Physical health peasantry Chernozem the Centre of European Russia as a factor of adaptation readiness to relocations in Siberia in the second half of XIX - early XX centuries

The author of the given article focuses on those subjects which were seldom enough used by the specialists of historical and ethnographic studies as the illustrations of "miserable" conditions of the agricultural population of the European Russia, formal arguments for "backwardness" of the peasantry: physical health and its factors, health care and education, sanitary and epidemiological situation in the Russian countryside. As a territorial range the author examines the typical agricultural areas of the Chernozem Centre of the Russian Empire. These areas were heavily involved in the agricultural process and heavily suffered from the agricultural crisis, so it led to a decrease in living standards and the search for the solution of the existing situation. Without bias, embarrassment in Russia of the capitalistic industrialization period reflected in the lowest bead excess contrary to physiological needs and provided the peasantry with provisions only in the years of big crop. As a natural process of poor harvest and crop failure and also of popular starvation caused by these processes, general physical condition and lower population were intensified. Furthermore it turned out that peasants were deliberating anti-crisis behavior strategies, traditionally involving performance of agricultural and commercial incomes, higher implication of rent relationships, out-migration to the remote Eastern areas of the country. It is generally known that the local peasants considered namely the latter measure in the period of XIX-XX centuries as the most effective one, inasmuch as it allowed the agricultural population due to transferring traditions and economic management skills to save their peasantry identity. At the same time, applying the materials of the recruits' examination, correlating to the data of peasant nutrition, mortality statistics, epidemiological stress which was caused by sanitary and household disorder of the mentioned countryside, allows to draw a conclusion. Thus, the capitalistic industrialization period, marked by the outbreak of mass peasant out-migration outside the European Russia including the agricultural territories of Siberia, can hardly be recognized as a favorable process of the national colonization of the remote Eastern areas of the country. It is obvious that namely in the Chernozem Guberniya negative effects of the agrarian crisis was embodied in lower living standards, worse nutrition and physical health, that they naturally restricted adaptation opportunities to provide annually out-migrating contingent outside the area.

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