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The 1937 census and the limits of Stalinist rule*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Catherine Merridale
Catherine Merridale
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
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Abstract

In January 1937 the government of the USSR conducted its first population census in eleven years. This article, which is based on the archives of the census organizations and on reports from some local offices for the registration of births, marriages and deaths, describes the campaign of data collection, the questions that were asked (including, for the first and last time, a question about the respondent's religion) and the response which people give to this personal contact with their rulers. The information gathered was exceptionally thorough and complete. Crucially, however, the census was entirely suppressed, and the officials responsible for organizing it promptly arrested and executed. The reasons for doing this – which largely centred on the sensitivity of evidence of high mortality during the famine of 1932–3 – are discussed, as are the potential implications of the suppression of such information. Finally, the article questions how complete any statistics about famine mortality in this period can be, and calls for a discussion of the broader questions of memory and loss which underlie the bare statistics of death.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 225 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 More on their fate, and a discussion of the reasons for it, was published in Livshits, F. D., Perepis' naseleniya 1937 goda. Demograficheskie protessy v SSSR (Moscow, 1990).Google Scholar

2 The census data and materials relating to their collection are kept in the Russian state archive of the economy (hereafter RGAE) in the secret section of fond 1562.

3 RGAE 1562/329/107, for example, contains a letter of Jan. 1935 to Molotov from Kraval, the head of the central statistical administration, giving selected details of Soviet achievements, including high fertility, for 1934.

4 High birth and death rates, for example, characterize pre-modern societies, while those with effective structures for health care tend to display lower vital rates but higher life expectancy at all ages.

5 RGAE 1562/329/115, 45. All emphases in the original.

6 A previous pilot census had been held in 1932, possibly as the prelude to a more general survey to coincide with the end of the first five-year plan. By 1933, however, events had somewhat overwhelmed the sober business of statistical monitoring. What became the 1937 census was then rescheduled for 1935 and then deferred to 1936 before finally taking place in Jan. 1937.

7 Documents published in Ukraine in 1992 demonstrate the extent of police reporting of the famine, and also the weight of petitions and pleas to Moscow to alleviate conditions in the famine areas. Kolektivizatsiya i golod na ukraini 1929–1933, zbirnik dokutnentiv i materialiv (Kiev, 1992).Google Scholar

8 See RGAE 1562/329/107, 184–9, for example.

9 The ZAGS data showed a population loss for 1933 of 1,315,200 people in the USSR as a whole, mostly (71·5%) in the countryside, and mostly in the Osokina, Ukraine. E., ‘Zhertvy goloda 1933 goda: Skol'ko ikh? (analiz demograficheskoi statistiki TsGANKh SSSR)’, Istoriya SSSR, v (1991), 18–26.Google Scholar

10 Molotov entered ‘chairman’. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya (hereafter SI), VI (1990), 4.Google Scholar

11 Plan (the journal of Gosplan, the state planning commission), X (1936), 24.

12 See Polyakov, Yu. A., Zhiromskaya, V. B. and Kiselev, I. N., ‘Polveka molchaniya’, SI, VII (1990).Google Scholar

13 Plan, XXIII (10 Dec. 1936), 13.

14 As late as the autumn of 1936, key areas of the Soviet Union still lacked competent enumerators. An undated note from Kraval (probably written in September) informed Molotov and Kaganovich that only 10% of the total required had been found and approved in some places, while in others unsuitable candidates were being virtually press-ganged into service. RGAE 1562/329/116, 103–4.

15 See Kraval's article on the census, published in both Bol'shevik and Plan (10 Nov. 1936).

16 RGAE 1562/329/143, 40.

17 In remoter areas, such as Karelia, as many as three-quarters of the enumerators had only primary-level education, and even in Leningrad oblast (excluding the city) the figure was 27%. An ‘error’ which occurred in the Ukraine was the recruitment of secondary school children as enumerators – surely evidence of the shortage of suitable alternatives. Plan (10 Dec. 1936).

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 RGAE 1562/329/143, 29–31.

21 The famous ‘Kurman gap’ and later revisions of it. See Kurman's note on undercounting, RGAE 1562/329/152, 16–20, and Andreev, E., Darskii, L. and Kharkova, T., ‘Opyt otsenki chislennosti naseleniya SSSR 1926–41’, Vestnik statistiki, V (1990).Google Scholar

22 Plan (25 Feb. 1937).

23 RGAE 1562/329/152, 8–9.

24 William, Krunskal, Research and the census (1984)Google Scholar, cited by Nathan Keyfitz in his address to the opening of the population research centre, university of Groningen, 1991.

25 Pravda (2 Jan. 1937), p. 1.

26 Popov, A., writing in Plan, XXIII (10 Dec. 1936).Google Scholar

27 Ibid.

28 The census in fact found that religious belief was on the increase.

29 Plan, a (25 Jan. 1937), 2.

30 RGAE 1562/329/117, 2.

31 RGAE 1562/329/116, 24.

32 For examples, see Plan, IV (26 Feb. 1937), 50–2.

33 Plan, II (25 Jan. 1937), 40.

34 This kind of picture is presented, classically, in Merle, Fainsod, How Russia is ruled (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)Google Scholar, although his own local study of Smolensk suggested a more chaotic and imprecise relationship between centre and localities. For a discussion of the issue, see my ‘Centre-local relations during the rise of Stalin: the case of Moscow, 1925–1932’, in David, Lane (ed.) Elites and political power in the USSR (London, 1988).Google Scholar

35 SI, VI (1990), 9.

36 Pravda (5 Jan. 1937).

37 Examples of all these difficulties were cited by enumerators working in Moscow, Leningrad, Ufa and Kiev. Pravda (5 and 6 Jan. 1937).

