In 1822 the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs granted a group of state peasants from Chemigov guberniia permission to resettle in Tavria guberniia.

When the peasants arrived to inspect their newly allotted land they reacted with dismay, angrily advising the civil governor of Tavria that they ‘utterly refuse to settle at the assigned spot for the following reasons...

The words of these disgruntied peasants reveal important characteris­tics of the Russian colonization process. First, it was controlled and administered by the state. The state assigned the peasants preselected land and even designated the location of their village on that land. The peasants, however, were not simply helpless subjects of the state. They were permitted to send an advance party to inspect the land, and when it proved unacceptable they did not merely protest - they refused to accept it. Moreover, they did so in terms that implied (correctly, as it would turn out) that they had a real say in the matter.

Second, there is a clear implication that these were litigious peasants, for they took it for granted that land located too close to other villages would be the subject of ‘disputes without end.’ This implied litigious­ness is confirmed by the countless disputes that clogged guberniia land survey offices in Simferopol and Kherson. These peasants operated within a system that gave them rights that they were aware of and busily (alto­gether too busily, the land surveyors must have thought!) employing for their own benefit.

Yet there is a contradiction here, for had the peasants truly been part of a fully integrated system, surely there would have been no cause for ‘disputes without end.’ The land had been surveyed, the borders de­fined, the maps drawn, and that should have been that.

This chapter details the state’s policies for the colonization of New Russia and records demographic growth in the Molochna region. It also describes the official systems by which Molochna was administered before 1838, arguing that the paternalistic state viewed Molochna set­tlers as wards, allotting them land and establishing administrative or­gans based on its assessment of (1) their ability to feed themselves, (2) their potential to contribute to the state’s welfare, and (3) their poten­tial to enhance or threaten the state’s security. This description of offi­cial policy will serve as a backdrop to the descriptions in Chapter 3 of the unofficial, self-administered systems the settlers established in the Molochna River Basin.