The 1897 Census: The Acquisition of “Lost” Materials and Their Preliminary Analysis

Abstract

This article reviews primary materials of the 1897 census stored in the archives of Siberia and the Far East, systematises and analyses them as well as compares information potential of aggregated and personal data. The primary materials of the census were considered completely lost for a long time, but it is evident now that some Russian and foreign archives store some of the copied census papers. Data on archival nominative sources emerged in academic research in the late 20 th century. Nowadays, personal census data are used both by historical and philological studies. Methodologically, the author relies on the principles of system analysis and methods of archival heuristics to search for primary census materials. In order to systematise and evaluate primary materials, the article employs the historical-comparative methods as well as historical-typological method. The analysis is carried out with reference to studies addressing primary census material, reference sources, and funds of the state archives of Siberia and the Far East as well as issues of the Central Statistics Committee with the 1897 census results. Census papers in the archives of Siberia and the Far East are represented by 1895—1896 test forms, the second and the “third” (abridged) copies of census papers. The most detailed complexes of census papers are those for the settlements of Tobolsk Province uyezds with the exception of Berezovsky and Surgut Uyezds (Tobolsk archive), some uluses of Yakutsk Oblast (archive of the Republic of Sakha), the city of Yeniseisk (archive of Krasnoyarsk Region). The “third” copies have been preserved in the archive of Altai Region (settlements of Borovlyanskaya Volost of Barnaul Uyezd, Tomsk Oblast) and the archive of the Republic of Buryatia (Kuytun Volost of Nizhneudinsk Uyezd, Irkutsk Province). The article concludes that 1897 census papers have a high information potential; at the same time, the author points out their incompleteness depending on the region and that they have not been preserved equally well.