Tomsk Villages in the 1900s-1920s: Dynamics of Population and Size

IntroductionThe process of settlement and economic development of any territory occurs gradually and unevenly.

First, as a rule, colonization strongholds appear in new areas, then the framework of the settlement network is formed, after which a larger-scale settlement takes place, empty lands are involved in economic turnover.

One of the intensively colonized territories of Russia over the past centuries has been Siberia. Since becoming part of the Russian state, this region has experienced several stages of settlement associated with planned, government colonization, reference to the settlement and "free people" resettlement. By the end of the XIX –beginning of the XX centuries, areas of old agricultural settlement, where a developed settlement network had already formed, and areas that were just beginning to be developed by local residents and settlers, coexisted simultaneously in the Siberian expanses.

Among the territories of the old, mainly agrarian settlement, was the Tomsk county/district. Already in the XVII–XVIII centuries. his lands were colonized, which resulted in the creation of a network of settlements, which included settlements of both Russian and autochthonous populations.

In the research literature, the problems of settlement and development of the settlement network on the territory of the Tomsk county/district have been studied rather poorly. Thus, certain aspects of the pre-revolutionary history of the formation and functioning of the Tomsk village are considered in the works of V.N. Kurilov, S.V. Pospelova, G.S. Khorokhordin ^{[3; 8; 12-14]}.  A monograph and a series of articles by O.V. Usoltseva ^[11] are devoted to the Soviet period of the development of a network of rural settlements in the Tomsk region. At the same time, the author examined the processes of transformation of the rural settlement network in the period from the 1940s to the 1980s.

The studies of M.A. Ovcharova, A.A. Plyasuli, B.A. Voronin, I.P. Chupina and others are of interest in the Siberian and Russian contexts. They touch upon such issues of the history of the development of Tomsk settlements as: the organization of agrarian resettlement and resettlement of peasants in the region in the 1920s-1940s; the forced formation of state farms in the first decades of Soviet power; the liquidation of "unpromising" villages and the appearance of abandoned settlements ^{[5; 7; 2]}.

In foreign historiography, the issues of rural settlement development are considered as part of the study of the settlement process. At the same time, scientists study in more detail the impact of urbanization on the change in the pattern of settlement of different territories [16-18; 20], determine the role of socio-cultural transformations in the expansion of the settlement network ^[19], investigate the role of regional cities in the development of rural regions ^[15].

Thus, the 1920s-1930s turned out to be "overboard" of the attention of specialists in the field of historical geography – the time of a serious transformation of the network of settlements associated with changes in settlement policy in the first decades of Soviet power, the transition to a program of new agrarian transformations in the countryside, the acceleration of economic and socio-cultural modernization of the country and its constituent territories.

The purpose of this article is to characterize the dynamics of the Tomsk village development in the 1900s-1920s. At the same time, such indicators as the number of rural settlements of the county /district, their size, and typical structure are taken as the basis of the characteristics.

The phrase "Tomsk village" is used in the work as a collective and is applied to the entire set of rural settlements of the characterized administrative-territorial unit.

The chronological scope of the work is limited to the 1900s-1920s, which, on the one hand, is explained by the peculiarities of the source base of the study, which contains information about the state of the Tomsk settlement network in three time slices (1904, 1911, 1926), on the other – the appearance in the designated period of new trends in the development of this network, reflected in its typical structure, number and size.

The territorial boundaries of the study include the Tomsk Uyezd/district, which was part of the province of the same name until 1925, and then, after its abolition, to the Siberian Territory, which existed from 1925 to 1930. It is important to note that the boundaries of the Tomsk District changed during the designated period. After the economic zoning carried out in 1925, six districts of the former Mariinsky and five districts of Narymsky counties were included in the district. In order to objectively study the Tomsk network of rural settlements when characterizing its condition in 1926, the author took into account the settlements of only those nineteen districts that were part of the Tomsk district earlier, in the pre-revolutionary period (together with the Narym region).

The main source for studying the dynamics of the number and size of the rural settlement network of the Tomsk County/district were the "Lists of populated places" published by the central statistical authorities both in the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet periods. The information presented in the "Lists" about the types of settlements, the number of courtyards and the number of inhabitants in them help to recreate the picture of rural settlement in the subregion, to trace the development of the settlement network in historical dynamics, to determine the influence of political, administrative and socio-economic factors on the state of the network.

