Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
563
Post-Reform Russia affords us an example of the two processes
going on simultaneously. At the beginning of the post-
Reform period, in the 60s, the southern and eastern outer
regions of European Russia were largely unpopulated, and
there was an enormous influx into those areas of migrants
from the central agricultural part of Russia. It was this
formation of a new agricultural population on new territory
that to some extent obscured the parallel process of the
diversion of the population from agriculture to industry. To
get a clear picture, from data on the urban population, of
the specific feature of Russia here described, we must divide
the 50 gubernias of European Russia into separate groups.
We give data on the urban population in 9 areas of European
Russia in 1863 and in 1897 (see p. 564).
As far as the question that interests us is concerned,
the greatest importance attaches to three areas: 1) the nonagricultural
industrial area (the 11 gubernias in the first
two groups, including the 2 metropolitan gubernias).* This
is an area from which migration to other areas has been very
slight. 2) The central agricultural area (the 13 gubernias in
group 3). Migration from this area has been very considerable,
partly to the previous area, but mainly to the next.
3) The agricultural outer regions (the 9 gubernias in group 4)
constitute an area that has been colonised in the post-
Reform period. The percentage of urban population in all
these 33 gubernias differs very little, as the table shows,
from the percentage of urban population in European
Russia as a whole.
In the first area, the non-agricultural or industrial, we
observe a particularly rapid rise in the percentage of urban
population: from 14.1% to 21.1%. The growth of the rural
population is here very slight, being little more than half
of that for the whole of Russia. The growth of the urban
* That we are right in combining with the metropolitan gubernias
the non-agricultural gubernias taken by us is borne out by the
fact that the population of the metropolitan cities is augmented chiefly
by migrants from these gubernias. According to the Petersburg
census of December 15,1890, there were in that city 726,000 members
of the peasant and the burgher estates, of these, 544,000 (i.e., threefourths)
were members of the peasant and the burgher estates from
the 11 gubernias out of which we constituted area No. 1.