In Western Europe, the pressures generated by a somewhat smaller but still rapid population growth from the middle of the eighteenth century onward was solved in part by overseas migration and in part by industrialization. During the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the agrarian countries of Europe (e.g., Italy, Ireland, Austria-Hungary) sent much of their excess rural population to the Americas. The net outflow of overseas migrants from Western Europe between 1870 and 1914 is estimated at 25 million, which took care of approximately one-half of the continent’s excess rural population. Much of the remainder found employment in industry. Industrialization permits unprecedented levels of population density. For instance, Germany, which in the first half of the nineteenth century had been a major source of overseas migration, in the second half of the century, in consequence of industrial development, not only ceased to send people abroad but had to import labor. Some industrial countries attained staggering population densities: England and the Low Countries accommodated 250–270 inhabitants a square kilometer, or several times that of the most crowded areas of central Russia, without suffering from overpopulation. There can be little doubt that the ability of the Western countries, through emigration and industrialization, to relieve population pressures played a major role in enabling them to avoid social revolution.
18. Strip farming as practiced in Central Russia, c. 1900. The strips in black are cultivated by one household.
Russia had neither safety valve. Her citizens did not migrate abroad: they preferred to colonize their own country. The only significant groups to leave Russia were non-Russians from the Western provinces: of the 3,026,000 subjects of the Tsar who emigrated between 1897 and 1916, more than 70 percent were Jews and Poles.15 But as Jews did not engage in agriculture and Poles engaged in it in their own homeland, their departure did nothing to ease pressures on the Russian village. Why Russians did not emigrate is far from clear, but several explanations suggest themselves. Perhaps the most important cause was the practice of cultivating by joint families and in communes. Russian peasants were not accustomed to pulling up stakes and leaving for the unknown, except in groups. Although peasants were always on the lookout for fresh land, they never moved by families, as was common in the American West, but only with enough fellow peasants to set up a new commune, usually by villages or parts of villages.16 Second, living in a largely self-sufficient economy, they lacked money to pay the shipping fare. Third, they were convinced that before long there would occur a general repartition of non-peasant land in Russia and did not want to be excluded from it. Finally, living in a self-contained universe of Orthodox Slavs, on land hallowed as Holy Rus, little exposed to foreign cultures, Russian peasants found life among infidels hard to conceive.
Nor could Russian industry absorb significant numbers of excess peasants. In the 1880s and even more so in the 1890s, rapid industrial growth led to a rise in industrial employment: in 1860, Russia had 565,000 industrially employed, and in 1900, 2.2 million (of the latter, about one-half were factory workers).17 Using the same figures for households as above, this means that during the closing four decades of the nineteenth century, the number of Russians freed from dependence on agriculture grew from 3 to perhaps as much as 12 million. But with an annual accretion of 1 million rural inhabitants, it also meant that industry at best absorbed from the land one-third of the new population.*
Population growth without a commensurate expansion of arable land or emigration meant that the quantity of land available for distribution in the communes shrank steadily: the average allotment per male “soul,” which in 1861 had been 5.24 hectares, decreased in 1880 to 3.83 and in 1900 to 2.84 hectares.† The peasants compensated for this by leasing land. Around 1900, more than one-third of landlord land was rented by peasants.18 Even so, many peasants had access neither to land nor to regular employment.
Many of the landless or land-poor peasants found employment as farmhands: they usually spent the winter in the village and at sowing and harvest time hired themselves out to richer peasants or landlords, often far away from home. These workers provided the bulk of the labor force on private estates and privately held peasant land. Others took occasional work in industry, while retaining their rural connections. In the villages, landless peasants had no status. Excluded from the commune, they took part in no organized life.
Many peasants whom the commune could not accommodate went to the cities on temporary permits in search of work. It is estimated that in the early twentieth century, each year some 300,000 peasants, most of them males, moved into Russia’s cities, looking for casual jobs, peddling products of cottage industries, or simply milling around for lack of anything better to do. Their presence significantly altered the character of the cities. The 1897 census revealed that 38.8 percent of the Empire’s urban inhabitants were peasants and that they represented the fastest-growing element in the urban population.19 In the large cities, their proportion was still higher. Thus, at the turn of the century in St. Petersburg and Moscow, respectively, 63.3 and 67.2 percent of the residents (actual, not those legally registered) were peasants.20 In the smaller cities, these unwelcome guests were known as inogorodnye or “out-of-towners.” They were especially attracted to towns in the prosperous agrarian regions where agriculture was carried out by households rather than communally, such as the Cossack settlements on the Don and Terek rivers and southwestern Siberia.21 Here gathered multitudes of batraki, who cast avaricious eyes on the large, prosperous farms, awaiting the signal announcing the onset of the grand repartition.
In striking contrast to Western Europe, Russian cities did not urbanize the rural newcomers: it has been said that the only discernible difference between the peasant in the village and his brethren in the city was that the former wore the shirt outside and the latter inside his trousers.22 The peasants who flooded the cities, lacking in institutional attachments of any sort, without steady employment, their families usually left behind, represented an unassimilable and potentially disruptive element.
This was the essence of the “land problem” which greatly exercised Russians in and out of government: there was a widespread feeling that unless something drastic was done, and done soon, the countryside would explode. It was axiomatic among the peasants, as well as among socialist and liberal intellectuals, that the crux of the problem was land shortage, and that this difficulty could be resolved only by expropriating all privately held (non-communal) land. The liberals wanted large properties to be taken with compensation. The socialists preferred either the “socialization” of land which would place the arable at the disposal of the cultivators or its “nationalization” on behalf of the state.
But historians and agrarian specialists have cast doubts on the evidence of a severe agrarian crisis and the remedies proposed for it.