38 SI, VII (1990), 68.

39 Ibid.

40 Pravda (5 Jan. 1937).

41 Both the 1926 and 1937 censuses used self-identification as the criterion for nationality. The 1897 census had used first language. For the implications of this for one national group, see Guthier, S. L., ‘The Belorussians: national identification and assimilation, 1897–1970, Part I’, Soviet Studies, XXIX (1977), no. 1.Google Scholar

42 RGAE 1562/329/116, 149. The note was dated 2 Feb. 1937.

43 The word is the same in Russian, and Isaev was correct to point out that many Kazakhs were known as Kirghiz or Turkmen in the early twentieth century.

44 See below, note 56. 45 RGAE 1562/329/143, 51 ff. Report to Kraval from Belorussia.

46 RGAE 1562/329/143, 52.

47 RGAE 1562/329/143, 114.

48 Pravda (5 Jan. 1937), RGAE 1562/329/143, 64.

49 See also SI, VII (1990). Viktor Fink's account of the 1897 census is in Pravda (6 Jan. 1937).

50 Pravda (6 Jan. 1937).

51 Pravda (10 Feb. 1937).

52 Plan (25 Feb. 1937).

53 Plan (10 Apr. 1937).

54 Plan (25 Apr. 1937), 7–8.

55 Cited in SI, VII (1990), 8.

56 RGAE 1562/329/143, 6–10.

57 This was M. V. Kurman's figure, suggesting an undercount of 0·5 or 0·6%. Andreev, et al. , Vestnik statistiki, V (1990), 36.Google Scholar

58 See Andreev et al., p. 36. Interestingly, the findings of the 1926 census were not questioned.

59 Ibid., citing evidence from Kazakhstan, where, despite the difficulties of collecting data, the census was calculated to have missed less than 1% of the population.

60 RGAE 1562/329/107, 144 (report from Kaplun to Kraval covering the period from 1930).

61 RGAE 1562/329/152, 152.

62 The state also disguised information from itself, for example by forbidding people employed in defence industries from giving accurate information to the enumerators about their place of work or trade speciality.

63 Andreev, Darskii and Khar'kova suggest roughly 8 million excess deaths in 1932–3; Maksudov, S., Poteri naseleniya SSSR (New York, 1989)Google Scholar and Lorimer, F., The population of the Soviet Union: history and prospects (Geneva, 1946)Google Scholar, both writing before the 1937 census data were available, gave 9·8 million plus or minus 3 million (again depending on the ‘normal’ birth and death rates) and 4–5 million respectively.

64 Andreev et al.

65 Kondrashin, V. V., ‘Golod 1932–1933 godov V derevnyakh Povolzh'ya’, Voprosy istorii, VI (1991), 176–81.Google Scholar

66 Osokina, , ‘Zhertvy goloda 1933 goda’, pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

67 This is Maksudov's point, which he takes as evidence that recorded deaths were relatively accurate in the period 1927–32, Poteri naseleniya SSSR, pp. 217–33.Google Scholar

68 The difficulties this posed in the early 1920s are discussed in Kniga o golode (Saratov, 1922).Google Scholar

69 Russian centre for the preservation of documents of contemporary history (formerly central party archive), fo. 16, op. 60 d.77, 98–9.

70 RGAE 1562/329/107, 157.

71 RGAE 1562/329/107, 159.

72 Kondrashin, , ‘Golod 1932–1933’, pp. 177–8.Google Scholar

73 See Kniga o golode, in which the distinction between ‘kannibalizm’ (the ceremonial eating of enemies in tribal societies), ‘trupoedstvo’ (eating corpses, most commonly the feeding of one child's flesh to those surviving) and ‘liudoedstvo’ (killing people to eat them) is discussed by a doctor who had first-hand experience of the 1921 famine.

74 RGAE 1562/329/107, 157.

75 The under-registration of deaths from ‘starvation’, as opposed to diseases arising from undernourishment, was common to the 1921 and 1933 famines. See Kovalevskii, A. G., Ocherki po demografii Saratova (Saratov, 1928), p. 147.Google Scholar

76 Kondrashin, ‘Golod 1932–1933).

77 Ibid. pp. 178–80.

78 Victor, Kravchenko, I chose freedom (London, 1947).Google Scholar

79 RGAE 1562/329/143, 147.

80 SI, VIII (1990). The figure cited in the NKVD's own records for deaths in 1932–3 was 241,355 persons.

81 Ibid.

82 Those who wish to revisit this debate should refer to the series of articles by Stephen Wheatcroft and Stephen Rosefielde in Soviet Studies and Slavic Review between 1980 and 1983.

83 The classic example is Robert, Conquest, The harvest of sorrow (London, 1988).Google Scholar

84 Interviews conducted by the author in Moscow (in 1986 and 1993) confirm this. In general, respondents ‘remembered’ most effectively the incidents which related closely to current discussions.

85 See, for example, Slovji, D., The Golgotha of the Ukraine (New York, 1953)Google Scholar, The black deeds of the Kremlin, A White Book. I–II (Detroit, 1955)Google Scholar, Hrysko, V., Ukrjinskyi holokost 1933 New York–Toronto, 1978).Google Scholar

86 RGAE 1562/329/107, 171–3 (unsigned memorandum of 31 Mar. 1934).

87 Figures from RGAE 1562/329/143, 143, 14 Jan. 1937.

88 Kondrashin's local study of the Volga suggests that death rates among the Germans were no higher than those in contiguous Russian villages, but he accepts that the Germans were among the groups most severely stricken by famine in 1933.

89 The most controversial decisions were conveyed by telephone or face to face.