New Online Database Highlights How Russia Changed During the 20th Century

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 7 – Andrey Markevich, a Moscow economic historian, has overseen the creation of RISTAT, a collection of statistical data about seven aspects of Russian life (population, labor, industrial production, agriculture, services, capital and land) between 1795 and 2002).
    Aleksandr Basov of the To Be Precise portal has mined this database to come up with seven charts that highlight the ways in which Russia changed over the course of the 20th century, just one of the ways RISTAT (ristat.org/) can be used (tochno.st/materials/my-izucili-istoriceskuiu-statistiku-rossii-s-konca-1890-x-godov-vot-sem-grafikov-o-tom-kak-xx-vek-izmenil-stranu).
    His key findings include:
•    The share of the urban population in Russia rose from 12 percent in 1897 to 52 percent in 1959 and 73 percent in 2002.
•    The population of Russia east of the Urals rose by five times but much of this was by compulsion rather than in response to market forces and is now falling as a result.
•    Over the course of the 20th century, birthrates decreased from 52 births per 1,000 population in 1897 to 10 per 1,000 at the end. Death rates fell from 34 per 1,000 at the end of the 19th century to 16 per 1,000 at the end. But deaths rose again after 1959.
•    Women in Russia joined the paid workforce earlier and more rapidly than was the case in the US and Europe. In 1897, 13 percent of Russian women worked outside the home; but by 1959, 63 percent did, and by 2002, 81 percent, almost equal to the 84 percent of men.
•    Literacy rose from 20 percent in 1897 to 93 percent in the 1960s. And the share of Russians with higher education rose as well, from 0.5 percent in 1897 to almost 20 percent at the end of the 20th century.