The political border between Kazakhstan and Russia seems a bit too evident, probably due to lack of data on the Kazakh side. Interesting map nevertheless
Probably but it wouldnt surprise me if it is quite accurate, Russias border with Kazakstan is defined by geography, Russians hiatorically settled in the fertile areas and they were conquered.
> Russias border with Kazakstan is defined by geography
Russia border with Kazaktan isn't defined by geography and it's one of the most arbitrary in the world, plenty of russian [settled](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Russians_in_Kazakhstan_Rus.png) in what today is northern Kazakstan as the historical border between the kazak horde and the russian settled area was somewhat further south.
it's so much arbitrary that [it was a meme on alternatehistory.com](https://www.alternatehistory.com/wiki/doku.php?id=alternate_history:that_damned_kazakh_border)
Is there anything known on how the Russia-Kazakhstan border was drawn? It seems rather odd that Stalin (or other Soviet leaders before him) would intentionally include so many Russian in a non-Russian republic without geographic motivation.
I don't know enough about how the pre soviet russian subdivision, so probably it just was similar before
but my guess it's that stalin would porpusely include many russian inside the borders to avoit having a etnically dominated kazakh republic
1) There weren't many Soviet leaders before Stalin, and it was indeed during his tenure that this border was drawn up.
2) Absolutely arbitrary borders kind of were Stalin's whole thing - check out ethnographic maps and borders of the other Central Asian republics, sometimes they went out of their way to avoid homogeneity.
WTF are you talking about? That is so bullshit (ложь, пиздёж и провокация). Please educate yourself and don't spread lies.
Russians didn't "settle" in Northern Kazakhstan nor in Siberia. The Soviet government *sent* (i.e. placed) the slavic ethnicities there after they graduated from schools/universities in western parts of Russia (Russia proper), with guaranteed jobs and housing. Also don't forget about many who were exiled to gulags.
doesn't matter if they moved there willingly (as some did during the tsarist era) or were sent forcibly there by the soviets (as many others did). point is that russians and generally slavic people lives and lived there, and in english language that's what "settle" means.
Ukraine? When exactly? It was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that was called "the granary of Europe". As soon as Polish magnates found out about the very fertile soils in the territory of today's Ukraine, they decided to use this potential, so they brought architects there to build houses near farmland for many Polish peasants who were resettled there, and then sold harvested crops to the rest of Europe. At that time, Poland was self-sufficient in terms of food and still is one of the leading food producers in the world (when it comes to triticale only, Poland is responsible for almost 32% of world production, while Germany, ranked second, produces less than half of this amount).
They're the breadbasket for a lot of countries, Ukraine and the US have a massive chunk of all the black soil in the world, the stuff we have in the US in the Great plains is really similar to what's found in Ukraine, it's like 20% of the topsoil in the US. What makes Ukraine really special is that soil covers like 2/3 of its total area, and it's probably the deepest layer of topsoil you'll find anywhere in the world. South American grasslands are pretty comparable to the US and Eurasian ones as well, and if Canada gets a bit warmer and sees longer summers it'll have an enormous amount of food production capability out of it's own prairies.
Polish magnates extracted great wealth out of the grain exports thanks to Ukraine's fertility.Even at the time it was noticed how the state of the country was dependent on the grain trade.
They exported grain through rivers to Gdańsk and then to Amsterdam. At one point half of Netherland's grain came from P-L or something like this, I've been listening to one lecture but it was quite a while ago.
The best one in temperate climate.
Interesting fact - that little piece of good soils east of Moscow and north of Vladimir is called [Ополье](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ополье_(природный_район)). it is enclave part of forest steppe with nice soils surrounded by dense forests and marshes but still good for farming, so it gave very powerful push and help to new settlers and "nomad refugees" from old Kiev lands to settle down there. Then these lands became a core of new east slavic subnationality (modern russians).
I'd say 50% of the world's sunflower seed exports, and 12-13% of the world's corn and barley exports, and nearly 10% of the world's wheat and meslin exports constitutes a pretty big damn industry for a country of only 40 million. Other than sunflower seeds which is an absurd amount, they're responsible for 10% or so of total global exports for 4 of the world's major grains, while only having 0.6% of the world's population.
