Agriculture in The Russian Empire - The Open Fields

The Open Fields

In most of Slavonic Russia the peasants practised the open field system. The fields lay beyond the village's houses and gardens. Here the peasants grew the extensive cereal cultures and, to a limited but increasing extent, row and industrial crops too. The crops were protected from livestock by temporary fencing. After the harvest the peasants opened the land to let their animals graze on the stubble (which provided manure for the soil as well). (In addition to the arable land, there was some permanent pasture-land, waste and, in non-steppe areas, woodland as well.)

Each household held its arable land as a number of strips scattered throughout the fields. The strips were periodically redistributed by the mir (plural miry) so as to maintain equality among the households (see Repartition). The strips were supposed to be the length a horse-and-plough team could travel without `pausing for breath'. They were also narrow. In the Central Agricultural Region they were normally 80 sazhen (560 ft) long and 3-4 sazhen (21-28 feet) wide; in the Central Industrial Region strips 70-100 feet long and 7-14 feet wide were common. The number of strips for each household varied from region to region. In the centre and north there could be as many as 40 or 50. Large numbers of narrow strips were the consequence of a strict egalitarianism in sharing out land of differing qualities. Sometimes strips were too narrow for a harrow to travel along. In the large southern communities the problem was rather the distance of the strips from the household; in the Lower Volga it could be 15 kilometres or more. To farm such strips, temporary `camping out' was employed.

In dry areas (which included most of the black-earth belt) strips were divided from one another by grass borders and access paths. The amount of arable occupied by these borders has been estimated as high as 7%. In moist and rainy areas (the non-black earth) the basic strip-units were formed as a ridge-and-furrow system. As in medieval western Europe, perennial ploughing with a mould board had gradually produced a `corrugated' landscape of raised ridges or selions with ditches or furrows between them. The furrows acted as drainage. Such a system was necessary before the introduction of modern under-field drainage.