Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/277

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
PRESENT ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
225

Survey Staff for the province surveyed and prepared for incoming colonists unoccupied areas to the extent of 102,600 square desyatines (256,500 acres). The total population of the Yenisei Government in 1909 was 787,778, and the administrative area is 982,000 square miles. The average density of the population at that date was therefore ·8 per square mile. Excluding the vast and almost uninhabited toundras in the north, the average density of population in the rest of the Government averages 29 per square mile, which differs very little from the density of the same zones in the governments of Western Siberia. Five-sevenths of the total population consist of peasants who are living on the land, the remaining two-sevenths consisting of urban population, numbering less than 100,000,000; in addition there were 52,000 native and Finnish Tartars and 50,000 political exiles.

The whole economic development of the Yenisei Government is proceeding along the same lines as that of the western governments. In the absence of further railway development it must for some years be economically self-supporting, and independent of an export and import trade.

The immigrants to the Yenisei Government in 1907 amounted to 79,000, in 1908 to 72,400, in 1910 to 33,000. These have been mostly settled in the Achinsk district on the west, while the rich Minusinsk area has been in the past left more to local development. In view of the fact that in the last two years immigration to the whole of Siberia has nearly reached the enormous figure of 1,000,000 persons per annum, the immigration to Central Siberia has so far been very small in comparison with that to the