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The Great Leap Upwards: Anthropometric Data and Indicators of Crises and Secular Change in Soviet Welfare Levels, 1880-1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Stephen G. Wheatcroft
Stephen G. Wheatcroft*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Melbourne
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Extract

Assessing the change in the level of Soviet welfare in the first half of the twentieth century presents many problems. There are the problems associated with the reliability and accessibility of Soviet statistics, and there are those associated with the problem of understanding the peculiar nature of the Soviet situation in which a trend toward rapid secular improvements in welfare and life expectancy were accompanied by massive shortterm welfare and mortality crises. These problems are made even more complicated by the intense politicization of this question. In this paper I address all of these problems.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 27 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1999

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References

1. See Mironov, B, “Diet, Health, and Stature of the Russian Population from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in Komlos, John, ed., The Biological Standard of Living on Three Continents: Further Explorations in Anthropometric History (Boulder, Colo., 1995), 59–80.Google Scholar

2. For more details on this, see Wheatcroft, S. G. and Davies, R. W., “Agriculture,” in Davies, R. W., Harrison, Mark, Wheatcroft, S. G., eds., TheEconomic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge, Eng., 1994)Google Scholar. There is less agreement concerning the nature of the pre-1933 data, especially the 1930–32 figures. The official viewpoint is that the previous official series were barn yields that needed no further adjustment. I claim that they were already highly inflated and consequently needed to be reduced to remain comparable with the revised lower series for 1933–60.

3. For a more detailed discussion of this, see S. G. Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies, “Krizis v Sovetskom sel'skom khoziaistve, 1931–1933 gg.,” forthcoming in Otechestvennia istoriia.

4. See Shevelev, A, “Sdvigi v zdorov'e trudiashchikhsia SSSR,” in Kraval', I. A., ed., Zdorov'e i zdravookhranenie trudiashchikhsia SSSR-Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1937), 11.Google Scholar

5. As a result of a peculiar typesetting error, the table presenting these data is repeated three times in the article, see tables 8, 9, and 10.

6. Shevelev, “Sdvigi v zdorov'e trudiashchikhsia SSSR,” 15. The emphasis is Shevalev's.

7. See the Soviet archival series available in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 1562, op. 20, d. 42, 1. 76. They were first cited in S. G. Wheatcroft, “More Light on the Scale of Repression and Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s,” Soviet Studies 42, no. 2 (1989): 361.

8. See Statisticheskii spravochnik SSSR (Moscow, 1927), 902–9.

9. See, for instance, J. M. Tanner, “Growth as a Target-Seeking Function: Catch-up and Catch-down Growth in Man,” in Frank Falkner and J. M. Tanner, eds., Human Growth: A Comprehensive Treatise, 2d ed., vol. 1, Developmental Biology, Prenatal Growth (New York, 1986), 167–80.

10. I first reviewed these data about twenty years ago in S. G. Wheatcroft, Population Dynamic and Factors Affecting It in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, Birmingham University, Centre for Russian and East European Studies Discussion Papers, Soviet Industrialisation Project Series (SIPS), nos. 1 and 2 (Birmingham, 1976), no. l: 23–24a and no. 2: 103–5.

11. Volkov, Statisticheskoe obozrenie, 1930, no. 6: 132.

12. See Sinclair, D., Human Growth after Birth, 2d ed. (London, 1973), 18–24.Google ScholarPubMed

13. See, for instance, Whitwell, Greg, de Souza, Christine, and Nicholas, Stephen, “Height, Health, and Economic Growth in Australia, 1860–1940,” in Steckel, Richard H. and Floud, Roderick, eds., Health and Welfare during Industrialization (Chicago, 1997), 397 Google Scholar, which documents a 1 inch (2.5 cm) increase in height for 14-year-old Australian boys for the ten-year period from 1912 to 1922. (This is equivalent to an increase of 11.3 cm in height for a forty-five-year period.)

14. See the report of Kaminskii's speech in Izvestiia, 21 January 1935.

15. The data for 1885–1930 indicated an increase of 7.47 cm over forty-five years. The data for 1885–1935 showed an increase of 5 cm over fifty years. Hence, in the five years between 1930 and 1935 there must have been a decline of 2.47 cm.

