There was a clear geographic pattern in peasant–gentry land relations which helps to explain the distinctive distribution of agrarian violence during the revolution. The peasant war against the squires, both in 1905 and 1917, was concentrated in an arc of provinces around the southern edge of the central agricultural zone (from Samara and Saratov in the south-east, through Tambov, Voronezh, Kursk, Kharkov, Chernigov, Ekaterinoslav, Kherson and Poltava, as far as Kiev and Podolia in the south-west). These were regions of peasant overpopulation and large-scale landownership by the gentry. Land rents were high and wages low. They were also regions where the fertile soil and the relatively long growing season favoured the development of commercial farming in wheat, sugar-beet and other crops suitable for mechanization. In other words, the peasants of these transitional regions were caught in the worst of all possible worlds: between the old pre-capitalist system of agriculture in the centre, and the emergent system of commercial farming at the periphery. As long as the landowners continued to lease out their land to them, albeit at exorbitant prices, then the peasants could just about survive. With the depression of world agricultural prices between 1878 and 1896 most of the landowners had done just that. But then cereal prices rose, freight transportation became cheaper, and, encouraged by the prospect of high profits, many landowners returned to their estates to transform them into commercial farms. Between 1900 and 1914 the amount of arable farmed by the landowning gentry in Russia increased by almost a third, and in these transitional regions the increase was considerably more. In Poltava province, for example, which saw the first wave of real peasant violence in 1902, the amount of land farmed by the squires almost doubled in these years. Land previously leased out to the peasants — and upon which the peasants had relied in order to feed their families — was withdrawn from them, or else rented under even more exploitative conditions. These often involved a switch from money rent to rental payments by labour on the squire’s estate (otrabotka) which the peasants saw as a new type of serfdom. Moreover, many of these large-scale commercial farms were mechanized with the introduction of harvesters and threshing machines so that the need for peasant labour — and thus the wage level — was further reduced. Many peasant families dependent on seasonal labour were forced off the land altogether.34
During the last decades of the old regime millions of peasants were gradually driven off the land by poverty or by some other misfortune, such as a fire or the death of an adult worker, which to the poor family, up to its neck in debt, was enough to make all the difference between survival and catastrophe. Drink was also a growing cause of peasant debt and ruination. Semenov described a whole class of heavy drinkers in Andreevskoe: ‘The adults were always thin and looked down and out; the children were rickety, with swollen necks from scrofula, big frightened eyes in pale anaemic faces, and inflated bellies on spindly legs.’35
Some of these poor peasants managed to scrape a living through local trades, such as weaving, carpentry, pottery, shoe-making, timber-felling and carting, although many of these handicrafts were being squeezed out by factory competition. Others migrated to Siberia, where land was made available to the colonists. Over a million peasants, especially from the Ukraine, made this trek during the decade following the famine of 1891. But the vast majority joined the army of migrant labourers who every spring made their way along the country’s muddy roads by foot or in carts, sailed down its swollen rivers in home-made rowing-boats or stowed away on steamers, and travelled across Russia by rail in unheated carriages or clinging to the roofs of trains. This nomadic host, some nine million strong by the turn of the century,36 headed for the Easter holiday markets where men were hired for ploughing on the large commercial estates. Later in the summer they were followed by reinforcements for the harvest. And then they dispersed throughout Russia in search of winter work on the railways, in dockyards, mines, construction sites, workshops and factories, only to repeat the whole cycle the following spring.
Every year, in body and spirit, these peasant migrants were taken further away from their villages and drawn into the new world of Russia’s industrial revolution. In the last half-century of the old regime the Empire’s urban population quadrupled, from 7 to 28 million. Most of the increase was accounted for by peasants flooding into the cities in search of work. First came the young peasant men, many of them no more than boys, followed by the married men, then unmarried girls, and finally married women and children. By 1914 three out of four people living in St Petersburg were registered as peasants by birth, compared with less than one-third fifty years before. Half the city’s population of 2.2 million people had arrived in the previous twenty years.37 The effect of this massive peasant in-migration was even more pronounced in Moscow. The crowds of peasants in the streets, the numerous outdoor markets (there was even one on Red Square), the unpaved streets, the wooden housing, and the livestock that roamed freely around the workers’ quarters, gave large sections of the city a rural feel. Moscow is still nicknamed the ‘Big Village’.
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Semen Kanatchikov (1879–1940) was just one of the millions of peasants to make this transition from the village to the city during the industrial boom of the 1890s. Many years later, as a minor grandee in the Bolshevik government, he recalled the experience in his memoirs. He was born to a poor peasant family in the village of Gusevo in the Volokolamsk district of Moscow province. His father had been born a serf and, although he had tried to improve his lot by renting land, dabbling in trade and teaching himself to read, he had lived on the margins of poverty like most of the peasants in his district. Every winter he left the village to work as a labourer in the city, leaving his sick and feeble wife, who had lost all but four of her eighteen children, to run the farm on her own. Years of disappointment had turned him into a heavy drinker, and when he was drunk he would beat his wife and children. And yet, like many Russians, he mixed heavy drinking with a deep fear of God; and wanted nothing more than for his son to become a ‘good peasant’. The young Kanatchikov found life unbearable. After his mother’s premature death, for which he blamed his father, he resolved to run away. ‘I wanted to rid myself of the monotony of village life as quickly as possible,’ he later wrote, ‘to free myself from my father’s despotism and tutelage, to begin to live a self-reliant and independent life.’38 It was not long before poverty forced his father to give in to his requests. At the age of sixteen Kanatchikov finally left for Moscow, where his father had arranged for him to work as an apprentice in the Gustav List metal factory. There, like thousands of other peasant immigrants, he would begin to redefine himself both as a worker and as a ‘comrade’ in the revolutionary movement.