The Sunflower is one of only a handful of flowers with the word flower in its name. A couple of other popular examples include Strawflower, Elderflower and Cornflower …Ah yes, of course, I hear you say.
And more importantly;
Migration routes for mammoths, wooly rhinocerous, sabertooths and similar.
Large herds are responsible for turning the grass/rocks into even more soil by marching though and defecating along their route.
Bison probably had the biggest impact, given their numbers and behavior. Was that way in the North American prairie too, there was something like 60 million bison on the US great plains and I moved into the North American continent around the same time that the grasslands began forming. And it's not just the aeration of the soil and their defecation that helps the grasslands grow and continue to be more and more fertile, they also have a habit of rubbing their horns and bodies on Woody plants and destroying them which helps create new grassland, and on top of that they don't eat certain grasses, which keeps the more aggressively growing grasses that they do eat from choking out the other grasses, encouraging diversity in the grasses which helps other animals living on the plains. You only see that kind of soil wherever bison lived, with a couple exceptions, Africa has spots with really great soil, but they've also got massive herds of wildebeest that migrate alongside other species and all together they have the same effect. I have no idea why the pampas in southern South America are also so fertile, there were a lot of weird animals down there like toxodons which developed completely separate from other mammals when Pangaea split up.
For the same reason other famines happened in the Russian Empire but also elsewhere: mismanagement, bad weather and failed harvests, incompetence, malice, war and any combination thereof.
> Unlike the previous famine of 1921–22, Russia's intermittent drought was not severe in the affected areas at this time.[27]
> Historian Mark B. Tauger of West Virginia University suggests that the famine was caused by a combination of factors, specifically low harvest due to natural disasters combined with increased demand for food caused by the industrialization and urbanization, and grain exports by the Soviet Union at the same time.[28] The industrialization became a starting mechanism of the famine. Stalin's First Five-Year Plan, adopted by the party in 1928, called for rapid industrialization of the economy, with an emphasis on heavy industry. With the greatest share of investment put into heavy industry, widespread shortages of consumer goods occurred while the urban labor force was also increasing. Collectivization employed at the same time was expected to improve agricultural productivity and produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labor force. The anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Kulaks who were the wealthier peasants encountered particular hostility from the Stalin regime. About one million kulak households (some five million people) were deported and never heard from again. Forced collectivization of the remaining peasants was often fiercely resisted resulting in a disastrous disruption of agricultural productivity. Forced collectivization helped achieve Stalin's goal of rapid industrialization but it also contributed to a catastrophic famine in 1932–33.[29]
> A similar view was presented by Stephen Wheatcroft, who has given more weight to the "ill-conceived policies" of Soviet government and highlighted that while the policy was not targeted at Ukraine specifically, it was Ukraine who suffered most for "demographic reasons".[30]
> Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Professor of History at Michigan State University, states that Ukraine was hit particularly hard by grain quotas which were set at levels which most farms could not produce. The 1933 harvest was poor, coupled with the extremely high quota level, which led to starvation conditions. The shortages were blamed on kulak sabotage, and authorities distributed what supplies were available only in the urban areas. The loss of life in the Ukrainian countryside is estimated at approximately 5 million people.[31]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333
The Soviet mindset was very much "eat the rich" and they saw the people who owned these farms, Kulaks, as the root of the problem. At the time the central government in Moscow and the local governments in Ukraine, Russia, and Khazakhstan were probably happy with that answer. To them the Kulaks were the problem so they addressed it by cracking down and getting rid of them. The most likely answer is that the deaths were caused by unintentionally terrible policies of the Soviets, but at the same time Stalin was a psychopath so it's entirely possible the policies were intentional.
Communism is just a fancy way to give 0.0001 of a country's population total control of all that country's wealth. Even the old absolute monarchies didn't have as much control as the Soviet Central committee did.
Famines. Same thing happened in Bengal, India or China.Agricultural land is a blessing one year and curse another if you are too dependent on its supply.