16. See Wheatcroft, Population Dynamic, SIPS, no. 1: 24a.

17. On the low effect of medicine on mortality in earlier times, see McKeown, T., The Modern Rise of Population (London, 1976).Google Scholar

18. See Braudel, F., Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century (London, 1981), 1: 31–51.Google Scholar

19. See McNeill, William H., Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y., 1976).Google Scholar

20. See McKeown, T, “Food, Infection, and Population,” in Rotberg, R. I. and Rabb, T. K, eds., Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society (Cambridge, Eng., 1985), 33.Google Scholar

21. For an account of how this mechanism operated in Russia during the malaria epidemics of 1924–28 and 1934–36, see Wheatcroft, Population Dynamic, SIPS, no. 2: 106–23.

22. Malaria has been used in the above example because we have some idea about its aetiology and the nature of its interaction. The argument that the decline in malaria (archaic “aigue “) in Europe was of far greater significance than normally accepted was made in Buer, M., Health, Wealth and Population in the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution (1926; reprint, London, 1968)Google Scholar. Although Buer presents an interesting line of argument, the argument I present here does not rely on malaria or any currently identified mechanism and disease. There are some complexities in life that we have not yet understood.

23. See Livi-Bacci, Massimo, “The Nutrition-Mortality Link in Past Times: A Comment,” in Rotberg, and Rabb, , eds., Hunger and History, 95–100.Google ScholarPubMed

24. Alain Blum, however, denies that this is the case and argues that the French data show a differentiation in life expectancy for different social classes that is observable over time. See Blum, Alain, Houdaille, Jacques, and Lamouche, Marc, “Éléments sur la mortalité différentielle àla fin du XVIIIe et au début du XIXe siécle,” Population, 1989, no. 1: 163–85.Google Scholar

25. Livi-Bacci, “Nutrition-Mortality Link,” 96.c

26. It is pardy for this reason that I have been attracted to looking at the scale and effects of famines and other disasters in Russia. My article “Crises and die Condition of the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia,” in Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, eds., Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, 1991), 128–74, was concerned with explaining the differences between agricultural crises, crises in peasant living standards, and agrarian crises, and offering some indicators to assist in understanding diese differences. Steven Hoch, who was looking for evidence of a relationship between secular trends in local welfare and local mortality, appears to have totally misunderstood this point in his article criticizing my work. Hoch, Steven, “On Good Numbers and Bad: Malthus, Population Trends and Peasant Standard of Living in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 53, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 41–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Alain Blum has kindly pointed out to me tiiat altiiough mortality is terminal for the individual, as a social phenomenon, it could experience these compensation effects, or their opposite. It has often been argued drat a selection process may operate, whereby the survivors of mortality crises would be stronger than the victims, and that consequently die generation of stronger survivors would have compensatory longevity. But the opposite is also possible, and Blum, Avdeev, and Zakharov have argued that the Russian generation born during World War II is demonstrably weaker than all other generations. See Blum, A. and Zakharov, S., “L'histoire demographique de l'URSS et de la Russie a travers l'histoire des generations,” Naselenie i obshchestvo (Population et société), February 1997, no. 17: 4.Google Scholar

28. This terminology is taken from R. H. Steckel. “Height at a particular age reflects an individual's history of net nutrition. The body devotes a substantial share of food to maintenance, and work or physical activity and disease make other claims on the diet… analyses of stature must recognize not only inputs to health such as diet and medical care but also work effort and related phenomena such as labour organization. Similarly, researchers must attempt to understand ways that exposure to infectious disease may have placed claims on the diet.” R. H. Steckel, “Stature and the Standard of Living,” Journal of Economic Literature 33 (December 1995): 1910–11. It is possible that “net nutrition” could also be influenced by differences in human responses to the epidemiological environment, and that in certain environments these epidemiological factors could predominate over normal nutritional ones. In this regard “net nutrition” may be a little misleading and may in fact have very little to do with nutrition at all. For this reason, I will always present this phrase in quotation marks.

29. The body mass indicator (BMI) is the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters.

30. Unlike mortality indicators, anthropometric indicators do normally provide more obviously favorable data for privileged groups in the population.

31. These two exclude anthropometric data, which are often considered nutrition indicators and which will be considered separately below.

