PEASANT PIONEERING: RUSSIAN PEASANT SETTLERS DESCRIBE COLONIZATION AND THE EASTERN FRONTIER, 1880s-1910s

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2001 by Willard Sunderland

Russian peasant agriculture in the late nineteenth century had a variety of problems, and for many Russian peasants one way around them was to find a way off the farm. [1] In most cases, getting off the farm--when it occurred--took the form of temporary or seasonal migration (in Russian: otkhod; literally "going out). Peasants who "went out" left their villages for a period during the year to work as field laborers, in industry, or in service positions in the city, and then returned. Even those seasonal migrants who ultimately left the village for good and made new lives in the city tended to move to the city gradually by retaining close economic and social ties with their villages over long periods. In contrast to seasonal migration, however, there was also the more permanent migration of agricultural resettlement (pereselenie) in which peasants from the Russian hinterland relocated to "new places" in Siberia and other eastern and southern areas and rarely if ever returned. Of the two forms of migration, otk hod was much more widespread than pereselenie, but millions of peasants, particularly from overwhelmingly agricultural provinces and especially as of the 1890s, nonetheless took their chances on resettlement. The result was an unprecedentedly huge peasant "exodus" to the borderlands in the last decades of the tsarist era. [2]

Most of the peasants who participated in this "exodus" did not write about their experiences and, as a result, most research on late imperial resettlement has not considered the peasants' view of the process. Views of the settlers' Weltanschauung--when offered at all--are usually based on generalized notions of peasant culture or on glimpses of peasant thinking that appear in the writings of contemporary literate observers. [3] Yet there are settler sources--such as letters and first-person resettlement narratives--that offer a much more substantial perspective on settler mentalite. This article examines these sources and argues that they reveal a variety of peasant perspectives on colonization and the frontier. Many migrant writers represented resettlement as a move towards abundance and the good life; others recorded it as a venture of hardship and disaster; and still others mixed and merged these associations. If there was a constant in the way that peasants represented their experience, it was in their t endency to define it in practical and local terms. In contrast to late imperial Russian elites who created colonization as an evocative field for imagining the nation and the empire, settler writers did not write about the nation or the empire at all. [4] Rather their focus was on the concrete tasks of building new settlements, coming to terms with new neighbors, and adjusting to the pain of leaving behind old localities and loved ones. For peasant migrants, the primary frame of reference for making sense of colonization and the frontier was--not surprisingly--a world of peasant values and attachments, and this world was inevitably shaped by the power of practical concerns and local horizons. Thus when peasants represented colonization they did so by 'speaking peasant' because this way of speaking was most meaningful.

But if settler perspectives were clearly expressed in a peasant idiom and shaped by a world of peasant concerns, this does not mean that settlers operated in a milieu, completely isolated from the literate world of the state and educated society. Contact between village culture and learned culture was on the rise in late imperial Russia and resettlement was a key social arena where this kind of contact was occurring. [5] As a result, peasant settler writings are best seen as part-and-parcel of a broader popular culture of resettlement in the countryside that reflected both peasant and non-peasant ways of knowing. [6] Peasants, in other words, understood and represented colonization in their own terms, but these terms were not necessarily limited to what peasants knew from peasant sources.

Sources of Settler Knowledge

The great majority of peasants who resettled to the borderlands in the late imperial period came from predominantly agricultural provinces in the Central Black-Earth Region and Left-Bank Ukraine, both regions where migration to the city was much less pronounced than it was in other parts of European Russia and where, despite the widespread practice of seasonal rural migration (i.e. agricultural otkhod), there were relatively fewer options for making ends meet on the farm. Settlers from these regions made it clear why they were migrating: in their responses to state and zemstvo-sponsored surveys, they routinely pointed to a lack of sufficient land and poor harvests. In the 1880s and early 1890s, the majority of migrants were so-called "middling peasants" (sredniaki) who had limited capital but nonetheless enough to consider embarking on a long and difficult journey. Beginning in the mid-1890s, as the Trans-Siberian Railroad started to make relocation quicker and cheaper, the general economic profile of migran ts changed somewhat and "poor peasants" (bedniaki) took over the lead. Regardless of their material condition, however, almost all of these settlers migrated as families (though many young men set out alone initially) and the great majority of them resettled with the intention of living as farmers (rural artisans made up only a small share of the total settler pool). Since most migrants were farmers, they were interested in moving to what they perceived to be areas that had large amounts of fertile "open land" and that, ideally, were not too far away. As a result, settlement generally unfolded first in parts of Western Siberia and the northern Kazakh steppe and then, as these areas became more populous, more intense migration shifted further east within Siberia and into parts of Russian Central Asia (Turkestan). [7]