The emigre geographers who named Zelenyi Klyn counted four of them. The green wedge lay in the Amur and Ussuri basins; the grey wedge, Siryi Klyn, in western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan around Omsk; the raspberry wedge, Malynovyi Klyn, in the Kuban, its colour taken from the banners of the Zaporozhian Cossacks resettled there in 1792; and the yellow wedge, Zhovtyi Klyn, on the lower Volga around Saratov.
The scheme is a twentieth-century construction with an obvious political purpose, and the demographic facts underneath it are nonetheless solid. Between the 1880s and 1914, something over a million people left the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire for the east. It was the largest movement of Ukrainian peasants in history, larger by a wide margin than the emigration to Canada and the United States in the same decades, and it is very much less well known — partly because those who went east ended up inside the Soviet Union, where the subject was closed, and those who went west ended up in countries with universities and printing presses.
Why they left
The emancipation of 1861 freed the serfs of the Russian Empire and left them short of land. Settlements were made in favour of the landlords; the peasants received allotments smaller than the plots they had worked as serfs, and were charged redemption payments for them over forty-nine years. In the black-earth provinces of the left bank — Chernihiv, Poltava, Kharkiv — the population then grew fast, and the communal repartition of land divided the same fields among more households in each generation.
By the 1890s a Poltava family might hold two or three desyatinas, something under three hectares, on land good enough to be worth fighting over and not large enough to live on. The alternatives were to rent from a landlord at rising rents, to go to the new industries of the Donbas, or to leave.
What the state offered in the east was, on paper, transformative: an allotment of up to a hundred desyatinas per household in the Amur region under the rules of 1861, exemption from taxes for a period of years, deferment or exemption from military service, and — after 1882 — assistance with the passage. It was a colonisation policy as much as a relief measure. The empire had acquired the Amur and the Maritime Province from China in 1858 and 1860, held them with a thin line of Cossack posts, and wanted a settled agricultural population on the ground before anybody questioned the arrangement.
The sea route
The families who could afford it went by ship, and they were the fortunate ones.
From 1883 the Volunteer Fleet — organised by public subscription after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, intended to serve as auxiliary cruisers in wartime and operated commercially in peace — ran an emigrant service from Odesa to Vladivostok by way of the Suez Canal, Colombo, Singapore and Nagasaki. The voyage took between six and eight weeks. Between 1883 and 1901 the fleet carried something in the order of 55,000 settlers east, and an overwhelming majority of them boarded at Odesa from the Ukrainian provinces.
The sea passage mattered more than it sounds. Settlers who came by ship arrived in one piece, in a single season, with their tools, their seed and sometimes their livestock, and were on the land in time to plant. Settlers who came overland before the railway took eighteen months to three years, wintering at Tomsk or Irkutsk in transit barracks, selling possessions to eat, and arriving exhausted, broke and often reduced in number. The administration's own figures show the sea-borne cohort establishing viable farms at a markedly better rate.
This is why the earliest and most successful Ukrainian settlement concentrated in southern Primorye, the terminus of the shipping line, rather than spreading evenly. The districts around Nikolsk-Ussuriysky, the Suifun valley and the Khanka plain were settled first, by the people who had arrived in the best condition, and they became the demographic core of everything that followed.
The railway, and Stolypin
The Trans-Siberian changed the arithmetic. Construction began in 1891 and the through route was complete in 1904 by way of the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria, and in 1916 entirely on Russian soil with the opening of the Amur bridge at Khabarovsk. A journey that had taken two years now took a few weeks.
After the revolution of 1905 and the appointment of Pyotr Stolypin, resettlement became a central instrument of policy. Stolypin's purpose was not primarily to fill the east; it was to reduce the pressure in European Russia, break up the peasant commune and create a class of independent proprietors who would have something to lose. Between 1906 and 1914 the programme moved something over three million people east, in fourth-class carriages designed for the purpose and known as Stolypin cars — a name that acquired a second meaning in the 1930s, when the same rolling stock carried prisoners.
The results were mixed and the recruiting literature was not honest. The best land near the railway had already gone, to earlier settlers and to the Amur and Ussuri Cossack hosts, who held the riverbank allotments and the privileges. Later arrivals were given taiga to clear, or marginal ground, or land whose title was disputed. A proportion gave up: return rates from the eastern settlements reached a fifth or more of departures in bad years, and a peasant who returned to Poltava had usually sold everything to go.
Even so, by 1914 the Ukrainian share of the rural settler population of the Far East was very large. Estimates vary with the definition and the source — declared nationality, language, province of origin — but the commonly cited figure is that something approaching half of the settlers of the Far East came from the Ukrainian provinces, and in some districts of southern Primorye they were a clear majority of the countryside.
The villages
What they built looked like home, deliberately. The settlement administration moved communities in groups and allowed them to name their new villages after the old ones, which is why the map of southern Primorye reads as a displaced map of the left bank: Chernihivka, Poltavka, Kyivka, Khorolsky, Chuhuivka.
The houses were khaty of the Ukrainian pattern where materials allowed, whitewashed, with a clay stove and a garden; where they did not, the settlers built the log houses of the Siberian type and whitewashed those instead. They planted sunflowers and gourds, kept the Ukrainian agricultural calendar as far as the monsoon climate permitted, and built churches to plans they remembered.
The climate did not cooperate. The Ussuri country has a monsoon summer, with two thirds of the rainfall between June and September, and floods that take the river valleys in August; the winters are dry and severe, with temperatures in Khabarovsk regularly below minus twenty-five. Wheat did poorly. What worked was soya, which the settlers took up from Chinese and Korean neighbours, along with rice in the Khanka wetlands and, in time, a dairy and honey industry.
By 1914 the Far East had Ukrainian cooperatives, Ukrainian reading rooms in the larger villages, Prosvita societies in the towns where the authorities tolerated them, and a small stratum of teachers, agronomists and clerks who had been to school in Ukraine. There was no Ukrainian-language schooling: the Ems Decree of 1876 was still in force, and Ukrainian publishing and teaching were prohibited across the empire until 1905 and restricted afterwards. The community that organised itself so quickly in 1917 had been assembling the material for thirty years without being allowed to say so.
End of Chapter II