Spatial Analysis of Peasants’ Migrations in Russia/USSR in the First Quarter of the 20th Century

Abstract

The role of migrations in Russian history is immense and cannot be underestimated. This paper is the first one attempting to analyze (using specialized aggregation statistical method and GIS) the macrostructure of the migration flows of Russia’s rural population since the end of the 19th century and to the first quarter of the 20th century to create an integral spatial distribution of Russia’s rural population inter-regional movement. For such enormous country as Russia it’s necessary to use macro-analysis of the migration data. The second section of the paper gives short overview of the peasants’ migrations in Russia and reveals the “bottlenecks” in the relevant research literature. The third section shows that these “bottlenecks” can be overcome using the materials of the 1926 All-Union Population Census. The method is applied for the aggregation of the migration flows network according to the data on all the 29 regions of the country (the fourth section); our NetAgg program permits to construct a macrostructure of the inter-regional migration, to reveal the groups of the main regions—the “consumers” and “suppliers” of rural migrants, to determine the intensities of the migration flows between the revealed homogeneous groups of regions. The fifth section gives interpretation of the obtained macro-structure of peasants’ migration flows and the last one contains GIS maps to visualize the results of spatial structure of the migration flows.