Peasants on the Move: State Peasant Resettlement in Imperial Russia, 1805-1830s

Abstract

recent attention, however, is peasant colonization. Although it has been over a century since V. O. Kliuchevskii identified the relentless process of internal as the basic fact of Russian history, we still, in many respects, know very little about how rural colonization occurred, how it affected peasant demographic and social structures, and how it influenced peasant mentalite and culture. This holds particularly true for colonization in the preemancipation period, which remains considerably understudied in comparison to the larger and better-documented peasant migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 State peasant resettlement in the early nineteenth century is one of the least studied and potentially most interesting episodes in the history of peasant colonization. The Russian state prior to this period had supported peasant colonization in a number of ways, either offering incentives to serfowners to relocate their serfs to