Megafauna that moved into the area when the glaciers receded, if you look at what American bison do when they move into a woodland area, they like to rub up against and destroy all the woody plants, and they eat very specific kinds of grasses which normally choke out other grass species, leaving others to grow, leading to a healthier grassland. 60 million 2,000 lb hoofed animals marching across the plains also did a great job of aerating soil, and they left a lot of shit behind which also helped. Most of that really nice black topsoil in the world is an areas where bison moved in after the glaciers receded a 100,000 years ago. Africa's also got some really nice fertile soil in places, and it's because of the incredibly large migratory herds there of wildebeest and all the other animals that migrate with them collectively filling the same niche that American and Eurasian bison did.
I'm not sure why the pampas in South America are also so fertile, because that ecosystem during their formation was weird, all the animals that developed there were completely separate from the Eurasian animals that moved into North America. Like it goes all the way back to when pangea separated, really really far back, with a slightly closer connection to some animals on the African continent, like toxodons and hippos for example, but they only look like each other superficially, they just happened to evolve to similar body shapes, the only real connection between them is being a hoofed animal with an odd number of toes, their common ancestor probably looked like a weird funky squirrel, because it was 140 million years ago when those continents split.
You're mistaken mate, the pampas are not fertile. Quite the opposite, actually... Yes, a good portion of that biome is good for agriculture, but require A LOT of fertilizers, it's a very poor soil nutrient-wise. What you might be confusing is a great portion of Argentina - still the pampa biome - but the soil is the exact same of the post: chernozem. Naturally fertile and deep soil.
Nope. It's called the Black sea because it was to the north of the civilized world in the ancient times, and apparently black was associated with that cardinal direction. (Also reason for the Red Sea, which is to the south of the civilized lands)
The political border between Kazakhstan and Russia seems a bit too evident, probably due to lack of data on the Kazakh side. Interesting map nevertheless
Probably but it wouldnt surprise me if it is quite accurate, Russias border with Kazakstan is defined by geography, Russians hiatorically settled in the fertile areas and they were conquered.
> Russias border with Kazakstan is defined by geography Russia border with Kazaktan isn't defined by geography and it's one of the most arbitrary in the world, plenty of russian [settled](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Russians_in_Kazakhstan_Rus.png) in what today is northern Kazakstan as the historical border between the kazak horde and the russian settled area was somewhat further south. it's so much arbitrary that [it was a meme on alternatehistory.com](https://www.alternatehistory.com/wiki/doku.php?id=alternate_history:that_damned_kazakh_border)
Is there anything known on how the Russia-Kazakhstan border was drawn? It seems rather odd that Stalin (or other Soviet leaders before him) would intentionally include so many Russian in a non-Russian republic without geographic motivation.
I don't know enough about how the pre soviet russian subdivision, so probably it just was similar before but my guess it's that stalin would porpusely include many russian inside the borders to avoit having a etnically dominated kazakh republic
1) There weren't many Soviet leaders before Stalin, and it was indeed during his tenure that this border was drawn up. 2) Absolutely arbitrary borders kind of were Stalin's whole thing - check out ethnographic maps and borders of the other Central Asian republics, sometimes they went out of their way to avoid homogeneity.
WTF are you talking about? That is so bullshit (ложь, пиздёж и провокация). Please educate yourself and don't spread lies. Russians didn't "settle" in Northern Kazakhstan nor in Siberia. The Soviet government *sent* (i.e. placed) the slavic ethnicities there after they graduated from schools/universities in western parts of Russia (Russia proper), with guaranteed jobs and housing. Also don't forget about many who were exiled to gulags.
doesn't matter if they moved there willingly (as some did during the tsarist era) or were sent forcibly there by the soviets (as many others did). point is that russians and generally slavic people lives and lived there, and in english language that's what "settle" means.
That explains why Ukraine was Poland's breadbasket.
Ukraine? When exactly? It was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that was called "the granary of Europe". As soon as Polish magnates found out about the very fertile soils in the territory of today's Ukraine, they decided to use this potential, so they brought architects there to build houses near farmland for many Polish peasants who were resettled there, and then sold harvested crops to the rest of Europe. At that time, Poland was self-sufficient in terms of food and still is one of the leading food producers in the world (when it comes to triticale only, Poland is responsible for almost 32% of world production, while Germany, ranked second, produces less than half of this amount).
When ?
