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CHAPTER 3 The pre-revolutionary period (1900–1916) This period covers the last years of the Russian Empire. From the point of view of economic development, the pre-war period presents a continuation of the process of reform in Russian society which started with the abolition of serfdom in 1861. The process of the modernization of the country was at times held up by more conservative moves. An unprecedented growth in the population and a shortage of land in the central regions made reform very urgent. In 1904 and 1905 there were numerous incidents of peasant unrest in many provinces in European Russia. From 1906, more radical reforms were launched in order to transform the country from an agrarian society based on patriarchal peasant communes into a capitalist society with a class of free farmers. By the early 1910s, the market economy was already affecting the lives of millions of Russian peasants. However, the main characteristic of the period as a whole is that Russia remained a poor country in which the majority of the population relied on small plots of land for food. This period ends with World War I and the two revolutions that followed in February and October 1917. 3.1. Major developments in agriculture At the beginning of the twentieth century the Russian Empire was largely an agrarian peasant country. In around 1910, the urban population made up 20 percent of the total and required only 7 to 8 percent of the sown crop area to support it. Private farms with a cultivation area of more than 50 hectares provided only 5 percent of the total agricultural production of the country. More than 89 percent of agricultural land belonged to the Russian peasants (Chelintsev, 1928). The majority of the Russian population depended directly on the efficiency of their farming. The economy of the Russian Empire could be identified as Climate Dependence and Food Problems in Russia, 1900–1990 mainly a capitalist market economy, although one in which the state played a considerable role and in which peasant households themselves produced a large part of the food they consumed (Wheatcroft and Davies, 1994). The main agricultural products of the Russian Empire were cereals, which accounted for about 90 percent of the total agricultural land of the country. Among the cereal crops rye and wheat dominated, totaling more than 60 percent of the total cereal crop area. Rye was cultivated mainly for the Russian peasants’ own consumption, as they preferred to eat bread made from rye grain. However, wheat was considered the most valuable agricultural product at that time. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a wheat market developed that determined the activities of millions of Russian peasants. The development of Russian agriculture had been influenced mainly by the external cereal market. Between 1860 and 1900 the domestic cereal market doubled, while the production of cereals in the “productive” part of European Russia tripled, from 5 to 16 million tons. Thus cereal production in the “productive ” zone outstripped the growth in domestic demand (Chelintsev, 1922). The volume of cereal production as an extensive type of crop was determined mainly by the area of the cultivated plots, thus farms with a larger area of arable land found themselves in a more favorable position. As the rural population of European Russia grew, the center of cereal production shifted to the south, where arable land was still in abundance. In the 1860s, the southern regions of European Russia produced 50 percent of exported cereals, and by the 1900s this had increased to 80 percent (Chelintsev, 1928). In 1912–1913, total cereal production in the Russian Empire reached 70.9 million tons, including 50.5 million tons of grain produced in European Russia (Popov, 1925). By way of comparison, the same amount was produced 40 years later in the Soviet Union. In 1912–1913, about 16 percent of grain production in the country was exported to the world market. Cereal exports increased throughout the period: between 1899 and 1903 the country exported 7.9 million tons; between 1904 and 1908 exports reached 9.0 million tons; and between 1909 and 1913 the figure was 11.6 million tons. At this time Russia and the United States emerged as the major suppliers of grain to the rest of the world. The marketability of Russian grain production was 26 percent of total output, and, taking into account the domestic peasant market, reached 31.5 percent before World War I (ibid.). The marketability...

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