ABSTRACT
The last decade of the nineteenth century represented a distinct stage in the evolution of Russian agrarian policy; a stage, during which, in a tentative way, the separate elements of a far-reaching programme of agrarian reconstruction were being evolved, which, later on, the genius and the courageous will of Stolypin had welded into a finished comprehensive whole. So it was with the Peasants' Bank; and the same can be said of Siberian colonization, described in this chapter. The modern history of Siberian colonization is closely connected with that of the Great Siberian Railway, whose construction was started in 1892. Though, indeed, a thin stream of settlers had been flowing beyond the Urals since the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Certain change in the official attitude to emigration became noticeable since the early eighties, when the aggravation of the agrarian crisis brought to the forefront the economic.
