STATISTICAL DOCUMENTS AS A SOURCE FOR THE DEMOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF RUSSIA DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1939 - 1945)

Abstract

Throughout the Second World War, employees of registry offices in the rear regions of Russia carried out painstaking work to collect information about the natural movement of the country’s population. No less intense activity was carried out by employees of statistical agencies to process the information received. The result of this work was the formation of an information-rich corpus of sources containing invaluable information on the number, composition and reproduction (fertility, marriage, mortality) of the population. A thorough search of these documents preserved in the archives, their scientific analysis and synthesis makes it possible to determine the main trend in the dynamics of demographic indicators of the USSR during the war years. The purpose of this article is to identify and characterize a wide range of statistical documents based on which it is possible to reconstruct the main trends in the demographic history of Russia in 1939-1945. For the first time in Russian historiography, the article provides an assessment of the number and specific weight of a socio-demographic group designated as “unallocated by territory.” In the future, this can be the basis for solving one of the most important problems in the history of the Second World War, namely, determining the scale of the demographic catastrophe that shook the Soviet Union during the war period. An equally important task set in the article is the author’s desire to identify the main methods of collecting statistical information and, on this basis, to assess the reliability of the statistical information used.