32. See the volumes in Trudy TsSU, and the surveys by Wheatcroft, S. G., “Famine and Food Consumption Records in Early Soviet History, 1917–1925,” in Geissler, C. and Oddy, D. J., eds., Food, Diet and Economic Change: Past and Present (Leicester, 1993), 151–74Google Scholar, and by Mironov, B, “Diet, Health and Stature of the Russian Population from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in Komlos, , ed., Biological Standard of Living, 59–80.Google Scholar

33. See Wheatcroft, S. G., “Soviet Statistics of Nutrition and Mortality during Times of Famine, 1917–1922 and 1931–1933,” in Cahiers du Monde russe 38, no. 4 (October-December 1997): 525–58.Google Scholar

34. See Popov on the importance of balances in P. I. Popov, Vestnik statistiki 1 (1919): 32.

35. For his own reasons, Stalin was particularly active in spreading this false picture in the mid-1920s. See Stalin, I., Sochineniia (Moscow, 1952), 6: 214–15.Google Scholar

36. For work aimed toward this, see Wheatcroft, S. G. and Davies, R. W., “A Brief History of the Balance of the National Economy,” in Wheatcroft, S. G. and Davies, R. W., eds., Materials for a Balance of the Soviet National Economy, 1928–1950 (Cambridge, Eng., 1985), 34–48 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wheatcroft, S. G. and Davies, R. W., “The Crooked Mirror of Soviet Economic Statistics,” in Davies, , Harrison, , and Wheatcroft, , eds., Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 24–37 Google Scholar; and again more recently in Wheatcroft, “Soviet Statistics,” 525–58.

37. See Wheatcroft, S. G., “Famine and Epidemic Crises in Russia, 1918–1922: The Case of Saratov,” in Annates de demographie historique, 1983, 329–52.Google Scholar

38. The last detailed demographic statistical handbooks to be published at this time viere Estestvennoe dvizhenie naseleniia SSSRv 1926g. (Moscow, 1929) for the USSR as a whole and Prirodnii rukh liudnosti Ukraini v 1929r. (Khar'kov, 1932) for Ukraine.

39. See Wheatcroft, S. G., “More Light on the Scale of Repression and Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s,” Soviet Studies 42, no. 2 (April 1990): 355–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. The exact scale of the correction needed is the cause of some dispute. I am not alone in challenging the reliability of the corrections to Soviet mortality and natality data applied by Andreev, E. M., Darskii, L. E., and Khar'kova, T. L., Istoriia Naseleniia SSSR, 1920–1959gg. Istoriia statistiki (Moscow, 1990), 141–42.1Google Scholar criticized these conclusions regarding corrections to the birth data at an international conference on Soviet population in the 1920s and 1930s, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto, January 1995.

41. See Arch Getty, J., Rittersporn, Gabor T., and Zemskov, Viktor N., “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (October 1993): 1017–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Wheatcroft, S. G., “The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930-45,“ Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 8 (1996): 1319–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42. Trudy TsSU(Moscow, 1924), 18: 86–89.

43. Materialy sanitarnoi statistiki Ukraini, 1876–1914gg. (Khar'kov, 1926), 112–13.

44. The 1893 eligible cohort only covered 9 months (from January 1893 to September 1893) and at 756, 196 was about 75 percent of the 1892 cohort (994, 869) and die 1893 cohort (1, 048, 029). See Trudy TsSU, 18: 86–89.

45. “Odier reasons” included “lack of ability” (nesposobnosti). It is unclear what exacdy this covers that is not covered by healdi.

46. Some brief 1933 data in comparison with the 1927 data were published in Sotsialisticheskii stroi SSSR (Moscow, 1935), 543. Some of these data, together with more complete data for 1935, were subsequently published in the TsUNKhU statistical handbook on health in 1937, as has already been mentioned.

47. See the restricted circulation NKVMD publication Kharakteristika kontingenta prizyva 1928g. (1906g.) (Moscow, 1930), 5, 36, 39 available in the military archives. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (RGVA), f. 54, op. 4, d. 62, 11. 5, 36, 39. Unfortunately this was the only volume of this serial publication that was available in the currently unclassified part of RGVA. Other scattered materials are available for other years. But systematic publications on these matters have apparently been transferred to the personnel section of the archive, which is still restricted.

