Hydrography

Rivers were one of the fundamental elements of Russia's infrastructure of mobility though to the end of the imperial period. Most os us, when prodded to think about Russian rivers, rattle off the familiar triumvirate of Volga, Dnepr, and Don. Some of us can differentiate the Desna from the Dnestr, the Irtysh from the Tobolsk. Very few of us visualize the riverine landscape as it is depicted in these two maps, but perhaps we ought to begin integrating the incredibly dense, tangled web of waterways into our conceptualization of imperial space.

Though they were not the only ones to suffer an obsession with rivers large and small, the statisticians Central Statistical Committee are particularly important to this project: in a sense it is their interpretation of Russia's spatial structure that I am reconstructing. They were the ones who measured changes in water level, catalogued rapids and shoals, and otherwise devoted themselves to describing the fluctuations and idiosyncracies of domestic trade as practiced on the rivers and wharves.

Among the wealth of statistics they generated is data on the number of square versty per verst' of river in each of the provinces of European Russia. The maps on the right show the resulting "river density." According to the symbology, the deeper the shade of blue the fewer the square versty watered by each stretch of river.