Grinding Mills in the Life of the Provincial Russian Peasantry of the Post-Reform Period

Abstract

Grinding mills were a routine attribute of the economic life of the peasantry, being an indispensable stage in the process of making bread. Meanwhile, these structures are hardly ever scrutinized specifically by historians and anthropologists. This paper investigates the socio-economic role of mills in the life of peasants of the early 20^th century in Karelia. The study is based on the analysis of archival statistical data from the agricultural census of 1916, as well as ethnographical and toponymical materials, permitting a comprehensive examination of the object. It was established the number of mills in Karelia at the beginning of the 20th century. The conditions that contributed to the effectiveness of the functioning of these peasant farm buildings were analyzed. It was found that the mill craft in Karelia was the second (after blacksmithing) in terms of economic benefit of small-scale peasant production. At the same time, this type of economic activity was not the main source of income in those farms where they existed. The miller remained primarily a peasant farmer, but the level of prosperity of his economy was higher than that of the other peasants. The sources we used have also enabled us to trace the negative effects of crisis phenomena in agriculture on the flour milling business in Karelia during World War I. Special attention in the paper was focused to the mythological worldview of peasants. Analysis of the corpus of Karelian- and Russian-language toponymic data confirmed the important role grinding mills have played in the setup of the region’s peasant economy.

Keywords:

Karelia, the Olonets province, watermill, windmill, peasantry, sociocultural anthropology, toponymy