Colonization Policy and Demographic Overview

The Russian Empire absorbed the Molochna River Basin on 8 April 1783 when Catherine II proclaimed Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Khanate. The Ottoman Empire formalized the annexation by treaty on 9 January 1784, and in February 1784 Catherine incorporated the former Khanate into the Ekaterinoslav guberniia of the New Russian krai as Tavria oblast.

Settlement of the Russian steppe was sequential, with Cossacks consti­tuting the first wave, followed by the establishment of fortified military towns, which secured regions against Tatar raiders and permitted peas­ant agriculturists to settie. Such peasants came, sometimes with the approval of the state, sometimes at the command of their landlords, and sometimes illegally, as fugitives from either state or landlord.³ This sequence applies generally to Tavria guberniia, but important varia­tions make the area a special case. To begin with, Tavria was the final frontier in Russia’s push to the Black Sea, and with its occupation there was no longer free land to the south to provide a continued outlet for excess population. Moreover, the Crimea, unlike much of the steppe, had a permanent, sedentary population with claims on land not easily ignored by newcomers. Finally, the territory was acquired by a state - and an empress - gripped by a passion for planning.

Catherine IΓs policies were ‘populationist,’ based on physiocratic no­tions of population as the basis of national wealth.⁴ Colonization pro­ceeded in accordance with the March 1764 ‘Plan concerning the distri­bution of state lands in the New Russian province for their settlement,’ with settlement open to ‘people of any status’ as long as they moved legally.⁵ This qualification had important implications, for no settlers were free to move without state permission; consequently, immigration was officially a controlled process.

New Russia experienced a flood of immigration in the last third of the eighteenth century, but the Molochna region was little affected.⁶ When P.S. Pallas, a German naturalist and explorer, passed through in 1794 he saw a vast rolling plain occupied only by wandering tribes of nomadic Nogai Tatars, who had arrived in 1792.⁷ A 1797 map of the region shows only four Orthodox peasant villages and ten Nogai vil­lages.⁸ Large-scale settlement began in 1802 when Doukhobor sectar­ians began arriving. They were followed in 1803 by the first foreign settlers, while large-scale Orthodox immigration began in 1805.

The state planned immigration to the Molochna region, but the plan­ning left much to be desired. The tsar’s Land Survey Department, based in Simferopol, allocated the land. The department worked without ac­curate survey equipment and subjected most of the region to only the most cursory inspection.⁹ Its job was to allot Orthodox and sectarian peasants fifteen desiatinas of ‘useful’ (udobnyi) land per male soul. Men- nonites were to receive sixty-five desiatinas per family, and other Ger­man-speaking settlers were to receive sixty desiatinas per family. ‘Use­ful’ land specifically included ‘farmsteads and commons, gardens and threshing areas,’ while excluding ‘rivers, streams, ravines, marshes, ponds, roadways, gullies, and other places altogether unsuited to crop- and hay-raising.’¹⁰ Notably lacking were specific instructions on soil quality, precipitation, or access to water. In effect, the Land Survey Department treated land as simple area, undifferentiated in its productive capacities and easily adaptable to human needs.

Demographic growth in the region is difficult to trace, because the Molochna River Basin did not conform to the borders of formal admin­istrative districts, while even formal borders were poorly defined and sometimes changed as a matter of administrative convenience. In 1842 the state redrew the boundaries of the uezds in Tavria guberniia in reaction to the growth of the region’s population, and as a result the Molochna River Basin became part of two different uezds.

The most important published work on the demographic history of New Russia, V.M. Kabuzan’s book Zaselenie Novorossii, does not cover Tavria guberniia.^π A number of works, most notably Kabuzan’s study Narodonaselenie Rossii and Druzhinina’s four volumes on southern Ukraine, give guberniia-level population figures, but none give uezd­level figures.¹² A variety of primary sources give partial uezd-level popu­lation figures, but none are wholly adequate. The uezd-level records of the 1835 census do not survive in comprehensive and accessible form, but an 1842 document, apparently based on the 1835 census of the Russian Empire, gives the male population of the uezd. Other sources give the populations of specific groups for specific years.¹³ It is often unclear whether such sources overlap or duplicate one another and consequently the population figures provided in appendix Table A.l are tentative.

The data in Table A.l points to the extremely rapid growth of the Molochna population between 1804 and 1861. Unfortunately, it is im­possible to differentiate natural growth from migration, and consequently little can be said about birth and death rates, with the signal exception of Mennonites. Between 1806 and 1848 the Mennonite settlement achieved an astonishing average annual growth rate, excluding in-mi­gration, of 2.93 per cent.¹⁴ By comparison, Steven L. Hoch estimates the average growth rate of serfs in Petrovskoe, Tambov guberniia, in the same period at between 0.5 and 1.5 per cent, a figure consistent with population growth rates among peasants throughout Europe.¹⁵