springs and summers contrast to long winter freezes. The mean temperatures in
January in European Russia and southern Siberia average zero to freezing Fahrenheit;
the rest of Siberia averages 0 to–32 degrees Fahrenheit. In comparison, western
Europe and North America average 32–50 Fahrenheit in the winter months.
Growing seasons were accordingly short: around St. Petersburg, four months
(mid-May to mid-September); near Moscow aboutfive and a half (mid-April to
end September); up to six months in the fertile steppe south of Kyiv. By contrast,
much of western Europe enjoys eight to nine growing months with the temperate
effects of Gulf Stream and Mediterranean.
Short growing seasons allowed time for only one crop in the summer. Only a
narrow range of hardy grains (oats, rye, barley) and root vegetables could be grown;
yields depended upon the quality of the soil, and they tended to be not much better
than subsistence level until the empire expanded into the black earth steppe in the
late seventeenth and eighteenth century. The length of winters also meant that
livestock would be few and hardly robust, as peasants could spare little grain and
hay for fodder and the animals were cooped up all winter. In central Russian lands
this cycle meant limited supplies of manure forfields and meat and dairy for the
peasant diet, balanced by protein from forest exploitation. Expansion into the black
earth lands, fertile ground for animal husbandry as well as grain production,
improved this situation in the eighteenth century.
Soil and vegetation created the most significant natural divides in historic lands
of the Russian empire. Europe and Eurasia are composed of east–west bands of
soil and vegetation produced by latitude and relationship to atmospheric bodies of
warm and cold air. These in turn dictated settlement patterns and economy. At the
far north in European Russia and Siberia, south of the frozen Arctic, is a band of
1.5 million square miles of tundra, or cold desert. A land of permafrost, with a two-
month summer thaw, here grow only mosses, lichens, shrubs, grasses, dwarfed
plants—no trees. Mainly reindeer live here and the area is generally inhospitable to
humans other than Eskimos and Laplanders on the seashore.
South of that extends over 4 million square miles of taiga or boreal forest, from
south of the Arctic circle to just north of Moscow in European Russia (an area we
call the north) and from Scandinavia through all of Siberia. Larger than all of
Canada, this is the world’s largest coniferous forest, featuring pine, spruce, and
larch. Pine needles create an acidic soil, which is further denuded of nutrients with
leaching as the winter snowpack melts. Furthermore, the soil is boggy and marshy,
since it sits on hardpan. Thus, not agriculture but hunting,fishing, and forest
products supported a sparsely settled population. The minimal grain farming that
was done used slash/burn method, a rational economic choice given the abundance
of land. Having roughly cleared afield by burning its vegetation, communities
farmed it for less than a decade until the soil was exhausted. Then they moved on.
Yields were no better than three to one, although peasants would plant even when
they expected only a two-to-one yield, supplementing with forest exploitation.
West of the Urals, south of the taiga was a triangle of mixed deciduous (oaks,
birch) and coniferous forest that formed the core of ethnic Russian settlement
and the Russian state; this we will refer to as the center. Extending from current day
Land, People, and Global Context 23