Road Tradition and Methods of Transportation in the North of European Russia from the Late 18th Century to the Early 20th Century

Means of transportation and methods of arranging the road network for such a vast country as the Russian Empire were of great importance. Despite the development of river communications, the share of horse-drawn transport for transporting goods and moving people was always important. In Russia, people began to travel and transport goods over very long distances by horses long ago; they created different types of carts and sleights and developed ways of harnessing horses. Stable stereotypes of behavior during long-distance journeys by horse-drawn vehicles constitute the so-called road tradition of Russia. Road tradition involves the conditions, circumstances, and situations that accompanied long-distance overland travel. This article examines some features of the road tradition in the European North of Russia in pre-revolutionary times, namely in Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Olonets, and Vyatka governorates. The sources include numerous documentary essays created by writers and journalists, works of statisticians, and memoirs. The distances in Northern European Russia were long and the population was sparse. This made it difficult to build roads of high quality. Special attention is drawn to the set phrases that were used to characterize the road tradition of those lands, such as the saying “Vo vsei Onege net telegi” [There is no cart in the whole of Onega]. It is shown that during the warm season, ordinary peasant carts were indeed rarely used in remote areas of the northern governorates of Russia because of the lack of roads and swampy terrain. Various other means of transportation were used instead or people traveled on horseback. This shows the adaptive mechanisms of traditional culture. In the period between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 20th century the condition of traffic network did not improve considerably. All these stimulated the search for fundamentally different methods of transportation. Subsequently, in the 19th and 20th centuries, technical improvements became the main driving force of Russia’s road history. They radically altered the transport system and road geography and affecting the lives of millions of people.

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