Reforms from Below: Negotiating with the State

While Orthodox state peasants showed little interest in state-initiated reform plans, like the Mennonites they were willing to turn to the state for support in implementing their own reforms.

The request for repartition came in the midst of a long and complex dispute between the three villages. Trouble had begun in 1812 when a land surveyor named Razumov, who was assigned to map the district, misplaced the border between Berestova, Nikolaevka, and the Nogai land grant, giving the Nogai 10,000 desiatinas of land that ought to have belonged to the Orthodox state peasants. At least this was the Orthodox peasants’ claim, but unfortunately for them, in 1815 their original 1803 land grant, the 1812 map, and their petitions protesting the mistake, burned in a fire at the land surveyor’s office in Simferopol.¹⁶ New petitions eventually earned their case a hearing by the Senate in St Petersburg, where in 1824 it was ruled that although the two villages were indeed short of allotment land - their formal allotment amounted to less than ten desiatinas per male soul - free access to vast supplies of open steppe more than compensated them, so that they ‘cannot be regarded as land-poor.’¹⁷

The state’s typically ill-informed belief that arid steppe land was ad­equate compensation for a lack of good bottom land left the Berestova and Nikolaevka villagers with a serious land shortage. They renewed their petitions, provoking a new survey of the district in 1831. The surveyor, one Golenkin, increased the Berestova allotment by giving the village 6,000 desiatinas of land belonging to the neighbouring vil­lage of Popovka.

To resolve the problem Berestova proposed that the state consolidate the landholdings of seven villages - Berestova, Nikolaevka, Andreevka, Popovka, Chernigovka, Novogrigor’evka, and Petropavlovka - into one district, add ‘as much Nogai land as possible’ to their combined land­holdings, and redistribute the land proportionately on the basis of male souls.¹⁹ Almost four years later, in March 1837, the Ministry of Internal Affairs ordered Vorontsov to institute precisely this solution, and ceded the seven villages 10,000 desiatinas of Nogai land to supplement their holdings.²⁰

After 1837 the Berestova case disappears from extant records, and to follow the process of repartition further it is necessary to turn to a different example.

The peasants themselves obviously had a different point of view. They regarded both their village’s land as a whole and the mills and khutors of individual villagers to be real property. They apparently understood such property rights to be based on their payment of taxes, for when the Berestova Obshchina appealed to Vorontsov its final argument was that if its problems were not resolved it would not be able to pay its taxes. This threat is often repeated in other peasant petitions relating to land claims; it seems likely, therefore, that peasants knew from expe­rience that it was effective.²¹

It is important, too, to emphasize that the peasants lacked a sense of common interest extending beyond the borders of their own villages. Popovka village’s seizure of Berestova grain, occurring as it did on the heels of the Great Drought, might perhaps be credited to desperation, but even so it bespoke a complete disregard for people who, after all, lived just a few kilometres down the road. The limited horizons of Ukrainian and Russian peasants is not a new discovery, but it is striking how starkly it contrasts with Mennonite reactions to the drought.

Their lack of mechanisms to self-administer intervillage disputes left Orthodox state peasants dependent on the state to resolve the increas­ingly pressing problems of overcrowding and land shortages. The state’s solutions are revealed in its plans to repartition the land of the largest village in Molochna, Bolshoi Tokmak.

The Bolshoi Tokmak repartition is exceptionally well documented, and it provides a unique look into conditions in one Orthodox state peasant village in Molochna. An examination of the Bolshoi Tokmak repartition reveals that the lack of corporate identity among villages was echoed within individual villages, as well. Rich peasants and poor ones, traders and artisans, were deeply divided over the basic issue of land rights. In resolving their differences they resorted to the old standby of the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry - land repartition - turning away from the path of development that they had shared until then with their colonist neighbours and following a road that would soon lead to economic stagnation.

Bolshoi Tokmak, established in 1783 on a rich stretch of bottomland on the Tokmak River, was in the 1830s the largest settlement in the Molochna River Basin by a substantial margin. Although formally desig­nated as just another agricultural village, in 1844 it had fifteen wind­mills, two watermills, three oil presses, a large tallow factory, a candle­making factory, and a brick and tile factory. Its approximately 6,700 residents included nine blacksmiths, twenty-six shoemakers (six of them German colonists), five hatmakers, sixteen weavers, sixteen tailors (six of them Jews), seventeen millers, two butchers, fifteen potters, nine tanners, two carriage-makers (both German colonists), one watchmaker (German), and six coopers.

