South of that extends over 4 million square miles of taiga or boreal forest, from south of the Arctic circle to just north of Moscow in European Russia (an area we call the north) and from Scandinavia through all of Siberia. Larger than all of Canada, this is the world's largest coniferous forest, featuring pine, spruce, and larch. Pine needles create an acidic soil, which is further denuded of nutrients with leaching as the winter snowpack melts. Furthermore, the soil is boggy and marshy, since it sits on hardpan. Thus, not agriculture but hunting, fishing, and forest products supported a sparsely settled population. The minimal grain farming that was done used slash/burn method, a rational economic choice given the abundance of land. Having roughly cleared a field by burning its vegetation, communities farmed it for less than a decade until the soil was exhausted. Then they moved on. Yields were no better than three to one, although peasants would plant even when they expected only a two-to-one yield, supplementing with forest exploitation.
West of the Urals, south of the taiga was a triangle of mixed deciduous (oaks, birch) and coniferous forest that formed the core of ethnic Russian settlement and the Russian state; this we will refer to as the center. Extending from current day
St. Petersburg and Kyiv in the west to the southern Urals, this mixed forest triangle enjoyed slightly milder winters and warmer summers than did the taiga. Its deciduous trees created a richer, less acidic soil that was also more porous and less boggy. As one moves south the forest grows more deciduous, soil color changes from brown to grey, and soil fertility rises. Around Vladimir is an unprecedented patch of loess soil (the Vladimir Opole), accounting for its role as historic center of settlement in the upper Volga. With adequate rainfall appropriately timed for the growing season, in this forested zone rye and flax can be grown at least at subsistence level (three-to-one yield), especially with the two-field and three-field systems with fallowing that supported somewhat more dense settlement. Even so, villages were small, often two or three households, with larger ones upwards to 20-30; historically these lands combined farming with forest exploitation and eventually manufacturing for livelihoods.
Moving south, mixed forest blends into forested steppe, then steppe. The forested steppe (See Figure 1.1) stretches east-west in a line from Kyiv to Ufa in the southern Urals to western Siberia; it extended south in a 200-mile wide band in the west, narrowing towards the Volga and Urals. These became the first grain surplus-producing lands in the empire (the provinces of Kaluga, Orel, Tula, Riazan', Kursk, Tambov, Voronezh, Penza), as trees yield to prairie grassland or
Figure 1.1 An 1853 statue of Grand Prince and St. Vladimir, who accepted Orthodox Christianity for the Kyiv Rus' state in 988, looks across to the Left Bank of the Dnieper River and the vast prairie of the Eurasian steppe. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
steppe and the soil becomes progressively darker and richer. This rich, broad swath of "black earth," stretches from modern day Ukraine and Moldova, north of the Black Sea and Northern Caucasus, across the lower Volga, north of the Caspian Sea, south of the Ural Mountains, into modern Kazakhstan and the southern edge of Siberia. The steppe ends in the Altay and western Sayan Mountains through which lay Silk Road routes to China, India, and the Middle East. Since time immemorial the steppe was home to pastoral nomadists, grazing herds ofhorses and other livestock in patterned rotations. They only began to be plowed and farmed when agrarian empires achieved the military and bureaucratic power to subdue the nomads, starting in the sixteenth century. The "black earth" topsoil extends two to six feet deep and could yield as much as tenfold with sufficient annual rainfall (notably lacking in the steppes of Central Asia).
These soil zones comprised the Russian empire by the second half of the eighteenth century when Russia conquered the Black Sea littoral, which added some subtropical climes in Crimea. When the empire reached its peak by the mid- nineteenth century, with the conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia, more horizontal geographical bands joined the empire—desert and semi-desert in Central Asia, high mountains in the Caucasus.
Overlaying this wide forested plain is a dense system of rivers and lakes. Since the plain is at a low elevation (nothing west of the Urals exceeds 350 meters and western Siberia does not exceed 200 meters), Eurasia is ideal for regional and international transit trade and movement of peoples. The Russian empire at its greatest expanse possessed thirteen rivers of over 2,000 km in length, and the same number of about 1,000 km, comprising six major river systems. Flowing south were the mighty Volga (to the Caspian), the Don (to the Sea of Azov at the Black Sea), and the Dnieper (to the Black Sea near the Crimean Peninsula). The upper stretches of all these rivers reached into the mixed forest zone where the Russian state coalesced from the fourteenth century. Lesser river systems moved people and products east-west: the Western Dvina flowed from the Belarus'an lands into the Baltic at Riga; the Northern Dvina flowed to the White Sea at Kholmogory and Arkhangelsk. In Siberia, major rivers flowed north to the Arctic, but were easily navigable in either direction when frozen in the winter; on their upper stretches across southern Siberia sprang up the fortresses that established Russian power from the late 1500s. Moving west to east, these rivers were the Ob and Irtysh system, the Enisei, and the Lena. In all there were over 100,000 rivers and over 200,000 lakes in the Russian empire, making portages relatively easy even before the building of canals from the eighteenth century.
CLIMATIC CONDITIONS
Just as the Russian empire shared the European plain and bands ofsoil and climate with Europe and Asia, so also did it share deep climatic conditions. In these centuries the most penetrating was a broad cooling trend known as the Little Ice
Age, affecting the northern hemisphere from Greenland and Iceland across the Europe through Russia to China, starting around 1300 and lasting into the nineteenth century. This was the coldest extended climatic period since the first great Ice Age, but hardly a homogeneous phenomenon. Particularly harsh were the second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century when the Baltic Sea, rivers in northern Europe and England and in 1622 even the Golden Horn and part ofthe Bosporus froze over. As a rule, winters were longer and colder, with growing seasons shortened by 15 to 20 percent. As the Little Ice Age began to abate in the eighteenth century, tremendous variability ensued, including brief warming spells and some of the coldest, harshest weather yet (in the 1740s). A series of immense volcanic eruptions from the middle of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century also exacerbated the climate, notably the 1783-4 Laki explosion in Iceland that cast sulfur dioxide as far as Central Asia and Alaska, lowering temperatures noticeably through 1786.
Across this long era, social distress and economic change are evident. Data is best from Europe. Viticulture retreated from England, northern France, and Germany; glaciers destroyed farmlands in the Swiss Alps and Iceland, pushing Icelanders to coastal fishing villages where the cod fisheries gradually collapsed as cooling waters drove fish south. Crops failed; grain prices rose, famines ensued (in the 1690s parts of France, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, and Finland lost 10 percent or more of the population to famine); populations became more susceptible to epidemic. Population movement was marked, as villages were abandoned and people sought better climes or economic opportunities.