Statistics and ‘sufficiency’: toward an intellectual history of Russia's rural crisis

Abstract

The article examines the impact of the ‘rise of statistical thinking’ and statistical measurement on elite perceptions of the condition of the Russian Empire's post-emancipation peasant economy. Using archival and published sources, it argues that the increased use of statistical measurement did much to concretize in numerical (‘objective’) terms the idea of rural crisis. In particular, the combination of traditional paternalistic concerns about the sufficiency of peasant resources and the use of cadastre measurement yielded an image of the peasant household economy in which the value (the income-producing capabilities) of post-emancipation peasant allotments nearly always fell short of subsistence requirements and tax/payment obligations. Thus, because of how observers measured peasant well-being, it appeared as if peasants had been over-changed for their post-emancipation land allotments and were doomed to exist in a permanent state of crisis.

‘Sadder and wiser’: St Petersburg 1872 and Budapest 1876

“…Nevertheless, for many decades it had been the primary source of information about the state of agriculture in Russia, but that information generated an incomplete picture of Russian farmers that was considerably more pessimistic than reality warranted. 11 Rostovtsev died before the emancipation process was completed, so Semenov's role grew significantly. He was the linchpin of the committee for most of 1860, and acquired a good position at the State Chancellery for his efforts.…”

Russian Inequality on the Eve of Revolution

“…We are fortunate that pre-Revolutionary officials, zemstvo researchers, and scholars took seriously the task of learning not only the averages, but also the distribution, of peasant assets and, very occasionally, incomes in a large number of provinces between the 1880s and the early 1900s. Scholars such as David W. Darrow (2002) and Igor Khristoforov (2011) have been critical of the methods and perceived lack of objectivity among zemstvo statisticians, but their views generally refer to the researchers' conclusions rather than the raw data. Robert E. Johnson (1982 and 1997) and Steven Nafziger (2010) have pointed out that, in practice, the asset and budget data collected by zemstva and other statistical bodies appear representative.…”

The Turukhansk Polar Census Expedition of 1926–1927 at the Crossroads of Two Scientific Traditions

“…Joshua Cole (2000) studied the French censuses. Recently, there has been an increased interest in Soviet and Imperial Russian censuses (Darrow 2002;Hirsch 2000;Kertzer and Arel 2002). However, as Benedict Anderson (1991) noted, the pioneering surveys of population were not in the European heartlands but instead in colonial regions where European powers tried to measure and control aboriginal peoples.…”

“…As Cadiot (1997) outlines, the measure of mother tongue, spoken language, and nationality fit in with international debates about how best to measure identity in the late nineteenth century. Further, the strategy of surveying a household, rather than a set of individuals, was also a well-documented practice in Central and Western Europe (Darrow 2002;Le Play 1877;Le Play and Silver 1982). Officials from both the Tsarist and the Soviet statistical administrations were active participants in international statis-tical congresses (TsSU 1926).…”