In practice Bolshoi Tokmak was no Iongerjust one village, but con­sisted of a large central settlement - Bolshoi Tokmak itself - and seven satellite settlements. The satellites had originally been founded as khutors, but had evolved into villages in their own right. About a third of the population migrated from the central village to the khutors each spring, returning to Bolshoi Tokmak at the end of the agricultural season. It was this third that controlled most of the wealth of Bolshoi Tokmak. One khutor-dweller rented 1,000 desiatinas of land from a nearby estate-owner, while many others rented smaller amounts from various sources. On average the wealthy peasants owned three times as much livestock as the families who did not own land in the khutors.

Alongside the rich peasants there was also a group of poor peasants. According to Wilhelm Bernhard Bauman, the agronomist assigned by the Ministry of State Domains in 1844 to administer the Bolshoi Tokmak repartition, many peasants had only a ‘hand’s-breadth’ of land under crops, and even had they held more land, their lack of draft animals meant they could not have farmed it.²³

Poor peasants lacked draft animals because the rich were monopoliz­ing the common pastures. Unlike the Mennonite villages, which stinted their commons, the Orthodox state peasants left their commons com­pletely unregulated. Rich peasants kept large herds of livestock on their khutors during the winter, feeding them fodder. They then released their livestock onto the commons as soon as the snow receded.²⁴ This was a formula for disaster. The earliest stages of growth are critical for pasture plants, for it is then that their roots spread and gain the capac­ity to store food.²⁵ Overgrazing at this vital stage kills plants, and ‘in such cases, less palatable or wholly unpalatable plants commonly take their place and thrive because livestock avoid them.’²⁶ In Bolshoi Tokmak the consequence of such overgrazing was the creation of a near-barren stretch of land extending a kilometre around the village.²⁷

Under such conditions, cottage industry and agricultural wage labour became increasingly important for poor peasants.

Agricultural labour was the single most important source of wage labour in Molochna. Its relative significance is shown by the way that wages fluctuated sharply in accordance with the agricultural season, peaking at as high as 1.25 rubles per day in midsummer - a man with a horse or two oxen could earn twice that much - and falling to half that in the winter months.²⁹ Records from Cornies’s estate at Iushanlee give some indication of the nature of labour opportunities in the region. Cornies typically employed between fifteen and twenty full-time work­ers, usually under contract for either six months or a year. Half of these were shepherds whom he hired from state peasant villages in Melitopol, Berdiansk, and various places in Ekaterinoslav guberniia.³° The shep­herds apparendy came as members of artels, for each year a large group of them would come from a single village, all hired on the same day and for the same term. A few of Cornies’s employees were labourers, and unlike the shepherds, they brought their families with them to Iushanlee. Although the labourers were also under temporary contracts, two of them, Demid Fatsenko and Ilia Odinets, worked at Cornies’s estate continuously throughout the five-year period 1846-50 for which records are available. Cornies also usually had three or four foreign (German) employees working as supervisors or specialists. Almost all of the contract workers were men, the exceptions being Helena Fietz, a German maid who came to Iushanlee via St Petersburg in 1848, and Olga Roshchvei from Bolshoi Tokmak, who came to Iushanlee with her family in 1846 under a one-year contract as a labourer.

Cornies also employed a significant number of temporary workers, particularly in peak agricultural seasons. In 1847 he paid for a total of 12,011 days of work from temporary workers.³¹ Of this, 57 per cent (6,794 days) came in August and September, during the harvest and the second shearing season, and a further 17 per cent (2,043 days) came in April and May, during planting and the first shearing season. Unlike with contract workers, some 29 per cent (3,486 days) of the temporary workers were women. There is no indication where these temporary workers came from, but clearly there was an available labour force in the region. Otherwise the wage control system described by Bauman would not have been necessary. The female half of the tempo­rary workforce must have been local, for migrant labourers were almost exclusively men. With the spread of repartition in the 1840s and 1850s the local supply of labour would have declined as once-land-poor peas­ants received allotments. Migrant workers from the overpopulated in­dustrial regions were a fixture on the steppe by midcentury, and the artels Cornies hired are proof of their presence in Molochna, so no doubt they filled some of the temporary positions as well. Nogai, who continued to practise extensive forms of agriculture, also had surplus labour to offer, but oddly, although Nogai had frequendy worked for Cornies as labourers in the 1820s, they seldom appeared on his paybooks in the 1840s.

