In the earlier period (1552-1861), the mass of Russian migrants consisted either of free peasants or of runaway serfs, or else serfs forcibly transferred from the centre to work on the estates of military men serving on the frontier. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the migrants were free peasants, now sometimes resettling with the assistance of the government which was eager to ease rural overpopulation in the central provinces. Over the centuries, the geographic pattern of Russian population distribution assumed the shape of a wedge, whose base has come to rest in the western part of the forest zone and the tip of which points south-east. This demographic wedge has continued to elongate over time, its changing shape reflecting a steady shift of the centre of the Russian population from its original homeland in the forest towards the steppe. In modern times, the heaviest concentration of the Russian population is in the black earth belt. The Revolution changed nothing in this respect. Between 1926 and 1939 over four million persons migrated eastward, mostly into the Kazakh steppe. The census of 1970 indicated that the movement has not ceased, the central regions continuing to lose population to the borderlands. A major secular process in progress for four hundred years has been carrying the Russian population outward
14
from the central forest zone, mostly towards the east and south, causing them to inundate areas inhabited by nations of other races and cultures, and producing serious demographic dislocations in the path of their movement.* Having surveyed the economic and demographic consequences produced by Russia's environment, we can now turn to the consequences of a social character.
The first fact to note is that the geography of Russia discourages individual farming. A general rule seems to exist which holds that northern climates are conducive to collective farm work: 'Everything indicates that fields lying in the north have been cultivated by people who conceive agricultural exploitation as collective labour, and those in the south by people determined to safeguard the independence and the freedom of initiative of each cultivator on his land.'14 There are many reasons why this should be so, but in the ultimate analysis all of them have to do with the brevity of the agricultural season. Any job that requires x workersy days of full-time work to complete, will-ifitmustbe done in \\z y time - require 2x workers; and the same applies to the draught animals and agricultural implements used by these workers. The unalterable fact that all the field work in Russia must be completed between four and six months (instead of the eight to nine months available to the western farmer) calls for work being performed with great intensity, and induces the pooling of resources, human as well as animal and material. An individual Russian peasant, farming with his wife and minor children and a horse or two simply cannot manage under the climatic conditions prevailing in the forest zone; he needs help from his married children and neighbours. In the southern zone of Russia the pressure to work collectively diminishes somewhat, which explains why in pre-Revolutionary Russia most of the individual farmsteads, called khutora, were to be found in the Ukraine and the Cossack regions.
The collective character of farming in Russia influenced the structure of the peasant family and the village.
The traditional type of peasant family in Russia, prevalent until a century ago, was of the so-called joint type; it consisted of father, mother, minor children and married sons with their wives and offspring. The head of this group was called boVshak ('the big one' or 'boss'). He was most commonly the father. Upon his death the family usually broke up; but sometimes it happened that after the father had died or become
* Since the end of the Second World War, there has been significant Russian migration westward as well, into areas originally populated by Poles, Jews, Germans and the Baltic nationalities. This colonization, in contrast with those of the past, is heavily urban. It is occasionally accompanied by mass expulsions and deportations of the indigenous peoples on charges of 'nationalism'.
16
incapacitated the joint family continued together under one of the brothers whom it elected to serve as bolshak. The bolshak, a kind of paterfamilias, had final say in all family matters; he also set the schedule for field work and performed the sowing. His authority, originally derived from customary law, was given legal status in the 1860s by the rural courts which recognized his verdict as binding in disputes occurring within the family. All the property was held in common. The joint family was economically very advantageous. It was widely acknowledged by persons with expertise in rural life that field work in Russia was best done by large family teams, and that the quality of the peasants' performance depended in large measure on the bolshak's intelligence and authority. Both the government and landlords did all in their power to preserve this institution, not only because of its demonstrable influence on productivity but also because of its political and social benefits to them. Officials and landlords alike preferred to deal with the head of the household rather than with its individual members. Furthermore, they liked the asssurance that a peasant who for some reason (illness or alcoholism, for example) could not work would be taken care of by his relatives. The peasants themselves had more ambivalent feelings. They undoubtedly recognized the economic advantages of the joint family since they had developed it spontaneously. But they disliked the tensions which were bound to arise where several married couples lived under the same roof; they also preferred to hold property individually. After gaining personal freedom in 1861, the one-time serfs began to break up the joint families into their constituent units, much to the detriment of Russian agriculture and their own well-being.
The basic social unit of the ancient Slavs was a tribal community, estimated to have consisted of some fifty or sixty people, all related by blood and working as a team. In time, the communities based on blood relationship dissolved, giving way to a type of communal organization based on joint ownership of arable and meadow, called in Russian mir or obshchina. The origin of this famous institution has been a subject of intense debate for more than a century. The debate began in the 1840s when a group of romantic nationalists known as Slavophiles became aware of the peasant commune as an institution confined to Russia, and extolled it as proof that the Russian people, allegedly lacking in the acquisitive 'bourgeois' impulses of western Europeans, were destined to solve mankind's social problems. Haxthausen popularized this view in his book, published in 1847. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Russian mir became in Western Europe the starting-point of several theories concerning communal land-tenure of primitive societies. In 1854, however, this whole interpretation was challenged by Boris Chicherin, a leading spokesman for the so-called Westerner camp, who