The Army Takes to the Countryside
had to be sold according to contracts drawn up in advance and vetted by ti
military authorities, who built up an elaborate bureaucracy for the purpo)
Few members of the divisional or regimental committees had the necessa 1
business experience or understood the elementary rules of accountancy \Vhi.
endeavoming 10 1.:ulllroi petty details they distributed grants and loans as mur
for their psychological as for their economic effect, which they were unable t
estimate accurately. On one occasion the tsar authorized expenditure o
658,000 roubles to give each of the northern settlers a minimum of five cows-
a measure that could ~till be hailed 70 years later as evidence of monarchica
generosity.^63 Naturally, the money sometimes did good, but such acts set ;
poor example to those officers who had to decide whether or not to extend ;
loan to an individual settler.IH
Another major weakness of the development programme was that settler'
lacked full legal title to their land and were in effect tenants for life of tht
state, rather like the pomeshchiki of Muscovite times. To have conceded thi,
right would have undermined serfdom by establishing a sizeable class 01
property-owning peasants.^65 A settler could pass on his holding to a son or
son-in-law (or could adopt a soldier as an heir if he had no children);^66 but this
was a duty, not a right, and implied a transfer of service obligations as well.
Even the movable property of a settler was not protected, for the interests of
the unit as a collective took precedence over those of individuals. The
authorities reasoned that in the last resort all a soldier-farmer's wealth-land,
buildings, stock, tools, and in some cases even articles of furniture-had been
'given' to him by the government, and so could rightfully be taken away.
As so often in Russia, authoritarianism and egalitarianism went hand in
hand. The land allotments were distributed among the settlers in the same way
as was done in most peasant communities. The norms were relatively
generous, at least in the south where arable was plentiful, and something was
done to reduce the intermingling of strips that was the bane of communal
agriculture.67 Yet in 1826 Dibich found that 'the soldier-farmers are scarcely
able to feed their own families; ... agriculture has been completely neglected
and everything has been done for appearance's sake instead of for genuine
63 Ibid., 4, p. 94.
64 Petrov, 'Ustroystvo', pp. 135-7. In 1822 a 200-rouble ceiling was imposed on such loans.
Interest was usually charged at 5 per cent (Ferguson, 'Settlements', p. 18-1), but officers in the
settlements who had access to a separate loan fund paid no interest whatever on loans-which
could reach ~s much as two-thirds of their annual salary: Petrov, p. 135.
65 Pipes, 'Colonies', p. 211, assumes that this was indeed the government's intention, but the
cavalry settlement regulations are explicit on this point: 'soldiers in settled squadrons ... will turn
into their property [sobsrvennosr · 1 all they manage to acquire by working the land and raising
cattle' (Petrov, 'Ustroystvo', p. 224). Civilians who brought land into the system were allowed to
keep it, but this did not affect the general principle. Like other classes of the tsar's subjects, the
farmers lacked any clear definition of their rights. Shchepetil"nikov justly observes (SVM iv,
p. 107) of the settlers that 'everything they had could become someone else's property'.
66 Petrov, 'Ustroystvo', p. 229.
67 Storozhenko, 'lz zapisok'. p. 455; von Bradke, 'Avtobiogr. zapiski', p. 39; Shchepetil' nikov
(SVM iv) p. 116; Ferguson, 'Settlements', p. 164.