Russia was widely believed to suffer from an acute shortage of agricultural land. At first sight it may appear surprising that a country as large as Russia should have experienced land shortages (or rural overpopulation, which is the same). And, indeed, Russia had a long way to go to match the population densities of Western Europe. With 130 million inhabitants and 22 million square kilometers of territory, the Empire in 1900 had an overall population density of 6 persons per square kilometer. Even such a young country as the United States had at that time a higher population density (8 per square kilometer). And yet, while the United States suffered endemic labor shortages, which it met by opening its doors to millions of European immigrants, Russia suffocated from rural overcrowding.
The explanation of this seeming paradox lies in the fact that in agricultural countries population densities acquire meaning only by relating the number of inhabitants to that share of the territory which is suitable for farming. Viewed in these terms, Russia was hardly a country of boundless expanses. Of the 15 million square kilometers of European Russia and Siberia, only 2 million could be cultivated and another 1 million used for pasture. In other words, in the homeland of the Great Russians, only one square kilometer out of five was suitable for agriculture. Once allowance is made for this fact, the figures for Russian population densities change dramatically. In Siberia, the average density in 1900 was 0.5 per square kilometer, a negligible figure. In the fifty provinces of European Russia, it rose to 23.7 per square kilometer, which exceeded slightly the figure estimated by economic geographers to be optimal for the region.* But even this figure misleads because it includes the sparsely populated provinces of northern Russia. The regions which really mattered, because they held the great mass of Russian peasants, were the central provinces, and here the population density ranged from 50 to 80. This figure matches that of contemporary France and exceeds that of Ireland and Scotland. In other words, had St. Petersburg given up Siberia and the northern provinces, its population densities would have equaled those of Western Europe.
Densities of this magnitude might have proven tolerable were it not for pre-revolutionary Russia’s extraordinary population growth. With an annual excess of births over deaths on the order of 15 per 1,000, Russia had the highest rate of natural increase in Europe.† The implications of such a rapid population growth for agriculture can be demonstrated statistically. In the Empire of 1900, three-quarters of the population was employed on the land. With an increase of 15 per 1,000 each year and a population of 130 million, 1,950,000 new inhabitants were added annually, 1,500,000 of them in the countryside. Allowing for the very high infant mortality rate, we are left with a million or so additional mouths which the countryside had to feed each year. Given that an average Great Russian household had five members and tilled ten hectares, these figures mean that Russia required annually an additional 2 million hectares of arable land.‡
In Western Europe, the pressures generated by a somewhat smaller but still rapid population growth from the middle of the eighteenth century onward was solved in part by overseas migration and in part by industrialization. During the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the agrarian countries of Europe (e.g., Italy, Ireland, Austria-Hungary) sent much of their excess rural population to the Americas. The net outflow of overseas migrants from Western Europe between 1870 and 1914 is estimated at 25 million, which took care of approximately one-half of the continent’s excess rural population. Much of the remainder found employment in industry. Industrialization permits unprecedented levels of population density. For instance, Germany, which in the first half of the nineteenth century had been a major source of overseas migration, in the second half of the century, in consequence of industrial development, not only ceased to send people abroad but had to import labor. Some industrial countries attained staggering population densities: England and the Low Countries accommodated 250–270 inhabitants a square kilometer, or several times that of the most crowded areas of central Russia, without suffering from overpopulation. There can be little doubt that the ability of the Western countries, through emigration and industrialization, to relieve population pressures played a major role in enabling them to avoid social revolution.
18. Strip farming as practiced in Central Russia, c. 1900. The strips in black are cultivated by one household.