The main partBy the beginning of the 1900s, Tomsk County was an area of old agricultural and commercial development, the area of which was 248,036 square miles (together with the Narym region).

In 1910, 627,907 people lived in the county, of which 440,980 people (70.2%) lived in rural areas ^{[4; p. 3]}. 

The harsh natural and climatic conditions of the northern part of Tomsk County, the predominance of swamp-taiga, unsuitable for habitation lands, their inaccessibility and remoteness from the more developed southern territories of the region had a significant impact on the unevenness of the current settlement system. Thus, the population density in the county in 1910 was 2.5 people per square mile. At the same time, in the northern volosts of the Narym Region, which occupied 79% of the entire territory of the county (196,536 square miles), there were only 20,762 inhabitants (0.1 people per square mile) ^{[1; p. 224]}. In the remaining Tomsk volosts located to the south, 420 218 people lived (8.1 people per square mile).

The uneven population of different districts of Tomsk County affected the density of the rural settlement network. So, by 1926, out of 3289 settlements in the district, 819 were located in the areas of the former Narym Region (24.9% of the entire settlement network). Thus, in the Narym part of the district, 240 square versts per locality accounted for, while in other districts – 20.8 square versts.

The analysis of the "Lists" of rural settlements for 1904, 1911 and 1926 showed a positive trend in the number of settlements of the county/district in the period under review (see Table 1).

Table 1

Number of rural settlements of various types in Tomsk County/district (1904-1926)

The data in Table 1 show that for twenty-two years (from 1904 to 1926), the number of rural settlements in the Tomsk District increased 3.6 times. At the same time, the settlement network grew most intensively in the 1910s and 1920s.

The analysis of the obtained data on the network of rural settlements allows us to conclude about the structural shifts in the typology of settlements that have occurred over a quarter of a century. There is a noticeable decrease in the share of villages with the status of villages, villages and yurts in the settlement network of the characterized administrative-territorial unit. At the same time, there is an obvious tendency to increase the share of farms, locks and "railway" villages (stations, sidings, barracks, booths) in the total number of settlements of the county/district.

The increase in the number of farms and settlements, which were mainly small villages (1-5 yards), indicates the spread of farmstead land use, especially among immigrants.  By 1926, 36% of peasant land use was occupied by farms in the Tomsk District, although as early as 1904 the share of villages of this type was negligible 0.1% here ^[9]. Zaimki were most often found in the northern districts of the district. In 1926, out of 381 villages with the status of zaimka, 102 were in the Parabelsky district, 160 – in the Chainsky, located in the forest-taiga part of the subregion ^[9].

The construction and commissioning of the Trans-Siberian Railway led to the appearance of new types of settlements in the 1890s (stations, sidings, barracks, semi-barracks, roadblocks). During the first quarter of the XX century. the number of such villages in the district increased 9.2 times.

Settlements that had settlement status in the 1900s and 1910s had disappeared from the typical structure of rural settlements of the district by 1926. Some of them received the status of a village, others ceased to exist.

A reflection of the state policy to encourage the resettlement movement to Siberia was a fourfold increase in the share of resettlement settlements in the network of settlements of Tomsk County in the period from 1904 to 1911. In seven years, 282 new settlements were formed in the county ^{[6; 10]}. In subsequent years, there was a decline in the migration flow to the region, as a result, from 1911 to 1926, only 60 new villages with the named status appeared on the territory of the county ^{[10; 9]}.

The study of the typology of Tomsk settlements by three time slices gives grounds to characterize the rural settlement network as dynamic, and, at the same time, complexly structured. So, in addition to settlements of common types (village, village, settlement, farmstead, zaimka, yurt), in the typical structure of the settlement network in 1904 there were villages with a rare status of a site, camp, frontier. A small number of settlements of the listed types allowed them to be included in the column "villages with a different status" (see Table 1). By 1911, this column included settlements of such types as a winter quarters, a camp, a plot. By 1926, camps, winter quarters, settlements, borders disappeared from the typical structure of the settlement network, but villages with the status of a state farm, farms, communes appeared. This became possible due to the change in the agrarian policy of the Soviet state, the essence of which was the reorientation of the peasant from communal-farmstead land use to collective-farm-state farm. In the following decades, the result of such a policy will be the settlement of farms, settlements, small villages into collective farms, as a result of which the typical structure of the rural settlement network will be replenished with communes, agricultural artels, state farms, while farms, settlements, single-family settlements as types of settlements will disappear.

