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APPENDIX 1: REFUGEE POPULATION STATISTICS No study of refugeedom would be complete without a consideration of what Aleksandr Blok called “the heat of cold numbers.” Attempts during the war to estimate the numbers of refugees were complicated by the poor relationship between central and local authorities, by the plethora of agencies involved in refugee relief, and by the speci¤c characteristics of the refugee population. It is important to distinguish between the number of refugees at a given time and the overall ®ow of refugees. An estimate of the refugee population on a given census date is obviously not equivalent to the total number of people who had experienced refugeedom. The pool of refugees was continuously being depleted and then replenished, not just because of renewed German or Austrian military incursions and Russian retreats, but also by the exhaustion of savings among the betteroff Polish or Latvian families who were forced to seek public assistance and who were thus enumerated for the ¤rst time. Meanwhile, refugees disappeared from view because they no longer quali¤ed for the public assistance that in the eyes of most relief agencies de¤ned their status as refugees.1 The starting point for any estimate of the size of the refugee population must be the reports prepared by the Tatiana Committee. These bulletins were regularly cited in the Duma and in the press.2 A survey carried out on its behalf on 20 December 1915 yielded a total of 2.076 million refugees in European Russia. The viceroy of the Caucasus reported that there were 221,000 refugees on 1 January 1916 in the territory he administered, giving a ¤gure of 2.297 million assisted refugees on Russian territory at the end of 1915. The Tatiana Committee regularly updated its estimates. A census of the refugee population in the middle of December 1916 put the total number at just under 3.2 million.3 Notwithstanding its heroic efforts, the Tatiana Committee did not provide an accurate picture of the total refugee population. Its statisticians were concerned only with individuals who quali¤ed for public assistance; they took no account of those who relied upon their own resources.4 For this reason, in Demosthenov’s view, “for the whole of the empire the number of war refugees must have been far in excess of three millions.”5 In addition, some critics believed that the committee frequently enumerated family units rather than individuals. M. M. Gran, working after the revolution in the of¤ces of the People’s Commissariat for Health, maintained that the “real” number of refugees on relief was closer to 9 or 10 million (this assumed, conservatively, a mean family size of three members). Gran in®ated this to 15 million , to allow for those “better-off refugees” who received no public assistance.6 The general criticisms of the Tatiana Committee’s data, although not the revised¤gures quoted by Gran, were endorsed by the well-known Soviet demographer Evgenii Volkov, in his standard treatment of Russian demographic history between 1850 and 1930. Volkov argued that Stavka’s decision to prevent the enumeration of refugees in a 15 kilometer zone at the front may have excluded up to 600,000 refugees.7 Taking into account the Tatiana Committee’s census results, allowing for under-registration, excluding around registered 121,000 refugees who had since died, and including refugees in the front zone, Volkov arrived at a provisional total of 3.848 million refugees as of 15 December 1916, compared to his estimate of 2.897 for 1 January 1916. Military developments on the western front and in the Caucasus during the latter part of 1916 probably produced a further in®ux of refugees, and Volkov accordingly put the refugee population at 5.256 million on 1 January 1917.8 The collapse of the June offensive in 1917 produced additional refugees , suggesting to Volkov that the refugee population reached 6.391 million on 1 July 1917.9 Volkov suggested, moreover, that these ¤gures needed to be in®ated by 17.8 percent to take into account the forcibly displaced population (primarily Jews and Germans), predominantly from urban settlements, who left for the Russian interior without any prospect of assistance and without being registered by of¤cial relief agencies. Applying this coef¤cient to his revised estimates of the refugee population (but not to those in the 15 km zone), and making some assumptions about the distribution of refugees in 1914 and 1915, Volkov arrived at...

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