In thefirst decades of the eighteenth century as fortified lines pushed south into
the forested steppe between the Dnieper and Volga and to the east into the southern
Urals, populationflowed from central and northern provinces and Left Bank
Ukraine; these areas actually saw demographic stagnation or even decline. Movement
went to the forested-steppe and black earth (Voronezh, Riazan’, Tambov, Orel,
Kursk, and Tula gubernii), to the Middle and lower Volga, northern Urals (Viatka
and Perm gubernii) and southern Urals. In thefirst half of the century, the lower
Volga received the highest concentration of new settlement of anywhere in the
empire. About a third of this movement was illegal runaways, along with legal
movement by the state (permitting or forcing state peasants to move) or landlords
moving serfs into more fertile lands.
In the second half of the century, the fertile Voronezh gubernia more than
doubled its population; movement towards the Black and Caspian Seas took off as
successful wars against the Ottoman empire opened the Black Sea littoral between
the Dniester and Don: more than half a million people emigrated in Catherine II’s
reign. Some of this was foreign in-migration, as discussed in Chapter 5: Moldavians
moved eastward into the Ochakov steppe from the 1760s (future Kherson guber-
nia), as did Russian Old Believers invited back to the empire; German Mennonites
settled in Ekaterinoslav gubernia on the lower Dnieper in the 1790s. By the 1790s
Novorossiia (Kherson and Ekaterinoslav gubernii) comprised about half Ukrainian
and Russian peasants and about 40 percent Moldovan. In the last quarter of the
eighteenth century the steppe between the Prut and the Dniester Rivers, the future
Bessarabia (gained by Russia in 1812) was settled by Bulgarians, Gagauz (a Turkish
Orthodox Christian community), Russian Old Believers, and Ukrainian peasants.
East Slavic peasants also moved eastward into Siberia; by 1790 the native
Siberian population was estimated to be only about 300,000, a modest increase
(from around 230,000 in 1709) reflecting the ravages of Russian conquest. With
in-migration Siberia’s overall population grew by over 77 percent, with 700,000
East Slavic migrants settling the narrow arable western borderland. Population also
flowed northeast from Moscow towards St. Petersburg in this century. In 1719
Peter I decreed that all landowners with at least forty serfs construct a house in
St. Petersburg and move there. Government offices were transferred there, trade
was redirected from Arkhangelsk and Riga to St. Petersburg, and thousands of
peasant conscripts, criminals exiled to“hard labor,”and Swedish prisoners of war
were imported to drain marshes, lay roads, construct shipyards, and build the city.
From a population of about 8,000 in 1710, the city had 40,000 by 1725. Over the
century the St. Petersburg area became an industrial region as export trade boomed
and peasants moved from neighboring gubernii to the city and its environs. The
area’s population rose sixfold from 1750 to 1825, and the city itself grew from
about 150,000 to about 185,000 from 1764 to 1782.
Population redistributed itself in this century. Statistics for 1782–95 show that
the lower Volga accounted for 18 percent of new settlement, taking in not only
Russian and Ukrainian peasants but also German colonists. Settlement into the
northern Caucasus accounted for 16 percent of all new settlers, primarily Ukrainian
Cossacks and peasants, while that into the southern Urals and western Siberia took
Soslovie, Serfs, and Society on the Move 357