Central Agricultural Zone

The Central Agricultural Zone is a traditional region of Russia. Historically it was the centre of agriculture and colonisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was the most densely populated area of the Russian Empire. It was also the poorest. Before the emancipation of serfs, it was home to most of the Russian serf population, and later it was also the centre of the communal system, which contributed to the areas relative poverty compared to the rest of Russia.

During the revolutionary years it was the centre of most agrarian violence, and later the centre of the Red Movement and Red Army during the Russian Revolution.

The Central Agricultural Zone was marked by lower living standards for peasants, and an extremely dense and poor rural population. It was surrounded by areas where commercial farming was prevalent: in the Baltic were capitalist farms able to hire wage-labour due to the Emancipation in 1817 with access to Western grain markets, in Western Ukraine nobles had established vast sugar-beet farms, in the fertile south of Russia, the Kuban and northern Caucasus ("New Russia", where there were fertile virgin lands with little population) there existed a 'wealthy stratum of mixed farmers' coming out of the peasantry and the Cossacks, and in Western Siberia where the Trans-Siberian Railroad had enabled smallholders to make a fortune producing dairy products and cereals for the larger market. These regions accounted for the general increase of peasant purchasing power (and living standards) noted in the Russian peasantry in the turn of the century and early twentieth century; there was however a growing divergence in the peasants' economic situation evolving between these relatively wealthy western, southern and eastern areas, and the central agricultural zone, where most of the estates of the gentry were located, where backward and old farming techniques and methods dominated, and which became increasingly overpopulated. Here the amount of land per capita was rapidly decreasing, while the population boom surpassed the increase in agricultural production. It was also one of the centres of 'hemp culture', i.e. the cultivation of hemp.

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