48. See data in Statisticheskii spravochnik SSSR za 1929gg. (Moscow, 1929), 910–11.

49. This would tend to support die claims of those scholars who maintain that the famine of 1891–92 was not as serious as often presented, that the tsarist relief measures were extremely effective (see Robbins, R. G., Famine in Russia, 1891–2: The Imperial Government Responds to Crisis [New York, 1975]Google Scholar), and that the leap in mortality in 1892 was largely a result of the cholera epidemic of die summer of 1892, rather than die famine of 1891–92. See Wheatcroft, S. G., “The 1891/2 Famine in Russia: Towards a More Detailed Analysis of Its Scale and Demographic Significance,” in Edmondson, L. and Waldron, P., eds., Economy and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1860–1930: Essays for Olga Crisp (New York, 1992), 44–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. See data in Statisticheskii spravochnik SSSR za 1929gg., 910–11.

51. See Kurshakova, Iu. S. et al., Problemy razmernoi antropologicheskoi standartizatsii dlia konstruirovaniia odezhdi (Moscow, 1978)Google Scholar. The posthumous article by R I. Zenkevich ( “Izmenenie razmerov tela vzroslogo muzhskogo naseleniia tsentral'noi chasti RSFSR za 100 let,” 64–70) is the most informative of die series of articles in this collection. I am grateful to Boris Mironov for drawing our attention to this source.

52. The data show furdier declines down to 163.9 cm in 1909, but since the 1909 cohort would only have been 18 in 1927, these figures are likely to be nonterminal heights.

53. Vlastovskii, V. G., Aktseleratsiia rosta i razvitie detei (Moscow, 1976), 39.Google Scholar

54. Nikitiuk, B. A., “Izmeneniia razmerov tela novorozhdennykh za poslednie 100 let,” Voprosy antropobgii, 1972, no. 42: 78–94 Google Scholar. These data are also cited by Moronov, although Moronov's series have been fitted into five-year averages and provide indicators that do not correspond to those used by Nikitiuk in his published work.

55. Livi-Bacci, Massimo, “Soundings in a Vast Sea,” in his Population and Nutrition: An Essay on European Demographic History (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 79.Google Scholar

56. For further details on this, see Wheatcroft and Davies, “Agriculture,” 106–30.

57. See Wheatcroft, “Soviet Statistics,” 537.

58. Age-specific mortality tables exhibit a sharp “U” shape which reflects this.

59. In the simplest of terms, societies with high birth rates will normally have a larger proportion of children than those with low birth rates and will normally have higher mortality rates because young children die more frequently than pre-old-age adults.

60. Lancaster, H. O., Expectations of Life: A Study in the Demography, Statistics, and History of World Mortality (New York, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chesnais, J.-C., The Demographic Transition, Stages, Patterns, and Economic Implications: A Longitudinal Study of Sixty-Seven Countries Covering the Period 1720–1984 (Oxford, 1992).Google Scholar

61. This applies particularly to Lancaster who devotes 5.5 pages to France and .5 pages to the Faeroe Islands, but only 2 lines to die USSR. Russia is not featured among the twenty-one countries whose crude death rates are included in the summary table on page 36, the fourteen countries whose age-specific mortalities are listed in a table on pages 30–31, or the seventeen countries whose age-specific mortality over time appear in a table on page 394.

62. Abortion was introduced as a health measure (to remove unwanted pregnancies and unwanted children) in 1918. It had taken on mass significance by 1924. It was banned by the authorities, for all but a limited number of medical complaints in 1936, and was only reintroduced after Stalin's death in the 1950s. See Wheatcroft, Population Dynamic, SIPS, no. 1: 53.

63. See Steckel, Richard H. and Floud, Roderick, “Conclusions,” in Steckel, and Floud, , eds., Health and Welfare during Industrialization, 423–26.Google Scholar

64. Peter Ward, W., Birth Weight and Economic Growth: Women's Living Standards in the Industrializing West (Chicago, 1993)Google Scholar. I am grateful to Janet McCalman for drawing my attention to this study. She is currently making a detailed study of the Melbourne hospital data on birth weights.

65. Ibid., 40, 56, 150.

66. Pipes, R., Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1994), 511–12.Google Scholar

67. Brzezinski, Zbigniew, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1990), 30–31, 240.Google Scholar

68. Conquest, R, “Casualty Figures,” in The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (New York, 1968), 699–713.Google Scholar

69. Hobsbawm, Eric, “The New Threat to History,” New York Review of Books 40, no. 21 (16 December 1993): 62–64.Google Scholar