Kozlov and the Pacification of the Nogai Front

Abstract

Imagine a great arc running across the map of Ukraine and Russia, moving northeast from the Romanian border through Zhitomir, Kiev, Orel, Tula, Riazan’, and Simbirsk and ending at Ufa near the Urals. Below this line, stretching as far south as the shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian and the foothills of the Caucasus, spread 270 million acres of humus-rich black soil called chernozem. Although this region is vulnerable to occasional drought, its black soil is so much more fertile than the leached gray soil (podzol’) of northern Russia that by the middle of the eighteenth century its agriculture was already half again as productive with the same labor inputs as agriculture in the northern grey soil zone.¹