The Russian Steppe 1

As fascinating as it would be to visit Molotschna, our ancestors’ former home, that is unlikely to be possible anytime soon, given the current unrest in southeastern Ukraine. Indeed, one of the entities that proclaimed its independence is in the oblast (province) directly east of that in which the former Molotschna colony was located. Consequently, for now we must rely on books and maps and drawings and photographs to become better acquainted with our family’s former home.

David Moon’s The Plough That Broke the Steppes will be a informative guide on that journey, as we draw key points from his narrative that help us imagine the context in which Benjamin Buller and his family lived. For example, in this post we learn that the Buller emigration was part of a much larger movement that spread across the steppe land of Russia.

To be specific, in 1719, when our family still lived in Poland along the Vistula River, most of Russia lived in areas other than the steppe, being mostly in the northern forests. According to Boris Mironov, whom Moon cites, only 2.6 percent of Russia’s entire population inhabited the steppes.

By the end of the century (1795), the percentage of the population living in the steppe had increased to 6.7, and fifty years later it was roughly 14 percent. By 1914, at the beginning of World War I, over 21 percent of Russia’s population lived in the steppe region. Moon explains:

The total population of the steppe region in the European part of the Russian Empire, around 90 per cent of whom lived in rural areas, increased more than eightfold over the eighteenth century, nearly tripled over the first half of the nineteenth century, and trebled again by 1914. The rate of growth far exceeded that of the empire as a whole, and was part of the relocation of the centre of gravity of the population from the old forest heartland to the south. (Moon 2013, 16)

The implication of this is clear: the movement of our family and hundreds of other Mennonite families into Molotschna was a small part of a significantly larger population shift from the forest to the steppe. Native Russians in the northern forest region moved south to the steppe, and non-Russians (mostly “Germans”) moved into Russia and its steppe land. The dual impact of these shifts increased the steppe population substantially, both in relative and absolute terms.

As Moon explains further, this was not the only drastic change.

Field near the Kurushan River almost directly north of
Alexanderkrone. Photograph by Владимир Переклицкий

The dramatic increase in the rural population of the steppe region was accompanied by an equally dramatic change in land use. A primarily pastoral, and partly nomadic, economy was replaced by settled, arable farming. Pasture was ploughed up and transformed into fields of grain. The two developments went hand in hand as growing grain generates several times more calories per unit of land than livestock husbandry, and many times more than nomadic pastoralism. Thus, the change in land use to arable farming meant that the region could support a far larger, and settled, population. The nomads were compelled to settle or to leave. (Moon 2013, 16)

Here Moon adds some depth to our earlier discussions of the Molotschna colony. If you remember, we noted early on (July 2014) that south of Molotschna was the land of the Nogai, a tribe of Turkic Muslims who earned their living primarily as seminomadic sheep herders (see here). As Moon notes above, the influx of farmer settlers limited the options the nomads (Nogai) could pursue. Thus it is not surprising to learn that in 1861 the entire tribe relocated away from the steppe land bordering the Molotschna colony.

Another of Moon’s comments deserves special note: “Pasture was ploughed up and transformed into fields of grain.” This statement has a familiar ring to it, as though we have encountered this sort of thing before. In fact, we have, and we will return to that point in a future post—after we learn more about the Russian steppe, particularly the the so-called Azov Upland.

Work Cited

Moon, David. 2013. The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.