As noted in Chapter 5, industry was primarily a feature of Molochna towns and colonies, but it was not solely a colonist phenomenon. The largest single industrial enterprise in the Molochna region was the tal­low factory in Bolshoi Tokmak, which averaged gross annual sales in excess of 100,000 rubles in the late 1850s. A substantial part of the 35,877 puds of tallow exported from Berdiansk in 1860 must have come from this factory. Bolshoi Tokmak also had a large candle-making fac­tory, as well as a brick and tile factory, and there were smaller brick and tile factories in several other Orthodox state peasant villages. Just who owned these enterprises is impossible to say, except for the tallow fac­tory in Bolshoi Tokmak, which belonged to a Russian merchant by the name of Litiachin.³² More important than ownership is the fact that these factories provided wages to Orthodox state peasants, although the extent of such industrial wage labour in the region can only be guessed at. Most enterprises were very small and probably only em­ployed the families who owned and ran them from their homes. Likely, the large estates employed more agricultural workers than the nascent industries employed industrial workers.

Before looking in more detail at the repartition of Bolshoi Tokmak it must be re-emphasized how closely Orthodox state peasant economic development parallelled colonist development to the end of the 1830s. Under conditions of hereditary tenure a significant group of landown­ers - about half of the Mennonites and a third of the Orthodox peas­ants - controlled most of the land and wealth, basing their success on sheep breeding. A small group of craftsmen - about 11 per cent of Bolshoi Tokmak families and 8 per cent of Mennonite families - were providing goods and services to the booming economy. Finally, a large group from both communities were either landless or land-poor and worked as labourers or supported themselves by cottage industry. It also must be noted that these colonist and Orthodox peasant economies were, to a significant degree, intermixed; colonist estates and industries employed Orthodox peasants, while the Bolshoi Tokmak fair served as a wholesale clearing house for colonists as well as Orthodox peasants. Nevertheless, while landless colonists and land-poor Orthodox peasants worked alongside one another as employees of wealthy Mennonites, there is no record of colonists working for wealthy Orthodox peasants.

These parallel developments suggest that in the late 1830s the possi­bility existed for Orthodox state peasants in Bolshoi Tokmak to con­tinue along the same path of industrialization and prosperity that Men- nonites would follow. But they did not. In 1836 the Bolshoi Tokmak obshchina petitioned the Ministry of Internal Affairs to impose a land repartition, explaining the request on the grounds that the village’s ‘wealthy householders have acquired the very best and largest quantity of the land, and the poor are victimized.’³³ This sharp break with previ­ous practice demands explanation.

Part of the answer lies in the fact that the Orthodox poor were not entirely landless. Although many of them only had a ‘hand’s-breadth’ of land, every household shared full rights to the commons, while the state distributed additional land after each census to households that were land-short. Obviously the exhaustion of land reserves was an im­portant impetus to demanding a redistribution of the existing supply, but as important was the fact that the poor, as landholders, shared a full vote in the village assembly. Landless Mennonites had no vote. The Orthodox peasant decision to repartition was not unanimous - the rich ‘opposed it with all their strength, which caused disputes, fights, and not infrequently, ruinous lawsuits.’³⁴ But the land-poor held a majority in the village assembly, and they imposed their will.

While voting rights explain how the Orthodox poor could force repartition, there is more to the story than this. There is no indication that the Mennonite landless ever expressed any desire for repartition, even if they had possessed the ability to force it. Clearly, there was also a different understanding in the two communities of what constituted equitable land distribution.

Orthodox state peasant support for land repartition should not be interpreted as the product of an inherent peasant opposition to wealth. After all, until shortages arose no one complained that some were wealthier than others. Peasants believed that everyone was ultimately entided to enough land, to a subsistence minimum. When there ceased to be enough surplus land to ensure this minimum, the poor demanded a larger share of existing supplies.

This Orthodox peasant attitude towards land had some important similarities to the state’s attitude. To both, land was first and foremost a public resource and not real property. But there was an important distinction. While the peasants were prepared to repartition the arable land, they viewed home plots, khutors, windmills, and so on, as real property. There was no indication that poor peasants ever proposed dispossessing the rich of such things. The state was prepared to reassign land regardless of the fixed assets that stood upon it.

