Adaptive capacity of peasant household in Siberia at the turn of the 20th century

At the turn of the 20th century, after the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway had began, small-scale peasant households of Siberia got involved into the system of Russian capitalistic market which abruptly increased the modernization of the former. The issue of agrarian modernization is sufficiently described in Siberia studies. Nowadays the leading role in agrarian study belongs to a key problem of estimating the depth of market modification of a traditional peasant household which demanded household's adaptation to a variety of social, economic and natural characteristics of Siberia. This side of the problem is still not examined closely, especially in the field of adaptive aspects of agrarian modernization. Adaptive aspects of sociocultural development and modernization capacity of agricultural households of this region are practically unstudied. In this regard, these questions are in the central focus of the author's work. The author's main tasks are to determine adaptation subsystems and to estimate adaptive capacity of peasant households in Siberia. The method of correlation modeling of the structure of a peasant household and method of multivariable analysis, aiming to highlight its adaptive subsystems, were used to analyze the economic system of the households. The study is based on the materials of the Agricultural Census of Tomsk Province that was held in 1901. The Census showed all main aspects of a peasant household: population, family labor force, draught animals and dairy cattle, sowing and fodder base. The correlation analysis of the structure showed that functioning and development of the production and technical base were under the influence of the Russian agrarian-capitalistic market. According to the results of the multivariable analysis, there were three adaptive subsystems in the structure of peasant households in Siberia. The first (market-capitalism or socio-market) subsystem ensured sustainable development and modernization of peasant households in Siberia in the face of new conditions of the Russian single capitalistic market. The second subsystem was a traditional natural (subsistence-insurance) subsystem that protected a peasant household and family from periodical natural hazards. The third, mixed, subsystem was both natural and market-productive. It created production reserves of draught animals and dairy cattle that protected a household against adverse weather, social and market conditions. At the end of the 19th century a Siberian peasant household accumulated a significant socio-natural adaptive capacity. Its functioning and development took up to 1/3 of the economic and cultural resources of agricultural family economy. This adaptive capacity of peasant household became a base for economic modernization of the region.

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