POPULATION GROWTH AND MOBILITY
Russia’s eighteenth century was a century in motion: between 1646 and 1796, the
Russian empire expanded from 14.1 million square kilometers to 16.6 million
square kilometers, encompassing at the end over twenty-five different ethnicities.
Notwithstanding the fact that a majority of the population was legally required to
live at their place of registration, be it under landlord control or enrolled in a state
village or town, people moved. Serfsfled illegally; the state moved populations to
borders and factory work and invited new settlers into the empire; landlords moved
serfs to black earth estates; state peasant villages moved; they and serf villages sent
men to work seasonally in towns and factories. Economic growth in tandem with
explosive demographic growth drove this movement.
The population boomed in Russia in the eighteenth century, as it did across
Europe. Russia saw about a 75 percent increase over the century, based on the data
provided by the head tax (initiated in 1718–24 and repeated roughly everyfifteen
to twenty years thereafter). Around 1724, population is estimated from 14 to 15.6
million; in 1744 about 18.2 million; in 1762 about 23.2 million, and in 1796
about 37.4 million. Even before major territorial acquisitions, European Russia’s
population grew by almost 34 percent by mid-century (1718–62). The second half
of the century witnessed a 66 percent rate of increase (like Britain and far faster than
France), about a third of which growth can be attributed to annexation of land
(much of the annexed land was sparsely settled, some population was lost in war),
the rest to natural increase.
Agriculture was the focus of most of this movement. Black earth lands offered
more fertile farming precisely at a time when dearth of land was developing over the
century in eastern Ukrainian lands and central Russia: state peasant holdings fell to
4 desiatiny(onedesiatinawas about 2.7 acres) or fewer, when 15 was ideal. Between
1696 and 1796, imperial expansion more than doubled the plow land available in
European Russia; in black earth provinces like Tambov, Voronezh, Riazan’, and
Kursk, cultivated land rose by 60 percent to 100 percent. Thus, the population
redistributed itself.
To some extent migration had always happened, as the infertility of the soil in the
center and points north encouraged an extensive use of forest land. But these were
small groups of villages moving not far away. In the eighteenth century landlords and
the state also drove population movement, the state systematically working tofill in
territories behind fortified lines before expanding further. As Brian Boeck has pointed
out, the state’s interest was in curtailing free movement. So, for example, in thefirst
decades of the eighteenth century Russian administrators directed Bashkirs to return
Russian and Ukrainian peasants who hadfled into the southern Urals, since Russia
begrudged loss of taxpayers. By the 1730s, Russian control in the southern Urals was
firming up, and administrators no longer tried to return Slavic in-migrants. Similarly,
at the same time, Russian officials prevented taxpaying peasants fromfleeing Sloboda
Ukraine into the Black Sea steppe which Russia did not yet control. A few decades
later, such emigration was welcomed when Russia had claimed the area. At the same
time, as steppe opened up, movement was difficult to control.
356 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801