One final point about this process must be made. Just as the land dispute between the villages of Berestova, Nikolaevka, and Popovka had to be resolved by state intervention, the internal land dispute in Bolshoi Tokmak also demanded that the state intervene. Internal administra­tive mechanisms were evidently too weak to deal with such a controver­sial issue. In this context it is vital to note how important the creation of the Ministry of State Domains was. The Berestova case began in 1812 and was still not fully resolved in 1837. In contrast, the state domains ministry moved much more quickly in dealing with Bolshoi Tokmak, resurveying the region and formulating a plan for the repartition within

TABLE 6.1

Villages and male souls in Bolshoi Tokmak volost, 1844

Source: Bauman, ⁱZusammensteIIung,' PJBRMA, /291.

eight years of the first request. The state’s renewed will to take direct charge of its peasants through the ministry provided poor Orthodox peasants with a lever against the rich, just as it provided a lever for local administrators against the Doukhobors. Once again, the similarity be­tween Orthodox and Mennonite experiences is apparent. At almost exactly the same time that poor Orthodox peasants were turning to the Ministry of State Domains to resolve their internal problems, Cornies and Warkentin were lobbying the Guardianship Committee for support against one another. As with Mennonites, the willingness of the Ortho­dox peasants to use ministry authority to impose repartition does not indicate that the peasants were prepared to cede full control of their affairs to the state.

Proof of this peasant insistence upon maintaining control of their own affairs comes from the Bolshoi Tokmak repartition itself. In 1843 the Ministry of State Domains decided to use the Bolshoi Tokmak re­quest for repartition as an opportunity to implement its newly con­ceived ‘Project for the correct economic distribution of land in state peasant villages in the southern guberniias.’³⁵ After first sending a sur­vey team to accurately map the area, in 1844 the state sent Bauman to inspect existing agricultural systems and recommend changes. Although Bauman’s report is not extant, much of its content can be inferred from correspondence it generated, while essays he later wrote confirm and expand on the correspondence.³⁶

In 1844 Bolshoi Tokmak volost consisted of eight villages divided into five obshchinas (see Table 6.1). They were populated by 3,344

TABLE 6.2

Land sown (desiatinas) per male soul in Berdiansk and Melitopol uezds, 1841-1861

Sources: ^lOtchetytavricheskikh gubernatorov,’ 1843-61, f. 1281, op. 4-6; f. 1283, op. 1 (for 1854).

male peasants and possessed 33,203 desiatinas of good land, an average of 9.93 desiatinas per male soul. Bauman found that almost half of this land - an average of four desiatinas per male soul - was used as com­mons and occupied all of the area closest to the villages. Meanwhile, some peasants lived as much as six versts from their grain fields. There is no indication of how much land was employed as arable, but a long- fallow system was in place, and if the peasants employed one-third desiatina per male soul for their dwellings and gardens (as did peasants in Orekhov volost to their immediate north), then they were left with 5.6 desiatinas per male soul for arable.³⁷ The fifteen-year rotation (de­scribed in Chapter 3) would have left a third of this, slighdy less than two desiatinas per male soul, available for sowing in any given year. But as Table 6.2 shows, the peasants had well over two desiatinas per male soul under crops by the mid-1840s. With this much land sown, peasants in Bolshoi Tokmak volost could no longer have maintained the old pattern of cropping for five years and fallowing for ten. Such a rotation would have permitted only one-third of the arable land under crops at any one time. The combination of increased population and increased cropping had set in motion a process that by the 1880s would see the cropping period throughout New Russia climb to between six and nine years and the fallow period drop to two to three years.³⁸ Bauman re­corded that in some places in Bolshoi Tokmak the fallow period had already dropped to as little as two years, and at most it was six years, although the cropping period remained at five years.³⁹

Although this process of intensification showed no signs of adversely affecting crop yields before 1861, in the long term it would over-tax the capacity of the soil. Modern studies suggest that where grass leys are used in fallow periods, the ley period ought to match the cropping period if soil degradation is to be avoided.⁴⁰ In a situation like that in Bolshoi Tokmak, where fallow fields were not planted to grass but were simply left to reseed by invasion, the necessary ley period would have been longer still. As Postnikov shows, despite technological advances in peasant agriculture, in the 1880s peasants in Molochna were obtaining yields little better than they had in the 1840s and 1850s, and indeed worse than in the exceptional years of the late 1850s. Postnikov points to the growing evidence of soil exhaustion resulting from such overcropping.⁴¹