The period of the 1910s-1920s was marked by changes in the size of Tomsk settlements. According to the data obtained on the average size of settlements of various types in terms of the number of courtyards and the number of inhabitants presented in Table 2, almost all types of Tomsk settlements, with the exception of villages and yurts, will be subject to the process of unbundling.

Table 2

The average size of settlements of different types by the number of yards and the number of inhabitants in Tomsk county/district (1911-1926)

The average size of the Tomsk village decreased in fifteen years (1911-1926) from 47 to 32 households, from 282 to 151 inhabitants ^{[10; 9]}.

The ambiguity of changes in the indicators of the size of settlements with the status of a village is noted. Simultaneously with the enlargement of villages by the number of yards, there is a reduction in the number of their inhabitants. In other words, in villages, as in settlements of other types, the population of the peasant household decreases. Similar processes were characteristic of villages of the "foreign" type, which had the status of yurts.

One of the reasons for the unbundling of Tomsk villages was the spread of individual land use in the period under review, the continuation of the practice of evicting peasants to farms, which began during the Stolypin agrarian reform. Confirmation of this can be considered a sharply increased number of farms in the Tomsk district by 1926 and an increase in their share in the total number of settlements for a quarter of a century by more than a third.

The demographic factor played a certain role in reducing the size of rural settlements: there was a decrease in the average size of a peasant household from 6 people in 1911 to 4.7 people in 1926 ^{[10; 9]}.

In general, the decrease in the population of the peasant yard was caused by a combination of interrelated reasons: urbanization accelerated during the NEP period, demographic losses during the First World War and the Civil War, the popularity of the farm system of farming, increased family divisions.

ConclusionThe state of the rural settlement network of the Tomsk Uyezd/district in the first quarter of the XX century was subjected to changes caused by a change in the course of the state in conducting agrarian and resettlement policy, as well as economic and socio-cultural modernization in the Siberian Region and in the country as a whole.

The massive influx of immigrants from European Russia, which peaked during the years of P.A. Stolypin's agrarian reform, led to a significant expansion of the Tomsk settlement network, which resulted in an increase in the number of rural settlements from 921 in 1904 to 3289 in 1926 (3.6 times!).

At the same time, the density (density) The settlement network in the sub-region under consideration increased as it moved from north to south, from extremely sparse to relatively dense (especially in the suburban area of Tomsk). 

The natural and geographical factor had a significant impact on the size of the Tomsk village. If in the northern Kargasoksky, Alexandrovsky, Kolpashevsky districts the average settlement numbered 17, 24 and 28 yards, respectively, then in the Yurginsky and Sudzhensky districts located to the south, the average size of settlements was 36 and 44 yards.

During the period under review, significant structural shifts occurred in the typology of the rural settlement network of the Tomsk County/district. Camps, winter quarters, borders, settlements disappeared, state farms, artels, farms, communes appeared in their place. By 1926, the most common type of settlements were farms. For a quarter of a century, the share of railway locks and villages (stations, sidings, barracks and semi-barracks, checkpoints) has increased. The number and share of resettlement settlements in the structure of the settlement network changed in waves: until 1911, these indicators grew, later they decreased.

Simultaneously with the expansion of the Tomsk settlement network, the process of unbundling its constituent units took place. In the period from 1911 to 1926, the indicators of the number of households and the number of people of different types of settlements decreased. The positive dynamics in the yard was inherent only in villages and yurts, their average value in the specified period increased from 140 to 175 and from 8 to 22 yards, respectively. Villages of other types showed negative dynamics in the number of yards. All types of rural settlements were characterized by a decrease in the number of inhabitants, as well as a decrease in the population of the peasant household from 6 to 4.7 people.

The described trends in the development of the Tomsk village in the first quarter of the XX century, which resulted from political and socio-economic changes in the country, will continue in the following decades and will lead to serious shifts in both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the rural settlement system in the region.