From these figures we see, furthermore, that trade, industry and commerce have, to this day, been unable to influence the density of population of the Ukraine. The Ukraine has remained in the original stage of development, [[146]]in which only the age of settlement and the fertility of the soil form the basis for increase in the density of population. The history of the Ukraine has, to this day, influenced the country’s density of population. The former central districts of the old Ukrainian state of Kiev and Halich are still the most thickly settled; the southern and eastern border regions, which have suffered most from the 500 years of the Tartar scourge, the most thinly settled. This is the reason that Galicia, one of the poorest regions of the Ukraine in natural resources, where industry and trade are so little developed, is at the same time the most thickly populated region.
Similarly primitive, and betraying a low grade of culture, is the relation between the city and country population of the Ukraine. Only a very insignificant fraction of the population inhabits the cities and towns of the Ukraine. In Galicia (1910) only 14½% of the population lives in places whose population is more than 5,000; only 9½% in cities of over 10,000. Similar conditions prevail in Russian Ukraine. Very rarely does the city population exceed 10% of the total number of people, usually keeping below this percentage, which is typical for all of Russia. Podolia has only 7% city population, Volhynia 8%, Chernihiv 9%, Poltava 10%, Kuban 11%, Katerinoslav 12%, Kiev 13%, and Kharkiv 14%. Only the regions colonized within the last century in Southern Ukraine, with their large cities, have a large percentage of city population (Tauria 20%, Kherson 29%).
More glaringly still does the low grade of culture of the Ukraine stand out when we give the percentage of the Ukrainian population in the cities of the Ukraine. Only in Galicia do 14% of the Ukrainian people of the country live in the cities. In the Government of Kharkiv only 10% of the Ukrainians of the district belong to the city population, in Kherson only 9%, in Kuban 8%, in Chernihiv [[147]]7%, Poltava 6%, Tauria 5%, Kiev and Katerinoslav each 4%, in Podolia 3%, and in Volhynia actually only 2%. It is true that, especially in the cities, the official estimates were “made” very unfavorably to the Ukrainian element, but, nevertheless, they show clearly enough that the Ukrainian people, clinging to their agrarian state, have left the cities, those centers of cultural and economic life, in the hands of foreign elements. Only within very recent years have these conditions begun to improve. The foreign-speaking cities are gradually coming to be Ukraine-ized, and the very rapidly growing percentage of Ukrainians in Galicia and the Russian Ukraine justify us in hoping that the Ukrainian element, in its continuous stream from the surrounding country, will, in time, absorb the foreign-speaking elements which now command the cities of the Ukraine. [[148]]
The Ukrainian Nation as an Anthropogeographic Unit
General Survey
In the first chapter of our little book we mentioned the reasons which compel us to regard the Ukraine as a physico-geographic whole. We emphasized the fact that the geographic units of the great uniform country of Eastern Europe could not, for obvious natural reasons, appear so well-defined and individualized as the different sections of Western and Central Europe. The same is true of the anthropogeographic conditions of Eastern Europe as well.
The anthropogeography of Eastern Europe is so unfamiliar a part of geographic science that even such pioneer geographers as Ratzel, Kirchhoff and Hettner entirely misunderstood and misrepresented the anthropogeographic conditions of Russia, and especially the racial conditions of this giant empire.
There are two reasons for the universal ignorance of the anthropogeographic conditions of Russia which exists even in the ranks of renowned scholars. The first cause lies in the sources from which scholars, and subsequently publicists, draw their knowledge of the subject. Now the official Russian sources on the basis of which an anthropogeography of Eastern Europe would have to be written are not immune from serious criticism. The ranks of Russian scholars have always worked in the interests of the Russian political idea, and latterly, caught by the [[149]]mighty wave of Pan-Slavic-Russian nationalism, they are doing their best to represent as actual fact whatever Russian governmental politics would desire to be fact. Russian geography, ethnography, statistics, history, have always worked in accordance with approved “unifying” designs. Hence, European learning involuntarily sees all that exists and is coming into existence in Russia thru the spectacles put on it by official Russia. The same official Russia comes to meet the European traveler upon every step of his journey, and guides him in such a way that he may be sure not to see below the general official Russian varnish what is actual and true. Besides, there is the Russian censorship, which even now, after the introduction of the constitution, takes very good care to veil everything from the view of the outside world, which, in the interest of the Russian political idea, should remain hidden.