The Russian Far East — the imperial territory east of Lake Baikal extending to the Pacific coast — had been formally annexed by the Russian Empire in stages between 1858 and 1860 through the Treaty of Aigun (1858) and the Convention of Peking (1860), both of which transferred substantial Chinese territory to Russian control. The annexed region was, in 1860, almost entirely uninhabited by Slavic populations; the existing population consisted of approximately 100,000 indigenous Siberian and Tungusic peoples (the Manchu, Nanai, Udegei, Evenki, and various smaller groups) and a small Russian Cossack military presence. The Russian state's initial settlement of the territory through the 1860s and 1870s was modest — perhaps another fifty thousand Russian colonists by 1880, concentrated principally in the new port-city of Vladivostok (founded 1860) and along the Amur and Ussuri river systems.
The Trans-Siberian Railway
The substantial transformation of the Russian Far East began with the Trans-Siberian Railway, the construction project authorised by Tsar Alexander III in 1891 and completed in stages between 1891 and 1916. The railway provided, for the first time, fast surface transport between European Russia and the Russian Far East: the journey from St Petersburg to Vladivostok, which had previously taken months by combination of rail, river, and overland transport, was reduced to about two weeks by direct train. The transport infrastructure made substantial settlement of the Far East practical for European Russian agricultural populations whose previous access to the region had been logistically prohibitive.
The principal source population for Far Eastern agricultural settlement was European Russia, including substantial fractions of both ethnic Russian and ethnic Ukrainian agricultural populations. The Ukrainian-speaking provinces of the empire — Poltava, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Podolia, Volhynia — were, in the late nineteenth century, substantially overpopulated relative to the available agricultural land, with rural land-shortage producing substantial peasant economic pressure. The opportunity to migrate east to the Far Eastern territories — where the Russian state was offering substantial land grants (typically 100 hectares of unimproved land per settler family), partial relief from military service obligations, and travel subsidies — was attractive.
The Stolypin reforms
The decisive single policy intervention was the Stolypin agrarian reforms of 1906. Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (assassinated in 1911) developed a substantial programme of agricultural reform whose principal feature was the dissolution of the traditional Russian peasant commune (the obshchina or mir) and the conversion of communal land tenure into private smallholdings. The associated migration policy — the so-called Stolypin Resettlement Programme — offered substantial state assistance to peasants who chose to migrate from European Russia to Siberia and the Far East. Between 1906 and 1914, approximately 3.5 million peasants migrated east under the Stolypin programme; about 1.6 million of them were ethnic Ukrainians.
The Ukrainian migration to the Far East was the largest single ethnic component of the Stolypin resettlement. Several factors shaped the substantial Ukrainian participation: the Ukrainian provinces' particularly severe rural overpopulation in the early twentieth century; the agricultural similarity of the Far Eastern climate to the Ukrainian climate (both regions are continental with hot summers and cold winters, suitable for grain cultivation); and the substantial network of Ukrainian community organisations in the source provinces that facilitated chain migration of related families. The settlers travelled in family and village groups; they typically arrived at the Far East with substantial portions of their original village communities intact; they established settlements that preserved Ukrainian-language community life in the new territory.
The geographic pattern
The Ukrainian settlement in the Russian Far East was concentrated in three principal zones. The first and largest was the Primorye region — the Far Eastern Maritime Province, with its administrative capital at Vladivostok — which received approximately 600,000 Ukrainian settlers between 1880 and 1914. The second was the Amur region (with the administrative centres at Blagoveshchensk and Khabarovsk), which received approximately 400,000 Ukrainian settlers. The third was the Trans-Baikal region (with the administrative centre at Chita), which received approximately 300,000 settlers. Additional smaller Ukrainian-settlement zones were established in the Sakhalin Island region, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Russian Manchurian railway corridor (the Chinese Eastern Railway zone, where Russian-controlled territory ran through Chinese sovereign space).
The settlements were typically grouped into ethnically coherent rural communities. Ukrainian village names — preserved from the European Russian source provinces or adapted from local features into Ukrainian-language forms — proliferated across the Far East; the contemporary Russian Far East still has hundreds of localities with recognisably Ukrainian-derived place-names. The settlement pattern produced a substantial Ukrainian-speaking rural majority in many districts of the Primorye and Amur regions by 1914 — perhaps fifty to sixty percent of the rural population in the principal Ukrainian-settlement zones, against a regional Russian-speaking urban population principally concentrated in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, and the railway towns.
The pre-revolutionary community
By the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the Ukrainian Far Eastern community was, in scale and institutional development, substantial. The principal Ukrainian-language educational institutions had been established in the cities (with primary-school Ukrainian-language instruction available in most rural settlements; secondary-school Ukrainian-language instruction concentrated in the larger urban centres). Ukrainian-language community organisations (the Prosvita societies, similar to the parallel organisations in the European Ukrainian provinces) were operating in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, and the other major Far Eastern cities. A small but substantial Ukrainian-language press had emerged: the principal Ukrainian-language newspaper of the Far East, Khvylia Ukrayiny ("The Ukrainian Wave"), was founded at Vladivostok in 1907 and operated continuously into the early Soviet period. The Russian Orthodox Church's Far Eastern dioceses had begun, in the early twentieth century, to allow Ukrainian-language religious services in the principal Ukrainian-settlement districts.
The community was, however, not politically organised as a separate institutional entity. The Tsarist regime did not recognise national-cultural autonomy for any of its subject populations; Ukrainians were classified, in official imperial statistics, as "Little Russians" (maloros) — a Russian-language category that treated the Ukrainian population as a regional Russian sub-group rather than as a distinct nationality. The political organisation that would emerge in 1917 was therefore largely a creation of the revolutionary period itself.
The next chapter takes up the political organisation of the Ukrainian Far Eastern community after the February Revolution.
End of Chapter I