Social History as the History of Measuring Populations: A Post-1987 Renewal

We can precisely date the moment marking renewed study of the Soviet Union's demographic history. In 1987, Mark Tol'ts published an article in which he revealed the history of the "repressed" 1937 census.¹ Shortly thereafter, V. V. Tsaplin, at that time director of the Soviet State Archive of Economics, revealed that the census documents had been preserved.² Interesting as this may have been, at the time one could hardly imagine that it would lead not only to a wholesale renewal of the history of the populations of Russia and the USSR, but also to new approaches to understanding the Soviet state, its methods and practices of governing, and relations between state and population. Indeed, far from being limited to reconstituting the major demographic trends of the 1930s, or to taking detailed stock of the catastrophic events of those years, the studies initiated in the wake of these revelations drew historians' attention to the history of populations as one of the major sources for social history. The resulting access to demographic sources of all kinds also led to an investigation of the nature of those sources, their reliability, and their uses; this, in turn, prompted historians to trace the process of their compilation. Finally, the new sources focused the attention of historians on governmental practices based on the use of statistics, as well as on representations altered by statistical constructions.

At times, demographic history in the Soviet field has become merely an exercise in accounting, an elaboration of disparate figures for the purposes of pointing the finger of accusation.³ But it also served as the basis for a branch of research which, as it has undergone a fundamental renewal over the past 20 years, has not been confined to the history of the "population." Rather, the new demographic history has cast new light on the history of one particular yet revealing type of administration – statistics. Borrowing methods used for many other countries, scholars have increasingly come to analyze the history of the sources themselves, thereby engendering a new approach to the nature and forms of the state's representation of society and its own "construction of reality." By their very nature these sources bear upon questions regarding the relation between local and national, center and periphery, micro and macro, individual and collective, diachronic and synchronic. In effect, they "present" the individual, whose vital details are collected and then assembled at various levels of aggregation.

The renewal of this field affects not only Soviet history. It creates a bridge between the history of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, as well as between Soviet and European history. It does so quantitatively, because demographic data enable us to monitor the behavior of populations without any methodological break, and therefore permit some degree of measurement of social behavior across temporal and geographical distances. The same kind of bridge is also created for the study of politics, because new questions can be asked about the relations between various levels of intervention by the authorities.

Reconstruction of Censuses

The history of Russian and Soviet populations has long been shrouded in obscurity. Parish registers were a belated phenomenon in the Russian empire. Early censuses, such as the Petrine "revisions" (revizii) tell us something of rural life,⁴ but they are not really statistical sources, since they evince no interest in counting on the part of the state.⁵ Even after demographic statistics were introduced, they were regarded with suspicion.⁶ While many towns carried out censuses during the 19th century, there was no census of the entire empire until 1897.

In terms of availability of demographic data, the Soviet period was little better. A sad litany of censorship (the banning of most demographic publications in the 1930s), repression (the suppression of the 1937 census, the closing of the Paevskii Demographic Institute, and so on), national prejudices (the total eclipse of Ukrainian demography), and embarrassments (high rates of infant mortality and adult mortality) all interrupted the flow of population statistics. Nevertheless, the Soviet period was one of scientific dynamism and debate...