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Russian society, law and economy
the peasant population, both male and female, grew from around 9 million
in 1678 to over 20 million in 1795, 32 million in 1857 and, most dramatically, to
over 90 million by 1914–17. This was a result of natural increase, not territorial
expansion or immigration. The growth of the peasant population of Imperial
Russia as a whole was even greater due to the annexation of large territories
to the west inhabited by Ukrainian, Belorussian and Baltic peasants. The total
population of the expanding empire, 80–90 per cent of whom were peasants,
increased from around 11 million in 1678 to almost 172 million in 1917.
6
The natural increase in the peasant population was a direct result of prac-
tices, in particular near-universal and early marriage, which were encouraged
by peasant households and communities in order to promote high birth-rates.
Peasants did this for a number of reasons. One of the most important was the
need to compensate for the very high death-rates, especially infant and child-
hood mortality, so that they could ensure new generations of labourers for
their households and villages. Noble landowners also encouraged high fertility
to increase the numbers of serfs they owned.
7
A further reason to promote
high birth-rates was the abundance of land, relative to the population, that
was available for cultivation in much of Russia until at least the late eighteenth
century, but thereafter only in more outlying regions. Parallel to population
growth was peasant migration. For the most part, peasants seem to have pre-
ferred to increase agricultural production to feed their growing numbers by
extensification, i.e. bringing new land into cultivation, rather than intensifying
production by adopting new methods. The main direction of migration from
the early seventeenth century was south and south-east from the non-black-
earth regions of north-central Russia to the more fertile, black-earth regions of
the forest-steppe and, from the middle of the eighteenth century, to the open
steppe. Peasants in time largely displaced the nomadic pastoralists who had
lived on the steppe for millennia. In addition, growing numbers of peasants
moved east, across the Ural mountains, to Siberia and, from the late nine-
teenth century, to parts of Central Asia and the Far East. From the middle of
the nineteenth century, moreover, peasants moved in increasing numbers to
the empire’s growing cities. Migration to outlying areas throughout the period
6 See Moon, Russian Peasantry, p. 21; Ia. E. Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii v kontse XVII–nachale
XVIII veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), p. 192; V. M. Kabuzan, ‘O dostovernosti ucheta nase-
leniia Rossii (1858–1917 gg.)’, in Istochnikovedenie otechestvennoi istorii 1981 g. (Moscow:
Nauka, 1982), p. 115.
7 P. Czap, ‘Marriage and the Peasant Joint Family in the Era of Serfdom’, in D. L. Ransel
(ed.), The Family in Imperial Russia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 103–23;
B. N. Mironov, ‘Traditsionnoe demograficheskoe povedenie krest’ian v XIX–nachale XX
v.’ in A.G. Vishnevskii (ed.), Brachnost’, rozhdaemost’, smertnost’ v Rossii i v SSSR (Moscow:
Statistika, 1977), pp. 83–105.
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