Tag: imperial russia

Categories
Imperial Russia Teaching Russian History

Visualizing the 1897 Census in Pie Charts

A couple years ago one of my Soviet history students, Jessy Mwarage, said he wanted to do a bit of extra work at the opening of the semester, so I gave him some Russian census data from 1897 to play with. He turned the data into very elegant pie charts.  

I should add one caveat. I’m not absolutely positive about the quality of the data, but I think it’s reasonably good. Above all, it will give students a sense of the diversity of the population in the Russian Empire.

Russian Census Data, 1897

Total population:  125,640,021 people
Sex:  50.2 % female;  49.8 % male
Urban:   16,828,395 (13.4%);   Rural:  108,811,626 (86.6%)
Literacy:   29.3% of males;  13.1% of females were literate
 
Nationalities (as determined by language)

  • Russians:  56 million (44%)
  • Ukrainians:  22 million (17%)
  • Poles:  8 million (6%)
  • Belarusians (a.k.a. White Russians):  6 million (5%)
  • Jews (Yiddish speaking): 5 million (4%)
  • Kirghiz = 4million (3%)
  • Tatars = 3.7 million Tatars (3%)
  • Georgians, Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians, Moldovians: 1-2 million each (1.6%)

    •  
     

     
     
    Religions

    • Russian Orthodox:   69.34%
    • Muslims:   11.07%
    • Roman Catholics:   9.13%
    • Jews:   4.15%
    • Lutherans:   2.84%
    • Old Believers and others split from Russian Orthodox:   1.75%
    • Armenian Gregorians & Armenian Catholics:   0.97%
    • Buddhists, lamaists:   0.34%
    • Other Protestants:   0.15%

     

     
     

    Social Groups

    Peasants and Cossacks:                      99.8 million (79.4% of the total population)

    Towndwellers:                                     13.4 million (10.7%)

    Total lower classes:  113.2 million (90.1%)

    Merchants, honored citizens:             0.6 million (0.5%)

    Church estate:                                       0.6 million (0.5%)

    Nobility:                                                  1.85 million (1.5%)

    National minorities [inorodtsy] incl. Jews:      8.3 million (6.6%)

    Foreigners:                                            0.6 million (0.5%)

     

     

     

     
    Source of Income of Main Breadwinner

    Agriculture  (incl. livestock prod., fishing, forestry):  74.57%

    Manufacturing & crafts (esp. sewing, construction, metal, textiles, woodworking):  9.34%

    Servants and daily manual workers:   4.61%

    Commerce:   3.99%

    Transport and communications (nearly one half were horse and cart drivers)  1.55%

    Army and navy:   .99%

    Public administration (state & local authorities):   .75%

    Living on capital income:   .72%

    Religious institutions (including clerks & janitors):   .63%

    Medicine, education, science, literature, and legal practice:  .61%

    Mining:   .44%

    Others:    1.8%

     

     

     
     
    Largest Cities of the Russian Empire:

     

    Data from Wikipedia (English and Russian) and other sources.   Pie charts by Jessy Mwarage.

    Categories
    Crimea Imperial Russia Teaching Russian History

    Russian Census of 1897 as teaching tool

    This week Pietro Shakarian posted an article on Russia Direct that addresses the issue of the ethnic composition of the Russian Empire in 1897 as it relates to current crises in Ukraine, Crimea, Nagorno-Karabakh and Trans-Caucasia. To my mind it is very informative and would be a good article for students to read if one also gave them good maps. (Shakarian is apparently a PhD student at Ohio State University.)

    Categories
    Current events in the Putin Era Films Imperial Russia Nostalgia and Memory Post-Soviet Russia Russia in World History Russian History in Popular Culture Russian Orthodoxy Teaching Russian History Uncategorized

    Mikhalkov as monarchist and Slavophile – his 2010 Manifesto “Right and Truth” (Право и Правда)

    In October 2010 influential filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov published an extensive “Manifesto of Enlightened Conservatism” which was published as “Right and Truth” in polit.ru. (Read in Russian here.)

    The defense of serfdom attributed to Mikhalkov, which I posted yesterday, may well be a fake, but his conservative views are well-known and worth reading. A shorter overview (and critique) of his Manifesto was published in Vedomosti and translated in The Moscow Times. I am taking the liberty of copying that article in full (below) as it might be interesting for our students in Russian history classes. Lest they (students) think the debates and views of Russian conservatism are archaic, they can see them returning in the extremely conservative new laws on homosexuality, on diversity within the Russian Orthodox Church (the rules on “insulting believers” are very broadly construed), and in the takeover of the Russian Academy of Sciences (long a bastion of independent thinking).

    Continue reading “Mikhalkov as monarchist and Slavophile – his 2010 Manifesto “Right and Truth” (Право и Правда)”
    Categories
    Digital Russian History Imperial Russia Russia in World History Uncategorized

    Imagining the Petersburg-Moscow Road in the Late 18th Century

    How do you imagine what a road was, historically?  Quite often, histories of transport describe histories of surfaces: the evolution of building techniques, say, from wooden planks to macadamized stone to modern asphalt or concrete.

    Novgorod Province, Postal Map (1808)

    Alternatively, roads are presented as transportation networks or ‘scapes’: that is, as a series of junctures (like the famous Moscow Metro Map) that permit traffic to flow from stop to stop to stop. Yet however important construction- or traffic-based approaches are, one thing they don’t capture is the way that human community is arranged in support of roads, and why. What are the social ‘moorings’ that sustain roads: that service their surfaces and also their travelers, and thereby make transportation along their elaborately constructed landscapes possible at all?

    I’ve been trying to visualize an answer to this question, for one of Russia’s most famous roads: the Petersburg-Moscow corridor, in the late 18th century.  In what follows, I sketch some initial results; I’d be happy for your thoughts on it.

    Continue reading “Imagining the Petersburg-Moscow Road in the Late 18th Century”