Central Agricultural Zone (Russia)
The Central Agricultural Zone was marked by lower living standards for peasants, and an extremely dense and poor rural population.
[1][2] It was surrounded by areas where commercial farming was prevalent: in the Baltic were capitalist farms able to hire wage-labour due to the Emancipation in 1817 with access to Western grain markets, in Western Ukraine nobles had established vast sugar-beet farms, in the fertile south of Russia, the Kuban and northern Caucasus ("New Russia", where there were fertile virgin lands with little population[2]) there existed a 'wealthy stratum of mixed farmers' coming out of the peasantry and the Cossacks, and in Western Siberia where the Trans-Siberian Railroad had enabled smallholders to make a fortune producing dairy products and cereals for the larger market.
[1] These regions accounted for the general increase of peasant purchasing power (and living standards) noted in the Russian peasantry in the turn of the century and early twentieth century; there was however a growing divergence in the peasants' economic situation evolving between these relatively wealthy western, southern and eastern areas, and the central agricultural zone, where most of the estates of the gentry were located, where backward and old farming techniques and methods dominated, and which became increasingly overpopulated.
[4] The Central Agricultural Zone in 1856, at the time the 'chief granary' of the Empire, was also the area where the gentry were most indebted: 71,3 percent of their revision souls[5] were mortgaged.
Orlando Figes cites the basic problem of the central agricultural zone being that 'the peasantry's egalitarian customs gave them little incentive to produce anything other than babies'; the birth rate in Russia at the second half of the 1800s were almost twice that of the European average, at about 50 to a 1000, with the highest rates in the lands with communal tenure, where the size of the family determined the size of land.
[12] The need for more land to cultivate caused by the boom in peasant population also led to one-third of the gentry's land being rented out, often at extortionate prices, with peasants agreeing to high prices out of necessity; this made the rental values increase to seven times the size, and this gave income for the gentry of the late 1800s to live on.
[12] An arc of provinces at the southern edge of the Central Agricultural Zone was where the agrarian violence – the peasants' war against the squires – of the revolution was concentrated, presenting a distinctive distribution: from Samara and Saratov, through Tambov, Voronezh, Kursk, Kharkov, Chernigov, Ekaterinoslav, Kherson and Poltava, all the way to Kiev and Podolia in the southwest.
[12] This 'transitional region' of overpopulation and large landownership by the gentry, with high land rents and low wages, but with fertile soil and decently long growing seasons favourable to the development of commercial mechanised farming and cultivation of wheat, sugar-beet, etc.
Within the final decades of the Russian Empire, millions of peasants had been driven off the land due to poverty, or a misfortune like the death of a family member, which was very difficult to handle economically for a severely indebted household.
Saratov Province on the other hand, albeit rich in land, was under the communal system, and its peasants were among the poorest and most rebellious in the entire Empire.