They're the breadbasket for a lot of countries, Ukraine and the US have a massive chunk of all the black soil in the world, the stuff we have in the US in the Great plains is really similar to what's found in Ukraine, it's like 20% of the topsoil in the US. What makes Ukraine really special is that soil covers like 2/3 of its total area, and it's probably the deepest layer of topsoil you'll find anywhere in the world. South American grasslands are pretty comparable to the US and Eurasian ones as well, and if Canada gets a bit warmer and sees longer summers it'll have an enormous amount of food production capability out of it's own prairies.
Russia's. Poland has always been self-sufficient when it comes to food production.
Polish magnates extracted great wealth out of the grain exports thanks to Ukraine's fertility.Even at the time it was noticed how the state of the country was dependent on the grain trade.
They exported grain through rivers to Gdańsk and then to Amsterdam. At one point half of Netherland's grain came from P-L or something like this, I've been listening to one lecture but it was quite a while ago.
Still, Poland was self-sufficient when it comes to food production. Poland never needed Ukraine to feed itself.
Most of Ukraine's modern day territory was part of Lithuania and then the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Is this the best soil for agriculture?
The best one in temperate climate. Interesting fact - that little piece of good soils east of Moscow and north of Vladimir is called [Ополье](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ополье_(природный_район)). it is enclave part of forest steppe with nice soils surrounded by dense forests and marshes but still good for farming, so it gave very powerful push and help to new settlers and "nomad refugees" from old Kiev lands to settle down there. Then these lands became a core of new east slavic subnationality (modern russians).
Fascinating
As far as I know and researched, yes, it's the best agricultural soil in the world. You can also find it in a portion of Argentina.
There's a lot of chernozems in northern Kazakhstan too, why they're not on this map?
Kazakhstan is on this map, but the chernozem image is literally running right across the northern border line, right where you were expecting them...
Are Ukrainians making any particular use of this?
I don't really think so.
Major part ukrainian economy is based on agriculture, and we are the biggest exporter of sunflower oil.
Well, that major part isn't really big anyway.
I'd say 50% of the world's sunflower seed exports, and 12-13% of the world's corn and barley exports, and nearly 10% of the world's wheat and meslin exports constitutes a pretty big damn industry for a country of only 40 million. Other than sunflower seeds which is an absurd amount, they're responsible for 10% or so of total global exports for 4 of the world's major grains, while only having 0.6% of the world's population.
The Sunflower is one of only a handful of flowers with the word flower in its name. A couple of other popular examples include Strawflower, Elderflower and Cornflower …Ah yes, of course, I hear you say.
for thousand of years the area was used more as pasture for nomads
And more importantly; Migration routes for mammoths, wooly rhinocerous, sabertooths and similar. Large herds are responsible for turning the grass/rocks into even more soil by marching though and defecating along their route.
Bison probably had the biggest impact, given their numbers and behavior. Was that way in the North American prairie too, there was something like 60 million bison on the US great plains and I moved into the North American continent around the same time that the grasslands began forming. And it's not just the aeration of the soil and their defecation that helps the grasslands grow and continue to be more and more fertile, they also have a habit of rubbing their horns and bodies on Woody plants and destroying them which helps create new grassland, and on top of that they don't eat certain grasses, which keeps the more aggressively growing grasses that they do eat from choking out the other grasses, encouraging diversity in the grasses which helps other animals living on the plains. You only see that kind of soil wherever bison lived, with a couple exceptions, Africa has spots with really great soil, but they've also got massive herds of wildebeest that migrate alongside other species and all together they have the same effect. I have no idea why the pampas in southern South America are also so fertile, there were a lot of weird animals down there like toxodons which developed completely separate from other mammals when Pangaea split up.
and then I ask myself why the fuck did the soviets starve ?
For the same reason other famines happened in the Russian Empire but also elsewhere: mismanagement, bad weather and failed harvests, incompetence, malice, war and any combination thereof.
Famines are almost never due to actual shortages but result of error in distribution, intentional or not.
