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PEASANT MIGRATION AND THE SETTLEMENT OF RUSSIA'S FRONTIERS, 1550–1897

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 1997

DAVID MOON
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Abstract

This article surveys the expansion of Russian peasant settlement from 1550, when most of the 6·5 million peasants lived in the forest-heartland of Muscovy, to 1897, when around fifty million Russian peasants lived throughout large parts of the immense Russian empire. It seeks to explain how this massive expansion was achieved with reference to different facets of the ‘frontier’: the political frontier of the Russian state; the environmental frontier between forest and steppe; the lifeway frontier between settled peasant agriculture and pastoral nomadism; and the ‘hierarchical frontier’ between the Russian authorities and the mass of the peasantry. The article draws attention to the different ways in which peasant-migrants adapted to the variety of new environments they encountered, and stresses interaction across each facet of the frontier. Nevertheless, by 1897, the coincidence between the two main types of environment and the two principal lifeways of the population had been virtually eliminated in much of the Russian empire outside central Asia. This was a consequence of the expansion of Russia's political frontiers, mass peasant migration, the ploughing up of vast areas of pasture land, and the sedentarization of many nomadic peoples. The expansion of peasant settlement helps explain the durability of Russian peasant society throughout the period from the mid-sixteenth to the late-nineteenth centuries.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1997 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented to a conference entitled ‘The frontier in question’ held at Essex University on 21–23 April 1995. I am grateful to Hugh Brogan for inviting me to attend the conference, to my fellow panellists, Willard Sunderland and Rodolphe De Koninck, and all who participated in the conference for comments on my paper and giving me a broader perspective on the subject. I would also like to thank Melanie Ilic for her help in tracking down the relevant tables in the provincial volumes of the 1897 census, and to acknowledge the financial support of the British Academy and the University Research Committee and Staff Travel Fund of Newcastle University.