The livestock epidemic of 1847 and harvest failure of 1848 were less severe than the Great Drought of 1832-4.
Nevertheless, they mark an important turning point for the Molochna region, for they forced consolidation of trends that had been developing over the preceding fifteen years. For Orthodox state peasants, after 1848 there was no going back to the old, pastoralist way of life.
The rate of repartitions rose, and more and more state peasant land went under the plough. For the interlocked economy of the Nogai and Mennonites1 the 1850s were a time of crucial new developments. Encouraged by Mennonite investment, Nogai had continued to base their economy almost exclusively on pastoralism in the 1840s. Therefore, when the 1847 epidemic hit they had nothing to fall back on. In the 1850s the Nogai fell into dependency on Mennonites until finally, impoverished and alienated, in 1860 they fled Molochna altogether.The Nogai exodus had important, unanticipated implications for Men- nonites. Landless Mennonites had come to rely heavily on land leased from Nogai. When the Nogai departed, the state ceded this land to new immigrants from Bulgaria, and one-time Mennonite leasers turned back to the their settlement, looking for a share of Mennonite land. The landlessness crisis that followed was thus closely linked to the long history OfNogai-Mennonite economic relations.
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