(^304) The Military Settlements
continued to watch over a large variety of enterprises: stud farms, forests,
granaries, flour-mills, brickworks, loan funds, and so on. Moreover, they
were still supposed to supervise the inhabitants' social and cultural life-for
example, iheir hygieni1.: 1.:u11Jiliu11s-aithough ic appears char in practice there
was a good deal less interference than before. Arakcheyev's 'breeding pro-
gramme' in particular was silently relegated to limbo, and the authorities now
behaved much as they did in villages inhabited wholly by (civilian) state
peasants: that is to say, they concerned themselves almost exclusively with
exacting taxes and keeping order, while neglecting their supposed welfare
functions.
In short the inhabitants forfeited the 'privileges' they had enjoyed as settlers,
but their overall burden was reduced. One may suppose that they perceived
this as an amelioration. Their land allotments were enlarged^38 and other
improvements carried out, so that their incomes were probably higher than
those of peasants in most neighbouring districts (although there is no hard
information on this point).
The settlers in Mogilev and Vitebsk provinces were transferred to 'farming
soldier' status in 1836. They were required to pay rent at only half the rate of
their fellows in the north-west, since they had not participated in the distur-
bances.39
In the southern settlements, which had also remained calm in I 831, the
government saw less reason to carry through a major reform. Their in-
habitants had provided a large amount of grain (to say nothing of manpower)
for the armies fighting in the Balkans in 1828-9,^40 and their economic outlook
seemed relatively rosy. In effect they now reverted more or less to the
eighteenth-century pattern, with manpower obligations much like those of
Cossacks. Active soldiers and reservists were no longer required to work in the
fields-although in practice they seem to have done so.^41 The farmers (khoz-
yayeva: the old terminology was retained in the south) had to do three days'
labour a week on lands from which all the harvest and profits went to the
state.^42 On the other three days they could work for themselves; they were free
to engage 'assistants' as before and to sell any surplus so obtained. These
arrangements placed them in a situation rather like that of serfs on private
estates in the region. In both cases the three-day norm might be exceeded in
practice; the main difference was that the settlers' surplus went straight into
the army's granaries instead of to a landlord.
(^1) K Chcrnyshcv. 'Isl. obo1rc111yc'. p. 420.
w II PSZ xi(ii), 9626 (21 Ck1. 1X36); Fcrgmon. ·sc11lcments', p. 235.
411 Lobachevsky, 'Bugskoye kazachestvo'. pp. 609-10; Ferguson ('Settlements, 1825-66',
p. 112) accepts a figure given informally by Vitt to Marmom, which was probably innated for
effect.
41 II PSZ xxxii(i), 31920 (4 June 1857), * 67; d. Fergll',on, 'Sculemelll>, 1825-66', p. 119.
42 Ferguson, 'Settlements, 1825-66', pp. 119-20; Dussieux, Forcee1fuiblesse, p. 61, states that
in practice less was demanded, but the reverse was also true.
wang
(Wang)
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