Preliminary Programme

The First General Census in 1897 was the largest statistical event of the Russian Empire at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. For researchers will be interesting both aggregated data and archival documents of the 1897 Census. But for a long time the 1897 census manuscripts were considered lost. And today it is evident that in some regional archives the complexes of the 1897 census documents have been preserved. The census lists have been preserved with data of some Siberian cities, for example, Tobolsk, Ishim, Yalutorovsk and etc.
Census manuscripts represent a unique historical source of the Russian Empire population at the end of the 19th century. First of all, they contain a unique set of information about each resident of the city, village or other settlement. The questionnaire collected data about demographics (gender, age, marital status, etc.), ethnic (mother tongue, nationality), social (status, position in the household, literacy) characteristics, and information about employment, place of birth, residence and registration. The second feature of the census lists is the reflection of the self-identification of the inhabitants. Unlike church or administrative records, the census form was written down according to oral information provided by respondent. This fact allows one to explore the population identity of Russian Empire at the end of the XIX century.
In our study special attention is paid to the ethnic, social and occupational identity of the Siberian urban population at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. During this period, the Siberian city society dynamically changed under the influence of the both socio-demographic (voluntary and forced resettlement, labor migration) and economic (development of production, transport routes) factors. The report will present the experience of researching of urban groups in some Siberian cities. We plan to explore the following city groups: 1) social groups, which are specific for Siberian cities, for example, "military", "exile", "convicts", etc., 2) communities created on the basis of religious (Muslims, Old believers, etc) .) or national (Jews, Tatars, etc) identity, 3) occupational communities, first of all, the artel as a voluntary association of people for joint work (including seasonal). The researching of self-identification data will reveal the typical trend development of the Siberian urban society in "transition stage", as well as reflect the features of the social appearance of Siberian cities at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. (Show less)

The paper aims to trace patterns in consumption and saving behavior among peasants in the Russian empire between the 1880s and 1914. The analysis is based on the peasant budget censuses collected by zemstvos – the rural self-government organizations in Russia. The budget censuses offer the richest data on the peasant economy. We analyze the budget censuses to address the following questions: How did saving-to-income ratio correlate to the wealth of peasants? How did the food, beverages and tobacco consumption in terms of quantity and quality varies in different economic categories of peasants? What do the budget censuses tells us about the regional and temporal inequality and consumption dynamics among peasants? We will also present some challenging issues regarding unification of the budget censuses and combining them into a single database. (Show less)

Preindustrial economic history of Ukraine is a fairly unexplored subject, especially in terms of quantitative analysis. A whole range of research questions that can be effectively dealt with in a quantitative way remain unattended. They include: internal coherence of Ukrainian agricultural market, its integration into the Russian imperial and international market networks, price dynamics and its factors, effects of growing administrative effectiveness onto the connectivity and integration of the market, relative importance of local, regional, national, and international factors in price formation and its dynamics, etc.
The present research project aims to trace the dynamics of Ukrainian market integration over the middle and late 18th century by decadal comparisons. The years of 1730-1790 have witnessed an intermittent process of social and political stabilization in the Hetmanate, an autonomous part of Russian empire, which covered the north-eastern quadrant of the present-day Ukraine. Thanks to the growing domestic peace and introduction of uniform administrative system, the Hetmanate has enjoyed a period of growing prosperity, which has been regularly interrupted by resource-intensive warfare with the neighboring powers, in most cases – against the Ottoman empire. These and other external events have generated a number of price shocks which can also be explored as useful cases providing a glimpse into the workings of the agricultural market at an early stage of its development. By establishing the overall dynamics of Ukrainian market integration over the five decades, as well as the origination, development, and dying-out of its price shocks, we will quantitatively chart the foundations of Ukraine’s economy of the period in question to contribute to the understanding of the sources of its growth and its effects on the social composition of population.
Our analysis is based on an extensive dataset of agricultural prices, which was assembled by the author over the last ten years. The dataset covers the years 1730-1790 and includes prices for a number of agricultural products recorded over 41 locations in the Hetmanate. Of these, observations were conducted twice per week at 23 locations and once a week at 18 locations. The commodities include rye (grain and flour), oat, wheat, salt, firewood, hay, buckwheat, barley, pea, millet, meat, vegetable oil, and liquor. The dataset suffers from a number of drawbacks: it is spatially and temporally interrupted, some commodities are only seasonally available, units of weight and volume are changing, different types of values are reported from different locations. Yet, all prices are expressed in terms of the same currency and the data is fine-grained (two observations per week in most locations, which yields over 100 observations per year). (Show less)

The concept of charity as a social institution that mitigates the growing social problems of industrial societies is not new in the literature. Nevertheless, studies of charity in late Imperial Russia are scarce. My paper aims to address this gap and shed new light on charity and industrialization in Dnieper Ukraine (a part of the Russian Empire). Rapid industrial development in 1870-1914 caused a rapid growth of urban population in Dnieper Ukraine, but cities and migrants themselves were not ready to face new challenges of industrialization. Social issues as prostitution, diseases, poverty etc. escalated and demanded solutions. Philanthropists and charity providers themselves admitted the need for social interventions. As one of the most famous Jewish donors and entrepreneurs of Dnieper Ukraine, Izrael Brodskiy, said: “I give not because I want to, I give because I understand the need of giving”.
Late 19th-early 20th centuries became the golden age of the charity in Dnieper Ukraine. I argue that this was the case because the state encouraged entrepreneurial charity by granting medals and orders for donors. It was more efficient for the state to incentivize resources of large entrepreneurs than to establish new social policies. At the same time, entrepreneurs saw charity as a tool to increase their social status, positive image, and getting closer to the members of Romanov family.
The cases of Brodskiy (Jew) and Tereshenko (Ukrainian) families are most suitable to illustrate my thesis. They used charity to signal their loyalty and get as high social status, as it was possible. At the same time, they needed state support for their sugar business. Granting money for Volodymyrskyi Cathedral and Imperial University in Kyiv as well as taking part in charity activities of members of the royal family became a perfect way to reach all these goals.
Nevertheless, the charity was not enough to solve issues that were connected with the social conflict between two emerging antagonistic social groups – workers and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs and employers were not always ready to invest time and recourses in social dialogue. The state did not manage to create an effective legal framework for social communication between these two groups. And both were not ready to recognize and stay in the legal framework. Thus, strikes and labour conflicts became a sign of the time. In my paper I review cases when the charity was efficient in solving social conflicts of a new industrial society, and when it was not. (Show less)