Immigrants in Semirechye (Zhetysu): Legal Basis for Land Tenure and Land Use in the Late 19th – Early 20th Centuries

The relevance of addressing the issue of land management by peasant migrants in the national peripheries of the Russian Empire is associated not only with the need to take into account interethnic and religious relations in the regions and provide a detailed analysis of external and internal migration flows, but also with insufficient study of the topic. Land relations were especially difficult in all Russia’s regions with prevailing nomadic populations: Semirechye (Zhetysu), Lower Volga region, Ciscaucasian steppes, etc. The greatest contribution to the study of the question was made by pre-revolutionary researchers who, as a rule, were government officials obliged to deal with the resettlement (Rumyantsev P. P., Kaufman A. A., Palen K. K., etc.). In the Soviet period, the topic was examined in detail by N. E. Bekmakhanova. Currently, the study of the problem has become actual due to the need to clarify and reassess some of the established past views. Goals. The paper seeks to analyze the legal status of migrant peasants in the region inhabited by nomadic peoples and their land management practices. Materials and Methods. The work involves a wide range of legislative and statistical sources, eyewitness accounts and materials from central archives of Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, revealing the complex nature of legal land system definitions of immigrant peasants. Results. During the government-initiated and spontaneous colonization of Semirechye in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, various types of rural peasant settlements ― old-timed, newly emerged and self-willed ones ― were established, which required legal land management regulation. Since administrative agencies in many cases found it difficult to determine legal statuses of peasant lands in Semirechye, the migrants had to solve the problem of land use on their own entering into negotiations with nomadic communities, directly renting land from the latter under different conditions. This made it even more difficult to finally resolve the issue of legal regulation of land tenure and land use. Conclusions. Local administrations – due to the complexity of land relations between immigrants and nomads, poor vision of a complete picture of land management in the region, lack of land for the growing population and the difficulty of conducting Stolypin land management – were able to start collecting information about land management in Semirechye and actually conduct land allocation only in the beginning of the 20th century. The outbreak of World War I and subsequent social upheavals made it impossible to complete the determination of legal foundations of resettlement land management in Semirechye in the pre-revolutionary period.

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