Cultivating the steppe in Ukraine’s Gammalsvenskby. Part 1: perspectives on classic agrarian debates

Brian Kuns, Mats Widgren, Maria Zachwatowicz and Ivan Moysiyenko

Landscape History, 2025, vol. 46, issue 1, 97-116

Abstract: In this article, we study the development of agriculture in the Swedish settlement (‘colony’) in southern Ukraine in the 1800s and first part of the 1900s, including in the early Soviet period. We use unique maps, acquired in the Kherson State archives in southern Ukraine, to show how cultivation expanded away from settlements close to the Dnipro River. Using a variety of historical sources in Swedish, German, Russian and Ukrainian, we detail (1) challenges that settlers had in securing agricultural production; (2) changing agrarian structure and land relations; and (3) how settlers dealt with the problem of distance between settlements and fields. Citing historical debates on farm differentiation, we argue that agrarian structure developed both as a result of demographic and market-related factors and that both pre-Soviet and early Soviet periods showed potential for agricultural development.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2025.2503540

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