The Making of Russian History: Society, Culture, & the Politics of Modern Russia. Essays in Honor of Allan K. Wildman

Eastward Ho! Peasant Migratory Networks of Viatka Province during Peace and Revolution, 1850-1921

Eastward Ho! Peasant Migratory Networks of Viatka Province during Peace and Revolution, 1850-1921 Aaron B. Retish In January 1916, a peasant woman from Iaransk district, Viatka province, writing as the wife of Ivan Bezdenozhnykh, petitioned the resettlement administration for free passage on the train to Eniseisk province in Russia's Far East. Her family and their livestock could not survive on their small plot of land and she had decided to join the countless other Russian peasants who heard of the abundant land and economic opportunities on the other side of the Urals. She claimed that her son and nephew had already prepared the way by establishing a homestead there on free state land. Her husband sold all of the property in preparation to join them but was called off to war. The administration, after reviewing the facts, granted her a free ticket so she could join her familyl Migration or flight from unlivable circumstances is a common compensatory technique among peasants throughout the world. Since at least the 11th century Russian peasants migrated or fled from their homes due to poor land, epidemics, failed harvests, harsh masters, religious persecution, and hope of new opportunities. They maintained this strategy well into the 20th century. Popular resettlement to the peripheries, as a number of historians have recently argued, was a defining characteristic of the Russian nation2 Peasants moved around a lot for a population whose economy and identity was based on the land. In the mid to late 19th century, well over a million peasants migrated from their villages to resettle both within their province and to the east as part of the great Siberian migration. The pioneers expanded 1 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (hereafter RGIA) f. 391, op. 6, d. 391, 11. 1-3. 2 Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 106-13, 247-49; Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); 898-901; David Moon, "Peasant Migration and the Settlement of Russia's Frontiers 1550- 1897," Historical ]oumal 30 (1997); 859-93; Nicholas Breyfogle , Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia's Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5- 6. The Making of Russian History: Society, Culture, and the Politics of Modern Russia . Essays in Honor of Allan K. Wildman. John W. Steinberg and Rex A. Wade, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2009, 91 - 108. 92 AARON B. RETISH upon traditional information networks, such as word of mouth, rumor, news from kin, and stories by returnees, that had existed for centuries but grew in scope in the late 19th and early 20th centuries3 The networks built bridges and helped the transition between migrants' villages and the new settlements. Pioneering, though, was but one part of a complex, and growing, network of migration during this time. The easing of state restrictions on mobility and larger economic forces fed peasant migration as a whole in late Imperial Russia. There were three major overlapping orbits, or patterns, of migration during this period-to urban areas for non-agricultural employment, to spaces within the province, and to distant regions as pioneers. The whole system of migration and resettlement played a significant role in shaping the peasant lifestyle and the Russian economy4 On the eve of the First World War, scores of rural denizens resettled in the distant reaches of the empire and more and more peasants were migrating to the cities, setting up individual farms outside their village, traveling to markets and engaging in the market economy through the handicraft (kustar') industry and cash crops. Peasants marked well-beaten paths around Russia in complex migratory networks. What then happened to these migratory patterns and information networks that shaped them during the First World War and the Revolutionary era? Despite a rich scholarship on peasant migration and settlement bookending these events (in the late Imperial and Stalinist periods), there are no works devoted to peasant migration during the Revolution and Civil Wars The First World War and Russia's Revolution and resulting Civil War certainly disrupted peasant migratory patterns. The mass exodus of young men from the village to fight in the wars or escape military service removed the 3 Boris Gorshkov emphasizes peasant mobility even during serfdom. Gorshkov, "Serfs on the Move: Peasant...