Russia

Free Settlers.

The free settlers, however, have played the most important part in colonisation. In the first instance, they were runaway serfs, or fugitives from religious persecution and conscription, and thus they went into more remote parts to avoid re-capture. Many intermarried with the Buriats or Yakuts, and of ten adopted the language of the natives. Their descendants are called Siberiaks. The Russian government did not support volun tary emigration until after the abolition of serfdom in 1861; till that year it was a crime for a peasant to leave his native soil.

After the Russo-Japanese war, emigration set in intensively, and 350,000 families were settled between 1909 and 1913, while in 1913 the number of settlers was 234,877. There has been a marked decrease in the number of immigrants who return, with the exception of those going to Yeniseisk and Irkutsk, where climatic conditions reduced the colonists to destitution. During the general disorders of 1917 to 1922 colonisation ceased, but is reviving now. In 1925 a special commission of the Soviet gov ernment drew out a five year plan for settling 1,200,000 colonists in Siberia, and rebates from taxation and exemption from con scription are offered to suitable settlers. Many fishermen from the declining Caspian fisheries have been settled in the Far East ern Area and encouraged to develop a winter lumbering and a summer fishing industry. But colonisation now is of a different order; the more accessible lands have been settled and the rate of further colonisation will depend upon the development of road construction. Much of the vast forest wealth is at present locked up through lack of transport facilities. In recent years, the town population in the colonised areas has grown with the rapidity characteristic of American development, e.g., Novo-Sibirsk (for merly Novo-Nikolaevsk) had a population of 5,000 in 1897 and of 120,611 in 1926, Omsk in the same period has increased from to 161,475 and Vladivostok from 28,896 to Towns and Settlements.—According to the 1926 census, thirty towns had populations of over 100,0o0, and these all showed marked increases on the 1897 population with the excep tion of Odessa, which has been adversely affected by 'the dimin ished trade in the Black Sea and by the severance of Bessarabia. Two, Moscow 2,018,286 and Leningrad (Petrograd) 1,611,103, were over a million. Kiev, Baku, Odessa and Kharkov had more than 400,000 inhabitants, Tashkent and Rostov-on-Don had more than 200,000. The following towns (qq.v.) arranged in order

of size, had populations ranging between one and two hundred thousand :—Dnepropetrovsk (Ekaterinoslav), Nijni-Novgorod, Kazan, Samara, Krasnodar (Ekaterinodar), Omsk, Astrakhan, Tula, Stalingrad (Tsaritsyn), Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), Minsk, Orenburg, Novo-Sibirsk (Novo-Nikolaevsk), Voronezh, Yaro slavl, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Tver, Stalin (Yusovka), Vladivostok, Samarkand. Fifty-four towns have more than 5o,000, and 120 more than 20,000 inhabitants. The long struggle against the nomads is reflected in the type of Russian towns; the most ancient military settlements having been surrounded by wooden turreted walls; later the centre of the town was built of stone and has often retained its name of kreml, kremlin or keep. These ancient military centres and the later Cossack ostrogs to the south and east still retain their concentric forms and radiating streets.

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few towns of the west while under Polish-Lithuanian rule obtained the Magdeburg rights, notably Kiev in 1499, and traces of Germanic influence, such as tiled roofs, still remain. No chartered towns arose in Muscovite Russia. At the beginning of the 19th century, town formation began to be of an economic character, either factory or railway centres. An interesting illus tration of the importance of the present Soviet All-Union Con gresses in Moscow is the fact that the towns of Eastern Siberia have a higher cultural level than those of Western Siberia, be cause the merchants from the east traded in small bulk, but valuable goods, e.g., gold, fur and tea, and therefore visited Leningrad, Moscow and Nijni-Novgorod, while those of the west, trading in heavy bulk and cheaper goods did not travel further than Irbit, and thus missed higher cultural influences. Most of the ancient towns of European Russia bear strong traces of Byzantine influence in their architecture ; the Ukrainian stone tracery is distinctive. A marked feature of Russian towns is the appearance, on the outskirts, of the low wooden house of the same type as the peasant izba. The smaller towns are dis tinguished by the great width of the main street, which in spring and autumn is often a sea of mud. The ancient oasis towns of Turkestan now usually consist of a new Russian garden city and the ancient city with its winding narrow lanes and ruins of Mohammedan palaces and madrasas.