Peasant Pioneering: Russian Peasant Settlers Describe Colonization and the Eastern Frontier, 1880s-1910s

Abstract

Peasant colonization in the eastern and southern borderlands of the Russian empire was a mass phenomenon in the last decades of the tsarist period yet historians, for a variety of reasons, still know little of what peasant settlers knew or thought about it. This article focuses on this question, approaching it in two ways. Since resettlement represented a major intersection between the worlds of educated and peasant Russia in the late imperial period, the first part of the article examines how the mingling of peasant and non-peasant ways of knowing created a diverse culture of information about resettlement and the frontier in the countryside. The second part of the article then examines settler writings--in particular, letters and longer settlement narratives--in order to identify the principal ways in which colonists represented their migrations and their encounters with borderland peoples and geographies. As the article argues, these experiences were diverse and so too were settler representations, but there was a language of local, practical concerns that was broadly shared by all migrants. Because they tended to describe and interpret their experiences in these terms, the article suggests that peasant settlers are perhaps best described as un-imperial imperialists, colonists whose colonization helped to advance and consolidate Russian imperialism in Russia's eastern territories yet who themselves identified much more clearly with local concerns than with imperial ones.