Vladimir Aleksandrovich Zverev,
Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Ilya Igorevich Ponomarev,
Graduate Student, Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Siberian Cossack Army: Renewal of Generations of Cossacks and Non-Cossack Population at the End of the Imperial Period
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2022-4-13
The article provides a specific historical, mostly quantitative description of the process of reviving the generational reproduction in the area inhabited by the Siberian Cossack Host in 1894–1915. Using military statistics, the authors determined the scale, rate and manner of the total population increase within the Host and its main categories during the specified period. The findings confirm the predominance of the natural growth of the Cossack population, which constituted the majority of the Host, over the mechanical growth, already noted earlier in the literature. The authors highlight the higher rates of growth in the number of non-Cossacks (’miscellaneous commoners’, or raznochintsy, and non-Russians) due to the one-time inclusion of over 70 thousand nomadic Kazakhs into the Host in 1899 and the appearance of peasant settlers that moved into the Host’s lands, especially in the years of Stolypin’s agrarian reform. The authors calculate the absolute and relative annual indicators describing the natural movement of the Cossacks and other population categories, put them into dynamic sequences, present them in tables and charts, and subject them to comparative analysis. This allows for discovering the long-term factors and specific causes of strong fluctuations in the dynamic sequences. As a result, the authors make conclusions about the fairly good reproductive potential of the Host’s population, and a consistent mortality rate reduction among both the Cossacks and other population categories. The drop in mortality was also accompanied by declining birth rates, but at a much slower pace and only among the Cossacks. Due to the imbalance in the rates of transformation of mortality and procreation, there was an increase in the indicators of natural population growth; notably, among the Cossacks, it reached the scale of a demographic boom. Thus, at the end of the Imperial Period of Russian history, the community residing on the Siberian Cossack Host’s lands showed the early signs of entering a transitional phase that would have led to the gradual replacement of the traditional type of generational renewal with the modern dynamics. However, in 1915, the second year of World War I, those sprouts of modernization were trampled by the demographic crisis.
Publishing: 28/08/2022
The article has been received by the editor on 16/03/2022
How to cite: Zverev V.A., Ponomarev I.I. Siberian Cossack Army: Renewal of Generations of Cossacks and Non-Cossack Population at the End of the Imperial Period // Historical Courier, 2022, No. 4 (24), pp. 148–163. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2022/ISTKURIER-2022-4-13.pdf]
Links: Issue 4 2022
Keywords: Cossacks; Siberian Cossack Host; 1894–1915; birthrates; mortality; natural population growth; reproduction of population; demographic transition