Bauman recommended a series of fundamental changes in Bolshoi Tokmak. To begin with, he suggested that the commons be reduced from four to three desiatinas per male soul. The 6.5 desiatinas per male soul this would have left as arable land, he suggested, ought to be used in a four-field rotation following the practice Mennonites were already successfully employing in nearby villages. He also recommended that the arable land be moved to the river flood-plain area closest to the village. Because this would have resulted in grazing livestock far from permanent water sources, he proposed digging water reservoirs on the steppe. He thought that if these were dug to a depth of three to four arshins they would hold water right through the dry season. Finally, Bauman recommended establishing a tree plantation on land that the village at that time employed for gardens, a proposal apparently sup­ported by Cornies, who is referred to in the report as being well known to the ministry for having ‘mastered the methods of steppe forestry.’⁴²

Appended to the report were recommendations by the nachal’niks of Bolshoi Tokmak volost and Berdiansk uezd.⁴³ The volost nachaΓnik generally supported the report but recommended minor revisions, sug­gesting that the commons be reduced to only 1.5 desiatinas per male soul. He also recommended that peasants be granted an additional one desiatina per male soul for grazing in the rocky hills near the village of Karakulak.⁴⁴ He cautioned that the place Bauman had designated for a tree plantation was too dry, and suggested an alternative site on Chungul Creek, at some distance from the village.

The uezd nachal’nik likewise largely accepted Bauman’s report, al­though he recommended that the pasture lands only be reduced by one-fifth. He objected to the volost nachal’nik’s proposal to pasture sheep near Karakulak because, he said, the land there was too poor.

Elders from each of the five peasant obshchinas in the volost also submitted opinions on Bauman’s proposal, and here it met with less enthusiasm.⁴⁵ The elders accepted the redistribution of their land on a proportional basis and did not object to the reduction of the commons to three desiatinas per male soul. However, they were not willing to alter the practice of long fallow, claiming that if they tried to place the land under more intensive cultivation it would ‘become altogether hard and not yield crops.’⁴⁶ They also rejected the idea of moving the com­mons away from the village and from immediate access to the river, protesting that their livestock had to be pastured near fresh water. They explained that the proposed reservoirs would not work because, except for areas immediately around the villages of Bolshoi Tokmak and Ostrikova, the water in the volost was bitter and salty, and if it were held in reservoirs through the dry season it would grow progressively worse. Although they acknowledged that without other options the livestock would drink such water, they claimed that the result would be an in­crease in livestock disease.⁴⁷

The Ministry of State Domains’ summary of Bauman’s report empha­sized at the outset that the ‘project for the correct economic distribu­tion of land’ could only be implemented with the voluntary agreement of the peasants. This was apparendy not forthcoming. But the summary went on to dismiss peasant objections, claiming they stemmed from a ‘fear of work’ and implying that peasant agreement was not really nec­essary.⁴⁸ The summary did not, however, give any directions for imple­menting the project, and there is no evidence that any of Bauman’s recommendations, apart from the basic repartition, ever took effect.

The imposition of repartition had far-reaching effects on Orthodox state peasant agricultural practices in Molochna. As Table 6.3 shows, the peasants’ average gross harvests between 1840 and 1861 were over seven chetverts per male soul, despite three near-total harvest failures. From 1858 to 1860 yields averaged in excess of ten chetverts per male soul. By comparison, gross harvests over the period 1808 to 1827 had averaged just 3.82 chetverts per male soul. The increase was not achieved by higher yields, but by planting more seed. The output/seed ratio for 1840 to 1861 was just 3.55:1, slightly less than the 3.64:1 of the earlier

TABLE 6.3

Orthodox state peasant harvests (in Chetverts) in Melitopol and Berdiansk uezds, 1841-1862

Source: 'Otchetytavricheskikh gubernatorov,' 1843-61, f. 1281, op. 4-6; f. 1283, op. 1 (for 1854).

period. Obviously, Orthodox peasants were not following the Menno- nite example of applying technology to increase yields.

For the most part Orthodox peasants in Molochna grew the same basic crops in the 1840s and 1850s that they had in the first three decades of the century, namely, wheat, rye, buckwheat, and millet. Bar­ley also entered the market, as did flaxseed, which (as noted in Chapter 5), became an important export crop.⁴⁹ Price records show significant changes from the earlier period (see Table 6.4). In Molochna, prices no longer were lower than in the rest of the guberniia, showing that the port at Berdiansk had overcome the high transportation costs from which the mainland uezds in Tavria guberniia had once suffered.⁵⁰

The increase in the arable land in Orthodox state peasant villages had important implications for the other Orthodox state peasant agri­cultural strategies. As peasants increased the amount of land under crops, their livestock holdings began to shrink. The data available will not permit a precise delineation of this process because livestock hold-

