ABSTRACT
The nineteenth-century changes in population distribution came when the mobility of the Russians was probably less than for the previous three centuries. The Siberian tayga and tundra form an immense, sparsely-settled country into which the pioneer colonization by Russian trappers and even peasant farmers has slowly pushed, advancing along the routeways of the great rivers, leaving the vast interfluvial forests and swamps to a thinly-scattered, nomadic, native population. Slavs have impinged on, and absorbed into the Russian state territory, settled communities with their own high degree of social, economic, and political organization, notably in the Baltic littoral, the Caucasian isthmus and Central Asia. The Great Russians have their traditional settlement area in the forests of Central European Russia, in the swampy lands of the Oka and upper Volga, with the centre around Moscow. Appeals were made to the patriotism of young Communists, and unemployed in European Russia were found jobs in the eastern regions.
