1 - The Ukrainian environment, 1861–1921

Summary

Cities and the working class on the eve of revolution

The abolition of serfdom in 1861 unleashed uncontrollable social forces that eventually undermined the Russian Empire's stability. This event introduced the Russian economy to capitalism and Russian society to limited political reforms, threatening the economic well-being of the peasants, who received meager amounts of land. Acceleration of these processes at the end of the nineteenth century tore the usually inert peasant from his soil and forced him to enter a more competitive world, to negotiate the alien urban and industrial ways of life.

At first, emancipation lowered the peasant's standard of living. In the Ukrainian provinces 94.0 percent of all peasant households received up to 5 desiatins (1 desiatin equals 2.7 acres) of land, far less than subsistence level. Despite peasant land purchases from the nobility and emigration to Siberia and Kazakhstan, rural overpopulation and poverty intensified in the late nineteenth century. Even though yields grew larger, they increased less than the rural population. Although the middle peasant (with 5 to 10 desiatins of land) was more common in the Ukrainian than in the Russian provinces, the most acute degree of rural overpopulation and poverty in the entire Russian Empire was centered in the Right Bank Ukrainian provinces of Podillia, Volhynia, and Kiev, where large landed estates survived from Polish times. By the end of the nineteenth century over 8 million peasants in the Ukrainian provinces needed additional wages or land to subsist. As the countryside suffered impoverishment, peasants migrated to Siberia and Kazakhstan.