A Re-Examination of Russian Harvest Statistics for the End of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In debates about the cause(s) of the Russian Revolution, considerable attention is given to the living standards of the population and their evolution in the late Imperial period. In these debates, the level of grain production and its changes over time play a major role. The current dominant interpretation, in both the Anglophone world and the Russophone world, is that per capita production and consumption of grain grew significantly in the late Imperial period. Hence prolonged low and worsening living standards could not have been a cause of the Russian Revolution. This article argues that the statistical data that are used to support this argument are unreliable because they ignore the fact that the methods used to collect and process this data were not uniform over time.