TABLE 6.4

Regression analysis of Melitopol and Berdiansk uezd grain prices, 1843-1861

Sources: ‘Otchety tavricheskikh gubernatorov,’ 1843-61, f. 1281, op. 4-6; f. 1283, op. 1, (for 1854).

ings are only reported in aggregates, including colonist, Nogai, and estate livestock, and each of these groups kept far more livestock per capita than did the Orthodox state peasants. However, although total livestock holdings in Melitopol and Berdiansk were little different in 1861 than they had been in 1843, the number of merino sheep had increased sharply, while the number of domestic sheep stopped grow­ing, and cattle and horses decreased sharply. State peasant sheep were almost exclusively domestic breeds. Thus, it is clear that their total livestock holdings per male soul were falling (see Table 6.5).⁵¹

Table 6.6, which shows livestock holdings excluding merino sheep per male soul, gives some indication of the progression. The figures in this table can only point at approximate trends, for colonists, Nogai, and estate owners are still included; probably Orthodox state peasant holdings were smaller yet. Nevertheless, these figures show a striking development. The holdings per male soul after 1854 ranged between 1.98 and 2.28 animal units (AUs). At the peak of the earlier period, in 1827, AUs per male soul reached 2.24, a figure almost identical to the earliest recorded years from the later period. Although the lack of data for the years 1828 to 1843 makes it impossible to be certain, it may well be that the highest level of state peasant livestock holdings had already been reached by 1827.⁵²

TABLE 6.5

Livestock per male soul in Melitopol and Berdiansk uezds, 1843-1861

Sources: 'Otchetytavricheskikh gubernatorov,’ 1841-61, f. 1281, op. 4-6; f. 1283, op. 1, (for 1854).

The shift to arable husbandry in the 1840s was not solely or even primarily a reaction to market demand, for the introduction of repartition had an important impact on the increase in the area under plough. In theory, repartition redistributed all land in the obshchina equally, but in fact the unregulated commons were monopolized by rich peasants, so repartition only had real significance on the arable land. Rich peasants, who owned large flocks of sheep as well as dispro­portionately large amounts of the arable land, were under no pressure to exploit their share of the arable land intensively. As long as sheep remained profitable, the rich could continue to concentrate their ef­forts on them and treat the arable in the same casual manner that their forefathers had. At the same time, even if their abuse of the commons was causing its rapid deterioration, as long as rich peasants owned khutors they did not need to worry. Indeed, by grazing their herds on

TABLE 6.6

Animal units (AUs) per male soul, excluding merino sheep

Sources: 'Otchetytavricheskikh gubernatorov,’ 1841-61, f. 1281, op. 4-6; f. 1283, op. 1, (for 1854).

the commons early in the year they spared their own land during the critical early season.

Rich peasants also had the ability to buy fodder to feed their livestock during the two or three months each winter when grazing was impos­sible. The purchase of fodder was beginning to significantly affect the cost of animal husbandry by the 1840s. In 1848 Russian regional histo­rian A.A. SkaΓkovsky wrote that fodder had always been regarded as free on the steppe because, as long as large areas of grasslands re­mained unpopulated, peasants could simply go out and harvest what they needed.⁵³ However, for the first time, in the 1840s the state began keeping records of the price of fodder. While such records are too fragmentary to allow cost accounting, that they were kept at all shows that the free fodder was disappearing. For poor peasants who did not own khutors and could not afford to lease land or buy fodder, the monopolization and destruction of the commons by the rich meant the carrying capacity of the commons was reduced to the point where sur­vival dictated raising grain. When repartition returned land to those peasants who had been reduced to farming only a ‘hand’s-breadth’ of land, it did not return to them control of the commons, which re­mained open to unrestricted use. Therefore, they turned to raising grain on the part of the land they did control. Because the proportion of the total of Orthodox state peasant landholdings that was in the hands of the poor rose through repartition, the total area of land un­der crops rose as well.

It must be noted, however, that because the commons continued to occupy the area closest to the village, the shift to arable husbandry did not place the prime flood plain land under crops.⁵⁴ Instead, peasant allotments were located on the high steppe and thus were heavily de­pendent on inconsistent Molochna weather. This had important long­term implications, for the intensive cultivation of the high steppe was certain to lead to soil exhaustion. The poor had little choice in this matter. Their allotments, exclusive of the commons, were only four or five desiatinas per male soul, which was too little land to support a family by raising livestock. To survive they had to take their chances with the weather and grow grain.