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On the Biological Standard of Living in Russia and the Soviet Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

John Komlos
John Komlos*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Economics, University of Munich
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Extract

The systematic study of the physical characteristics of human beings reaches well back into the eighteenth century. By the 1830s, scientists began to recognize that human biological outcomes were influenced, not only by inherited characteristics, but by both the natural and the socioeconomic environment. Genetic variation, by itself, did not account for the spatial, social, or temporal variation in physical stature. Only in the 1970s, however, did historians begin in earnest to explore the welfare implications of anthropometric measures. With the birth of “anthropometric history,” biological indicators, including physical stature, were used to assess the welfare of human beings as complements to such conventional indicators as income or real wages.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 71 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1999

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References

1. Komlos, John and Cuff, Timothy, eds., Classics in Anthropometric History (St. Katharinen, 1998)Google Scholar; Steckel, Richard H. and Floud, Roderick, eds., Health and Welfare during Industrialization (Chicago, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Steckel, Richard, “Stature and the Standard of Living, “Journal of Economic Literature 33 (1995): 1903–40Google Scholar; Bogin, Barry, Patterns of Human Growth (Cambridge, 1988)Google ScholarPubMed.

3. Anthropometric evidence has been employed successfully in such contexts. The finding, for example, that American slaves were considerably taller than the brethren they left behind on the African continent is a vivid indication of the nutritional advantages the New World provided to even die most unfortunate of its inhabitants. Without anthropometric data, such comparisons would have been nearly impossible, insofar as evidence on wages exists for neither population. The same pertains to numerous historical subpopulations, including females and the subsistence peasantry. Steckel, Richard, “Slave Height Profiles from Coastwise Manifests,” Explorations in Economic History 16 (1979): 363–80CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Eltis, David, “Nutritional Trends in Africa and the Americas: Heights of Africans, 1819–1839,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1982): 453–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

4. Komlos, John, “Shrinking in a Growing Economy: The Mystery of Physical Stature during the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 58, no. 3 (September 1998): 779–802.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. That the trend in the height of Moscow workers and peasants deviates from that of the military needs to be investigated further (Mironov, table 3). I suppose that the height of the recruits is more representative, because of the larger number of observations and because of their regional diversity.

6. Komlos, John, “Stature and Nutrition in the Habsburg Monarchy: The Standard of Living and Economic Development in die Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review 90, no. 5 (1985): 1149–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Komlos, John, Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropometric History (Princeton, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. The height of recruits increased until the birth cohorts between the years 1828 and 1843. This is also similar to the western pattern. Komlos, John, “The Height and Weight of West Point Cadets: Dietary Change in Antebellum America ,” Journal of Economic History 47, no. 4 (1987): 897–927 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In contrast, the height of Moscow workers fluctuated in the first half of the century without a clearly discernible trend, while the height of peasants remained constant (Mironov, table 4, columns

8. The height of peasants and workers even decreased markedly in the 1860s. Mironov stresses that the biological standard of living of the population did not improve until the end of the 1880s, yet the height of recruits increased shortly after emancipation, and the height of Moscow workers as well as that of peasants reached its lowest point in the 1860s (Mironov, figure 1). Hence, it appears that by the 1870s improvements in nutritional status were being registered.

9. This turnaround is just one indication of the minor role played by genetic factors, and, by implication, the importance of socioeconomic and medical factors on a population's average height.

10. Mironov argues that food consumption declined between the 1850s and 1890s. Yet, previously published data do not easily lend themselves to such a generalization, because per capita grain and potato output increased from 313 to 454 kg during those four decades. Even if rural consumption declined, the decline was hardly substantial (from 285 to 262 kg) and might not have applied uniformly in all regions and towns. Mironov, Boris, “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, 1995), 59–80 Google Scholar, here, 69–70.

