immigrant districts agricultural implement depots have been established, where machinery can be bought by the settlers at cost price. The Government has indeed done everything possible within the last twenty years to encourage organized colonization in Siberia, and has to a large extent succeeded in planting communal colonies along the wheat-growing belt of Western and Central Siberia, which are the exact replica of those in European Russia. Some idea of the immigration of peasants from European Russia can be gathered from the following fact. Between 1894 and 1903 there emigrated from European Russia into the governments of Tobolsk and Tomsk 590,000 people, the average numbers per annum during these dates being about 60,000 a year. Between 1905 and 1908 over 1,000,000 immigrants settled in the governments of Tobolsk, Tomsk, Yeniseisk and Irkutsk, at the average rate of 300,000 a year. In the year 1909 the immigration of these same regions reached the total of 500,000, which since that time has been exceeded by a still greater figure.
Siberia has therefore been colonized in the past by five distinct social classes of the Russian community:
(1) Cossacks or military pioneers, who laid the foundations of the Eastern Empire.
(2) Convicts, who during the early part of the nineteenth century were utilized for work in the gold mines.
(3) Wandering peasant immigrants or samovolny, who voluntarily immigrated and settled in the remote parts of Siberia without authority.
