Reform from Above: The Ministry of State Domains

The creation of the Ministry of State Domains, and the new ministry’s decision to reclassify Tavria guberniia as land-poor and reduce peasant allotment sizes, has already been described in Chapter 4.

Colonist efforts to establish tree plantations dated from the first de­cade of the nineteenth century, but Orthodox state peasants had never shown any interest in following their example. In 1834 the Ministry of Internal Affairs entertained a proposal for the ‘development of forests in sandy steppe places in the uezds of Tavria guberniia.’¹ The author of the report wrote that the peasants’ failure to establish tree plantations to that date was ‘partly because [they], for various reasons, [have] no desire to develop tree plantations, partly because the steppe is consid­ered unsuited to growing trees.’² The proposal suggested establishing a forestry institute, purchasing necessary tools, hiring workers, establish­ing a system of supervision and inspection, and constructing depots for storing seed.³ It proposed a budget of 5,000 paper rubles to meet initial costs, and a further 25,000 rubles for ongoing expenses.

The proposal suggested growing, first and foremost, grape vines, and then a mixture of birch, aspen, black poplar, acacia, and various ivies. Curiously, the author took no notice whatsoever of the colonist tree plantations already established in the region. By 1835 colonists had more than 400,000 trees on their plantations and private plots, none of which were birch, aspen, black poplar, or ivy.

Despite all of the state’s efforts to encourage Orthodox peasants to grow trees, there is Iitde evidence of success. In 1849, fifteen years after the initial proposal, there was only one Orthodox state peasant tree plantation in all of Melitpol and Berdiansk uezds, and it was located in the village of Terpeniia, which the Orthodox peasants had inherited from the recently exiled Doukhobors.⁶ Although Cornies established a forestry school, it trained only a handful of peasants - in 1854 it had just four students.⁷ Clearly, Orthodox peasants had little interest in growing trees. This is perhaps understandable, as they had spent the previous half-century learning to live without them.

The Ministry of State Domains’ efforts to encourage potato cultiva­tion met with only slightly greater success. Motivated by an empire-wide crop failure in 1839, Nicholas I in 1840 initiated a program to diversify food crops by promoting potato cultivation throughout Russia.⁸ From the very outset, the Ministry of State Domains assumed that because of the ‘hot climate and dry soils’ in New Russia the program would have little application there.⁹ Fragmentary data from 1856 and 1858 show that state peasants in Melitopol and Berdiansk uezds planted only four to five thousand chetverts of potatoes per year, about one-twentieth of a chetvert per capita.¹⁰ Undoubtedly, the main reason for the peasants’ reluctance to grow potatoes was that the state’s assessment of the un­suitability of the climate in New Russia was entirely accurate; potatoes thrive on low temperatures, short days, and very wet soils.¹¹ The lack of rainfall in Melitopol and Berdiansk meant that, without irrigation, pota­toes could not be grown effectively as a field crop.

A third state program to improve agriculture was the creation of agricultural schools for state peasants. Seven such schools were founded in Russia in 1842, with the nearest to Molochna in Ekaterinoslav. Be­cause the Ekaterinoslav school enrolled a total of only 150 students at any one time, and allocated just fifty-five positions to students from Tavria guberniia, it had little effect on state peasant farming practices.¹³ Closer to home, in 1839 the Ministry of State Domains enlisted Cornies to train state peasants on his estate at Iushanlee.¹⁴ Once again the number of students was very small. In 1846 the first graduating class had just eight students: three Nogai boys, two Ukrainian boys, and three Ukrainian girls. The five Ukrainian graduates immediately pro­tested plans to send them back to their home villages, asking instead to be settled together in Terpeniia where they could remain close to Cornies’s Iushanlee estate.¹⁵ Again, the potential impact of these stu­dents on Orthodox peasant agriculture was minimal.