Migration policy and the problem of land scarcity in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century (by the materials of Penza province)

Abstract

Background. Migration processes of the beginning of the 20th century had a huge impact on the subsequent development of the Russian society, laying the general trend of state policy on the placement of labor resources in the 20th and even 21st centuries. The rel-evance of studying the historical experience of organizing resettlement flows and strategies of social behavior is determined by the need to comprehend the problem of factors and the mission of the resettlement project in a peasant country, suffocated by low land. The pur-pose of the work is to study the activities of state structures to move the rural population of Penza province to Siberia and the Far East as part of the Stolypin agrarian reform, as well as strategies and practices for the interaction of the main actors of this process. Materials and methods. The implementation of research tasks was achieved by identifying and ana-lyzing documents extracted from the funds of the State Archive of the Penza Region, as well as studying statistical data on the socio-demographic development of Russia during the period under review. The methodological basis of the study was the methods of demo-graphic analysis, historical comparative studies, hermeneutics, and the history of everyday life. Results. The regional material examined the factors of activation, specificity and re-sults of the resettlement movement at the beginning of the 20th century. An assessment of the effectiveness of political measures initiated by the government in this direction was giv-en. Conclusions. The Stolypin agrarian reform did not affect the socio-demographic situa-tion of Penza province, its socio-economic diversification and did not accelerate migration processes, and also did not have a significant impact on reducing the organizational and economic inertia of the population of the province. Among the factors that prevented the exit of the Russian village from the state of the socio-cultural crisis, it is necessary to name the underdevelopment of the agricultural credit system, the low level of well-being of the rural population, the weak spread of new technologies, and the conservatism of the peasant consciousness.

Keywords

• penza province
• agrarian overpopulation
• low land
• stolypin reform
• resettle-ment policy