11. Roberto Frisancho, A., Anthropometric Standards for the Assessment of Growth and Nutritional Status (Ann Arbor, 1990), 39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eveleth, Phyllis B. and Tanner, James M., Worldwide Variation in Human Growth, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1990), 226, 251, 284 Google Scholar; Floud, Roderick, “The Heights of Europeans since 1750: A New Source for European Economic History,” in Komlos, John, ed., Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History (Chicago, 1994), 9–24 Google Scholar, esp. 13, 14; Shay, Ted, “The Level of Living in Japan 1885–1938: New Evidence,” in Komlos, , ed., Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development, 173–204, esp. 201Google Scholar; Barry Bogin, Dearborn, Michigan, personal communication, 2 October 1998, and Pierre van der Eng, Canberra, Australia, personal communication, 3 October 1998.

12. Wu, Jialu, “How Severe Was the Great Depression? Evidence from the Pittsburgh Region,” in Komlos, , ed., Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development, 129–52.,Google Scholar

13. The long-term trend in the Chinese crude death rate is very similar: 1950 18.0 1960 25.4 1970 7.6 Aird, John, “Population Studies and Population Policy in China,” Population and Development Review 8, no. 2 (1982): 267–97, here 268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Exceptions can be found in sub-Saharan Africa, the Solomon Islands, or some depressed regions of Mexico and India. Tadeusz Bielicki, “Physical Growth as a Measure of the Economic Well-Being of Populations: The Twentieth Century,” in Frank Falkner and J. M. Tanner, eds., Human Growth: A Comprehensive Treatise, 2d ed., vol. 3, Methodology, Ecological, Genetic, and Nutritional Effects on Growth (New York, 1986), 283–306, here 297. Male Australian aborigines did not become taller during the course of the twentieth century. See Nicholas, Stephen, Gregory, Robert and Kimberley, Sue, “The Welfare of Indigenous and White Australians, 1890–1955,” in Komlos, John and Baten, Jorg, eds., The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective (Stuttgart, 1998), 35–54.Google Scholar

15. The west European pattern is the decline in noncrisis mortality and the disappearance in crisis mortality by the nineteenth century, with very few exceptions. See Schofield, Roger and Reher, David, “The Decline in Mortality in Europe>,” in Schofield, Roger, Reher, David, and Bideau, A., The Decline ofMortality in Europe (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar, 1-17, here 3.

16. Another four million succumbed in the gulag. See Nove, Alec, “How Many Victims in the 1930s?” Soviet Studies 42, no. 4 (1990): 811–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford, 1981), 52, 86 Google Scholar; JeanDreze and Amartya Sen, “Introduction,” in Dreze and Sen, eds., The Political Economy of Hunger, vol. 1, Entitlement and Weil-Being (Oxford, 1990), 1–33, here 6. For the anthropometric history of the Great Leap Forward, see Morgan, Stephen, “Stature and the Standard of Living in China, 1910–1990s,” in Komlos, and Baten, , eds., Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, 7–34.Google Scholar

18. Mitchell, Brian R., International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–1988, 3d ed. (New York, 1992), 90–113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell, Brian R., International Historical Statistics: The Americas and Australasia (London, 1983), 111–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell, Brian R., International Historical Statistics. Africa and Asia (London, 1982), 73–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Feshbach, Murray, “Between the Lines of the 1979 Soviet Census,” Population and Development Review 8, no. 2 (1982): 347–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 351; Christopher Davis and Murray Feshbach, Rising Infant Mortality in the U.S.S.R, in the 1970s, Series P-95, no. 74, International Population Reports (Washington, D.C., September 1980), 33 pp.

20. Feshbach, Murray and Friendly, Alfred Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege (New York, 1992), 9.Google Scholar

21. The Human Development Index is an average of demographic, schooling, and income indicators. The Human Development Index of the other successor states was even lower: Belarus (61), Ukraine (80), Moldova (98). United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report: 1996 (Oxford, 1996), 136–39.Google ScholarPubMed

22. Vlastovskii, V G. and Zenkevich, P. I., “The Change of Body Measurements of Adult Moscow Men and Women for the Last 50 Years Depending on the Year of Birth,” Voprosy antropobgii 33 (1969): 34–45 Google Scholar, as cited in Bielicki, “Physical Growth,” 296.

23. Boris Mironov, “Welfare and Economic Growth: Height of New-Born Children and Adults in Russia in 1855–1980,” unpublished manuscript, 1997.