Conditions of soil and climate in the three areas examined differ appreciably (map 5 and table 22), the climate becoming increasingly difficult for farming as one moves from west to east. There were also differences other than those of physical environment. Moscow is centrally located in Russia in Europe. Toropets, however, was historically on the fringe of the Polish-Lithuanian state; its Russian dialect, for example, is basically North Russian, but with Belorussian features. Kazan' was only colonised by Russians after the military conquest in 1552; it remains a basically Tatar area. The Slav areas had a grainbased diet, the Tatar area had a livestock-based diet.

The differing areas were linked by the interrelated processes of colonisation by Russian peasants in the post-Mongol period and during the emergence of the Moscow state. We have to distinguish various types of colonisation. There was internal colonisation, that process of settlement within the vast forest area occupied by the East Slavs which led to axe meeting axe, to settlements and estates in some places coming to have contiguous bounds. Often this was the natural creep of peasant land settlement associated with an early marriage pattern; this, together with partible inheritance at the level of the household production unit, encouraged the farming of available land in closes with a simple, cheap and readily accessible technology. This was the more positive side of the somewhat gloomy view propounded by Lyubavskii, for example.