Rural settlement network of Tarsky district (uyezd) at the end of the XIX – first third of the XX centuries: patterns and features of transformation

Abstract

The paper characterizes the development of rural settlements on the territory of the Tarsky district, the planned settlement of the urban spaces of which under the control of the government began in the mid-1890s and continued for several decades. The subject of the study is the network of rural settlements of the Tarsky district, the object is the key indicators of the state of the network: the number of settlements, their typology and size by the number of yards and the number of inhabitants. The development of the settlement network can be traced in historical dynamics, according to several time slices (for 1893, 1903, 1912 and 1926), the choice of which is due to the peculiarities of the source base of the study. The novelty of the presented work consists in a comparative analysis of the indicators of the development of Tar villages in the late Imperial and early Soviet periods, determining the scale of the settlement network, identifying patterns and specifics of its functioning and transformation. Conclusions are drawn about the increase in the number of settlements in the district in the period from 1893 to 1926 by more than four times (from 447 to 1946 villages), changes in the typical structure of the network: the predominant in the late 1890s resettlement settlements and villages in the 1900s were replaced by farms that in the mid-1930s began to forcibly settle in large collective farms (collective farms). There has been a reduction in the number of households and the population of settlements.