Russia’s geographical environment
towards the end of our period that the mixed forest began to be subject to
agricultural colonisation.
Themixed forest environmentprovided peasants with a variety of resources
for their subsistence. It may be that initial settlement followed valleys where
there was easy access to rivers and streams for water and transport, to mead-
owlands and to woodland. The better-drained places, such as river terraces,
were favoured. Broadleaved tree species were usually not difficult to clear for
cultivation. Later, as technology improved and it became feasible to dig deeper
wells, watersheds could be settled also. Scholars have discussed how relatively
simple agricultural landscapes (like cultivation in patches in the forest perhaps
using temporary slash-and-burn techniques) gradually evolved into perma-
nent landscapes with more intensive forms of agriculture, albeit with tem-
porary patches still frequently scattered through the forest.
9
Rye, barley and
oats were the principal food crops grown. The hayfields, which might include
water meadows, pastures and once again even remote glades in the forest, pro-
vided feed for the peasants’ limited livestock. Livestock farming involved the
necessity of stall-feeding during the long winter months. Woodland provided
the peasants with many necessities: timber (for building), wood (logs, poles,
rods, brushwood, bark for many purposes including fences, implements, uten-
sils, furniture, fuel, making potash, resin, tar, pitch), food (berries, nuts, fruit,
fungi, game, honey) and additional pasturing for animals. Rivers provided fish.
Like all pre-industrial societies, traditional Russia made use of a wide variety of
plant and animal products for textiles, clothing, foods, flavourings, medicines,
tanning, dyeing, preserving, building and other purposes.
From the medieval period Russian peasants began to move north into a very
different environment from the one they had experienced in the mixed forest.
This region, dubbed by Dokuchaev and others the boreal forest (taiga), is
clothed by the great belt of conifers which crosses the entire span of northern
Eurasia from northern Scandinavia in the west across to the Pacific coast
in the east and then, leaping the Bering Strait, continues across Alaska and
northern Canada. According to Dulov, at the end of the seventeenth century
this region accounted for nearly half of the territory of European Russia but in
9 N. Rozhkov, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo Moskovskoi Rusi v XVI veke (Moscow: Universitetskaia
tipografiia, 1899); M. A. D’iakonov, Ocherki iz istorii sel’skogo naseleniia v Moskovskom gosu-
darstve XVI–XVII vv. (St Petersburg: Tipografiia I. N. Skorokhodova, 1898); G. E. Kochin,
Sel’skoe khoziaistvo na Rusi v period obrazovaniia Russkogo tsentralizovannogo gosudarstva,
konets XIII–nachalo XVI v. (Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka, 1965); A. L. Shapiro, Agrarnaia
istoriia severo-zapada Rossii, vtoraia polovina XV–nachalo XVI v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1971);
R. E. F. Smith, Peasant Farming in Muscovy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
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