Stolypin Agrarian Reform and the Southern Urals: Underappreciated Results

The socio-economic evolution of the Russian village in the early 20th century was influenced by the Stolypin agrarian reform, which determined the general vector of modernization processes both at the Russian and regional levels. Their comparative examination makes it possible to concretize general ideas, to see not only contradictions, but also the actual perception, the “response” of the village to the government course, which is far from being reducible to the volume of land management work and the number of migrant peasants. This is especially noticeable in the example of the Southern Urals, whose villages did not know large-scale serfdom and its “relics” that hampered the modernization of agriculture. The processes of agrarian modernization even captured relatively “closed” groups of the mining, Bashkir and Cossack populations. The effectiveness of transformations in the region was also affected by other factors that accelerated the commercialization of the agricultural sector: the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the technical revolution in the processes of processing and storage of agricultural products, the development of cooperation and small credit. Taken in their totality, they mutually conditioned each other and require a thorough study of the entire context of the transformations, an assessment of the relationship between various processes and new phenomena in the socio-economic life of the country at the beginning of the 20th century.