AGRARIAN MIGRATIONS OF POLTAVA LAND’S POPULATION AT THE TURN OF 20TH CENTURY: CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

Abstract

The article described the socio-economic and political factors predetermining the formation of migratory sentiment among the unprivileged states of Poltava Governorate in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. An important place among the various reasons for migration of the Poltava country people was taken by an economically unique social group such as the Cossacks who included about half of the small agricultural producers of the Poltava region at that time . The paper determine the scale of agrarian migrations, main regions of settlement and consequences of mass resettlement movements in both the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century when the famous Stolypin agrarian reform stated in the Russian Empire. Using as an example of agrarian migration of peasants, Cossacks and petty bourgeois farmers who constituted the bulk of the population category such as unprivileged states a clear trend in the evolution of the tsarist immigration policy is discernible from its prohibition in the first decades after the abolition of serfdom law in 1861 up to freedom of migration during the years of Stolypin agrarian reform. The migrations from the densely populated provinces of the European part of the empire to its eastern and south-eastern outskirts, progressive in terms of the clearing of virgin lands and their inclusion in agricultural production, could have a much more noticeable economic effect, if the state administration of the Russian Empire were able to fully implement the promises stated in the relevant legislative acts to organize transportation of the settlers’ families and their property to the settlement regions determined by the related government programs along with providing the newcomers with proper credit resources. It is the failure of implementation of basic legal acts on meeting the material needs of the settlers by both the central and local authorities that led in some cases to the tragic fate of those unlucky hundreds of thousands of migrant settlers who were not only unable to organize their tidy arable farms at the new location, but had to pass from this life through insufficient medical care and terrible conditions of existence in the deep taiga or waterless steppe. The fate of those families who, after an unsuccessful resettlement, were forced to return to their homeland was not much better – they had no longer land or homes. So the fixation of Pyotr Stolypin’s government on resettlement as a means of resolving the agrarian question collapsed, resulting in the fact the social conflicts among agrarians not only did not disappear, but, on the contrary, were even more escalated.