Figure 1.--This Prokudin-Gorskii image was identified as a settler's farm. We are not entirely sure what that meant. Agriculture in Tsarist Russia was dominated by huge estates with agricultural laborors descended from the serfs who were emancipated (1861). Settler here might mean a former serf who moved east and set up a small farm. The photograph would have been taken around 1910.

This Prokudin-Gorskii image was identified as a settler's farm. We are not entirely sure what that meant. Agriculture in Tsarist Russia was dominated by huge estates with agricultural laborors descended from the serfs who were emancipated (1861). Settler here might mean a former serf who moved east and set up a small farm. The photograph would have been taken around 1910. Prokudin-Gorskii's descriptions of many of his beautifil images are unfortunately rather cryptic. Here all he tells us is that this was a settler's farm, nothing more. Now the term settler is commonly used in the United States referring to both native-born Americans ahnd European immigrants who moved west seeking new land for farms in areas that were not being farmed. Land holding in Tsarist Russia was much more concentrated than in America. A rekatively small number of aristocrats owned huge estates that cobstituted a very large portion of the ariable land in European Russia. Two questions arise from this image. 1) Who are these people? 2) Where is their farm? Many American settlers were new immigrants. People in the 19th and early 20th century did immigrate to Russia, but rather from it. Thus we are not talking zbout immigrants here. I supose one possibility is tht the family here descended from the serfs who were emancipated (1861). As to where, one possibility is east of the Ural moubntauns. Russia on the 18th century expanded east toward the Pacific. This opened huge tracts of land, but much of it was inaccessible. There were no roads streaching east. And the rivers flowed on a north-south axis. There are no rivers extending east. The completion of the Trans-Siberian railway changed this. We suspect the farm here was located east of the Urals, somewhere along the Trans-Siberian railway.

Created: 7:09 PM 4/14/2009
Last updated: 5:01 AM 4/24/2009