10 percent of the new settlers, more than half of it Russian peasants, the rest Tatars
and Middle Volga peoples. The Black Sea steppe dominated all other areas, with
56 percent of all new settlers. All in all, the population in forested steppe lands
increased from 27.9 percent of the whole recorded adult male population in 1678,
to 44.3 percent in 1719 to 44.5 percent in 1856, according to Boris Mironov, and
that of the steppe exhibited an even more striking increase (2.3 percent in 1678, 2.6
percent in 1719, and 13.3 percent in 1856). But the empire’s traditional center and
north declined in population, from 57 percent in 1678 to 40.1 percent in 1719 to
30.9 percent in 1856.
COMPOSITION OF THE POPULATION
Despite the increasing diversity of the eighteenth-century Russian empire, its basic
social groups maintained about the same percentage in the population from 1678 to
1795, according to Mironov: the tax-free secular elite stayed around 1.7 percent to
2 percent of the population; parish and hierarchical clergy were about 0.9 percent to
1.2 percent; men enrolled in the military ranged from 0.9 percent to 1.2 percent.
Townsmen declined in the early eighteenth century but rebounded with urbaniza-
tion in the late eighteenth century: they were 4.2 percent of the population in 1678,
3.9 percent in 1719, 2.8 percent in 1762, and 4.2 percent again in 1795. The
peasantry stayed essentially the same at about 88.8 percent of the population. Minor
losses in various categories were made up for by the emergence of a new category
of educated free people, theraznochintsy, who appear in 1719 poll tax records at
1.6 percent of the population, and grew to 2.6 percent by 1795.
Ethnically, East Slavs constituted the vast majority of the population. The most
numerous among them were Russian speakers, but their proportion declined from
about 70 percent in the 1720s to just under 50 percent by 1795. Russians were
concentrated in the traditional center and points north and northwest; with
emigration they became dominant in other areas: the lower Volga population was
70 percent Russian by the 1795, Siberia 68 percent, the Middle Volga 64 percent,
and the northern Caucasus was 53 percent Russian. Russians were also well
represented, if not the majority, in the southern Urals and Novorossiia.
Ukrainian- and Belarus’an-speakers were also East Slavs. Belarus’ans were a
sizeable group, growing from 2.4 percent in 1719 to about 8 percent in 1795.
They tended not to emigrate and remained concentrated around Minsk, Polotsk,
and Smolensk, while Ukrainian peasants were mobile. The second largest ethnic
group in the empire in the eighteenth century, also primarily peasants, Ukrainians
constituted about 13 percent of the empire’s population in 1719 and almost
20 percent in 1795 after the partitions of Poland. Most lived in Left Bank
(where they were 93 percent of the population in 1795) and Right Bank Ukraine
(87 percent) but, as we have seen, in the second half of the century manyfled
overpopulation and serfdom to other areas. In Voronezh and Kursk gubernii and in
the Crimean peninsula they constituted about 12 percent of the population by the
end of the century; in Novorossiia they expanded from about 24 percent of the
358 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801