From overpopulation to rebellion

On the problem of the Malthusian cycle in the middle lane

On July 8, 1893, a law was passed in Russia that allowed redistribution of land in peasant communities no more than once every twelve years. This time, the desire of the imperial legislators for petty regulation played a cruel joke on them - the inevitable unrest during the redistribution were synchronized throughout the country. The next two massive redistributions occurred in 1905 and 1917, respectively.

We tend to attach too much importance to the vivid and dramatic political struggle of the last years of the Russian Empire and forget that the most common Malthusian crisis played a key role in its fall. In an agrarian economy, labor productivity decreases as the population grows. As long as the country's population is small, and the size of the land allotments is significant, only the best lands are cultivated. With the growth of the population, the plots become smaller, the peasants are forced to cultivate all the worst lands - the standard of living decreases. Sooner or later, population growth stops as a result of famine, war or epidemic.

European countries obeyed this law of demographic cycles until the industrial revolution: from the 15th to the middle of the 19th century. real wages on the European continent fell almost continuously. Characteristically, any demographic catastrophe like the plague or the Thirty Years' War in Germany led to a temporary improvement in the diet.

How was the situation in pre-revolutionary Russia? Many venerable agrarian historians, following Boris Mironov, argue that there were no signs of overpopulation in Russia. At the same time, they refer to a significant amount of empty land in Siberia, Semirechye, the North Caucasus, etc. Indeed, from a formal point of view, everything was going well.

The problem, however, is that for a political catastrophe, the entire country does not have to be in crisis - one region is quite enough if this region is central. According to the neo-Malthusian Sergey Nefedov, the main zone of agrarian overpopulation was “a connected region, covering the main part of the Center, the black earth and western provinces adjacent to the Center, the North and some provinces of the Volga region ... it was not by chance that these areas that experienced a shortage of bread became “fortresses of Bolshevism” in the Civil War - while the wealthy fringe regions supported the whites."

The crisis situation in the center has been created and maintained by the efforts of the supreme power for centuries. Back in the 1610-1620s. The Romanovs carried out a social revolution, turning most of the population of Central Russia into serfs, right up to Beloozero. In parallel with this, an administrative revolution is also taking place - the peasant community is turning into a fiscal and police tool of the state to control the black-haired peasants. If Central Russia of the era of Ivan the Terrible is predominantly a country of farms, then already in the 17th century. it is covered by large plantation-type farms. From that moment until the beginning of the 20th century. legal migration from the central provinces was extremely difficult even for free peasants.

It is difficult to overestimate the effect that the system of artificial attachment to the land, which persisted for many decades after the abolition of serfdom, had on the development of Russia. European countries were throwing surplus population into the New World - the scale of resettlement, especially in Northern Europe, sometimes took on such proportions that it caused concern to local authorities. Recall that the creation of the institutions of the welfare state in Germany, and especially in Sweden (from which every fourth inhabitant left in the second half of the 19th century), was associated with an attempt to keep emigrants with a carrot, not a stick.

It is not surprising that the population accumulated in the central provinces was looking for a way to improve their situation by force. With rapid demographic growth, each new redistribution meant an inevitable reduction in the proportion of communal land for each consumer and each family. Under these conditions, the peasants inevitably had to think about the division of the landlords' land. An analysis of the peasant orders to the deputies of the First State Duma, conducted by Teodor Shanin, showed that only two political demands were truly universal and were contained in 100% of the documents - the division of landlord farms and the introduction of free primary education.

The most striking thing is that in modern domestic political rhetoric, population growth invariably figures as the greatest blessing - not only for the country, but also for the ruling regime. Meanwhile, rapid growth, by definition, leads to an excess of young people and, most importantly, young men - the main fuel for rebellions and revolutions. At the time of the revolution, the median age of the population in Russia was 19 years old - slightly more than in the current Gaza Strip (17), but less than, for example, in Syria (21). So the current authorities should not be afraid of repeating the events of a hundred years ago: even with a significant deterioration in the economic situation and a drop in living standards, there is simply no one to rebel in modern Russia (with a median age of 38 years).

Kamil Galeev,
historian