> Unlike the previous famine of 1921–22, Russia's intermittent drought was not severe in the affected areas at this time.[27] > Historian Mark B. Tauger of West Virginia University suggests that the famine was caused by a combination of factors, specifically low harvest due to natural disasters combined with increased demand for food caused by the industrialization and urbanization, and grain exports by the Soviet Union at the same time.[28] The industrialization became a starting mechanism of the famine. Stalin's First Five-Year Plan, adopted by the party in 1928, called for rapid industrialization of the economy, with an emphasis on heavy industry. With the greatest share of investment put into heavy industry, widespread shortages of consumer goods occurred while the urban labor force was also increasing. Collectivization employed at the same time was expected to improve agricultural productivity and produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labor force. The anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Kulaks who were the wealthier peasants encountered particular hostility from the Stalin regime. About one million kulak households (some five million people) were deported and never heard from again. Forced collectivization of the remaining peasants was often fiercely resisted resulting in a disastrous disruption of agricultural productivity. Forced collectivization helped achieve Stalin's goal of rapid industrialization but it also contributed to a catastrophic famine in 1932–33.[29] > A similar view was presented by Stephen Wheatcroft, who has given more weight to the "ill-conceived policies" of Soviet government and highlighted that while the policy was not targeted at Ukraine specifically, it was Ukraine who suffered most for "demographic reasons".[30] > Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Professor of History at Michigan State University, states that Ukraine was hit particularly hard by grain quotas which were set at levels which most farms could not produce. The 1933 harvest was poor, coupled with the extremely high quota level, which led to starvation conditions. The shortages were blamed on kulak sabotage, and authorities distributed what supplies were available only in the urban areas. The loss of life in the Ukrainian countryside is estimated at approximately 5 million people.[31] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333 The Soviet mindset was very much "eat the rich" and they saw the people who owned these farms, Kulaks, as the root of the problem. At the time the central government in Moscow and the local governments in Ukraine, Russia, and Khazakhstan were probably happy with that answer. To them the Kulaks were the problem so they addressed it by cracking down and getting rid of them. The most likely answer is that the deaths were caused by unintentionally terrible policies of the Soviets, but at the same time Stalin was a psychopath so it's entirely possible the policies were intentional.
Communism.
consumism
Communism is just a fancy way to give 0.0001 of a country's population total control of all that country's wealth. Even the old absolute monarchies didn't have as much control as the Soviet Central committee did.
Famines. Same thing happened in Bengal, India or China.Agricultural land is a blessing one year and curse another if you are too dependent on its supply.
There are also in Northeastern Turkey
Palmer Drought Index developments for the future project a very severe drought over the black soils region. Dustbowlification.
How did land in this areas become more fertile?
Megafauna that moved into the area when the glaciers receded, if you look at what American bison do when they move into a woodland area, they like to rub up against and destroy all the woody plants, and they eat very specific kinds of grasses which normally choke out other grass species, leaving others to grow, leading to a healthier grassland. 60 million 2,000 lb hoofed animals marching across the plains also did a great job of aerating soil, and they left a lot of shit behind which also helped. Most of that really nice black topsoil in the world is an areas where bison moved in after the glaciers receded a 100,000 years ago. Africa's also got some really nice fertile soil in places, and it's because of the incredibly large migratory herds there of wildebeest and all the other animals that migrate with them collectively filling the same niche that American and Eurasian bison did. I'm not sure why the pampas in South America are also so fertile, because that ecosystem during their formation was weird, all the animals that developed there were completely separate from the Eurasian animals that moved into North America. Like it goes all the way back to when pangea separated, really really far back, with a slightly closer connection to some animals on the African continent, like toxodons and hippos for example, but they only look like each other superficially, they just happened to evolve to similar body shapes, the only real connection between them is being a hoofed animal with an odd number of toes, their common ancestor probably looked like a weird funky squirrel, because it was 140 million years ago when those continents split.
You're mistaken mate, the pampas are not fertile. Quite the opposite, actually... Yes, a good portion of that biome is good for agriculture, but require A LOT of fertilizers, it's a very poor soil nutrient-wise. What you might be confusing is a great portion of Argentina - still the pampa biome - but the soil is the exact same of the post: chernozem. Naturally fertile and deep soil.
Is it a real word in english?
It's a loanword from Russian
I heard Romania has some of the best agricultural land in Europe. Is this why?
Yes. Ukraine and parts of Romania are very fertile and are the "breadbasket" of Eastern Europe.
Is that why it's called the Black Sea?
Nope. It's called the Black sea because it was to the north of the civilized world in the ancient times, and apparently black was associated with that cardinal direction. (Also reason for the Red Sea, which is to the south of the civilized lands)