On February 9, 1897, the General Population Census was held in the Russian Empire.
According to experts, it has become a huge scientific achievement, allowing for the first time to form a complete and objective picture of the size and structure of the country's population.
However, the administrative elites of the state failed to fully take into account the results of the census in their practical work, and therefore could not avoid the aggravation of social contradictions in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.
Preparation for the census
According to historians, the first attempts to collect statistical information about the population were made in Russia back in the Middle Ages.
The authorities needed data for taxation and creating an idea of the mobilization potential of certain territories.
The first organized attempts at a population census in Russia were the “state audits” established by Peter I.
In total, ten of them were held before 1860, but they did not form an objective idea of the population of Russia.
“During the“ audits ”, the population and territory of the country were not fully covered, methods for conducting censuses were not developed at that stage, there were not enough trained specialists who could cope with such a task,” Vladimir Tomsinov, head of the Department of History of State and Law at the Law Faculty of Moscow State University, told RT .
According to experts, in the second half of the 19th century, it became clear to many in the Russian Empire that the state felt an acute shortage of detailed information about the country's population.
This became especially evident against the background of the discussion of the issue of introducing universal military service in Russia.
In 1874, a special commission was created under the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Empire, designed to determine the measures necessary to organize military registration of the population and establish the exact number of inhabitants of Russia.
The development of the regulations on the census was entrusted to the members of the commission, including the famous geographer Pyotr Semenov (the future Pyotr Semenov-Tyan-Shansky).
Pyotr Petrovich Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky
© Wikimedia Commons
In 1877, the commission submitted to the State Council of the Russian Empire a draft regulation on the national census, but consideration of this issue was postponed indefinitely.
Semyonov, as head of the Statistical Council of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, tried to convince the country's authorities of the need for a census, but for a long time his attempts were unsuccessful.
The issue of obtaining detailed information about the population of the country was actualized by the crop failure of 1891-1892, when the authorities were faced with the lack of data necessary to calculate the volume of food sent to certain regions.
In June 1895, the regulation on the general census, finalized by Semyonov, was approved by Emperor Nicholas II.
The overall management of the census was entrusted to the Minister of the Interior, who was the chairman of the Main Census Commission.
The census was supposed to cover the entire population of the Russian Empire, except for "Finnish natives" in the Grand Duchy of Finland.
Census commissions were established at the level of provinces and districts, as well as in individual cities: St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Nikolaev and Kerch.
Counties and cities were divided into census tracts.
General census
In December 1896-January 1897, census takers had to go around their plots and pre-fill in the census forms, which included the following data: first name, patronymic, last name or nickname, marital status, relationship to the owner of the household (relative, in-law, tenant, worker, servant, etc.), gender, age, state or class, religion, place of birth, place of permanent residence or registration, place of permanent residence, native language, literacy, occupation, craft, trade, major physical disabilities (deafness, dumbness, blindness, mental illness).
In cities, the census sheets had to be filled in by the owners of apartments, in the owner's estates, farms, factories and factories, as well as at stations, marinas and courts - by owners or managers, in villages - by counters.
The official day of the census was announced on February 9, 1897 (according to the new style), when the participants in the process clarified the information received earlier.
The received data were processed by the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
They were encoded using special symbols and calculated on machines developed by the American engineer Herman Hollerith.
The processing of the census data took almost eight years.
Since 1899, the publication of information on the population of individual administrative units of the Russian Empire began, and in 1905 two consolidated volumes were published containing data on the population of Russia as a whole.
Tabulator (Hollerith adding machine)
© Wikimedia Commons
According to the statistics obtained, 125.64 million people lived in Russia, of which about 16.83 million lived in cities. The population was distributed very unevenly throughout the country.
The average density was 5.9 people per square kilometer, but it varied from 0.46 people per square kilometer in Siberia to 74.06 in the Privislinskie provinces.
Census participants counted over 728 thousand settlements in the Russian Empire, including 932 urban settlements.
Most of the population of the empire by class (more than 77%) were peasants, 10.66% - petty bourgeois, 6.61% - "foreigners" (representatives of peoples who led a special traditional economy), 2.33% - Cossacks, 0. 97% - hereditary nobles, 0.5% - personal nobles and officials, 0.47% - representatives of the clergy, 0.27% - honorary citizens, 0.22% - merchants, 0.85% - representatives of other classes and foreigners.
Medal "For work on the general population census"
© Wikimedia Commons
Over 69% of the inhabitants of the Russian Empire identified themselves as Orthodox, 11% as Muslims, 9% as Catholics, 4% as Jews, and 3% as Protestants.
According to historians, the question of ethnicity was not asked during the census.
The census forms asked only about the native language.
“The unity of the Russian people was considered an objective fact.
The entire Orthodox Slavic population passed as Russians, but was divided into Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians, according to dialects, ”Fyodor Gayda, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor of Moscow State University, told RT.
First page of the census sheet (Kiev province)
© Wikimedia Commons
44.3% of the population of the empire were classified as Great Russians, 17.81% - as Little Russians, 4.68% - as Belarusians.
6.3% of the population were Polish, and 4.03% said they spoke Hebrew or Yiddish.
21.2% of the population of the Russian Empire (29.3% of men and 13.1% of women) were recognized as literate.
1.1% of the respondents at the time of the census studied in secondary and higher educational institutions.
The median age of the country's population was 25 years.
The average family size in the Russian Empire was 5.8 people, and the total number of families was 20.94 million. 8.5% of families had employees or servants.
Illustration from N. Rubakin's book “Russia in Figures.
The country.
People.
Estates.
Classes (1912)
© Russian Military Historical Society
“The census showed that Russia is a very large state, the population structure of which is dominated by young people who will need to be employed.
From this, one could conclude that the agricultural nature of the economy does not meet the challenges of the time, that Russia must turn into an industrial power, and that the country needs serious reforms.
But Russia could not effectively use the information received - the administrative elites of the empire turned out to be too helpless, ”said Vladimir Tomsinov.
According to Professor of Moscow State Pedagogical University, Doctor of Historical Sciences Vsevolod Voronin, the census, in which many scientists were involved, gave the authorities of the Russian Empire a chance, taking into account the data received, to adjust their political and economic course.
Illustration from N. Rubakin's book “Russia in Figures.
The country.
People.
Estates.
Classes (1912)
© Russian Military Historical Society
“However, judging by the events of 1917, the government of the empire failed to fully use the data obtained during the census to solve social problems.
At the same time, from a scientific point of view, the census was a qualitative shift in the scientific development of the country.
It was a huge victory for sociology in Russia, which gave a powerful impetus to the development of the social sciences in the empire,” Voronin summed up.