On Saturday, 1 September 1832, a light rain spattered the dusty fields of the Molochna River Basin, then quickly blew away west.

It would hardly be an event worth noting were it not that no precipitation fell again for seven long months, and it was twenty months before the spring rains of 1834 released Molochna settlers from the grips of drought and hunger.¹ Following hard on the heels of the cholera epidemic of 1830 and 1831, the Great Drought of 1832-4 left a permanent mark on Molochna society, pressing home the need for more efficient agricul­ture and more efficient administration.

The Great Droughtwas not confined to the Molochna region. Twelve guberniias in the south and west of the Russian Empire experienced total harvest failures in 1833, and many also had desperately poor har­vests in 1834.² The need for broadly based reform at the national level was driven home to the state by famine relief expenses that climbed to over eight million rubles. In the following years Russia sharply altered its approach to state peasant administration, turning away from ward­ship policies and towards new goals of efficiency and standardization, signalled most notably by the creation of the Ministry of State Domains in 1838.

In the long run both Molochna settlers and the state would see that the only solution to their common problem was to use land more efficiently. In the short run, however, both looked to solve the problem by finding more land to exploit in the old, extensive ways. The urgency for reform among Molochna settlers was heightened by the misper­ceptions of central officials; the state still thought that Molochna was underpopulated and, consequently, looked to it as a place to resettle peas­ants from overcrowded interior guberniias. But the drought had forced the people who already lived there to realize that their supply of land was on the verge of exhaustion. With the state looking for land for peasants from the interior and Molochna settlers looking for land for themselves, conflicts between regional and central administrators were looming. The ability of settlers to face down central administrators and defend their rights to land became vitally important.

This chapter describes the administrative changes that grew out of the Great Drought and the cholera epidemic. It employs the story of the exile of the Doukhobors as a case study of the interaction of land shortages, policies of standardization, and the lack of effective central administrative control. All of this provides a backdrop to the evolution of social and economic institutions that will be described in Chapters 5 and 6.