On the demographic and social history of the Chernozem region: data of parish registers and censuses in the context of historical sources

Abstract

In the article, the author uses the parish registers and tax censuses of the village of Snezhetok, one of the parishes of the Chernozem region, over a hundred years (1758-1862) as an objective source of data on the social history of this territory in the 18th-19th centuries. They reveal relatively low formal compliance with both the Church's regulations (non-observance of fasts, high illegitimate birth rate, the presence of sexually transmitted diseases, cases of polygamy) and civil legislation (frequent violations of the minimum age of marriage), noticeable postponement of marriage by men despite the importance of patrilineal kinship (early and stable surnames), active migrations and the practice of strong inflation of the age of the elderly dead. This picture, in the part of Central Russia with the most fertile soil, correlates poorly with the classical patterns of established agricultural communities, but corresponds to the cultural realities inherited from the pioneer military population of mixed ethnic origin, which are confirmed by numerous historical sources. The author calculates the demographic weight of the Chernozem region in the
17th-21st centuries and, based on its enormous size (40% of the population of Central Russia in the 19th century), casts doubt on the general idea about the agricultural nature of the entire Russian pre-revolutionary society. Consideration of the demographic history of the Chernozem region before and after the chronological framework of the array of parish registers allows us to make projections about the strong "path dependence" of socio-economic dynamics on the inherited cultural basis.