Population of the USSR in the 1930s: Mysteries of Demographic History

Abstract

The paper assesses the impact of ideological and political factors prevailing in the USSR on Soviet statistics that determined its population size over 12 years between All-Union censuses of 1926 and 1939. In this difficult period of Soviet history the country experienced forced industrialization, forced collectivization and accelerated, chaotic urbanization. Under these conditions, the demographic subsystem of the Soviet Union underwent fundamental changes. But the nature of these changes, shifts in population, and methods used by the Soviet statistics to obtain the most important demographic information have been studied very little. The paper shows how two dynamic population groups formed by Soviet statisticians – one published in the open press and another stored in the depths of the departmental archive TsUNHU SSSR. The author highlights how important had been registration of births, deaths, migrations in the estimates of population size. Numerous historical documents illustrate the complex work of statisticians to determine the population size under Soviet conditions of the 1930s. The paper sets forth pre-war and post-war assessments of changes in the country’s population.