ИСТИНА

Russian and Soviet censuses are important sources of social information. But the usual approach aggregated data of these censuses lack comparability on regional level. Practically it’s obvious, that regional structure of late Russian Empire was quite different from one of post-WWII Soviet Union. So the point of this paper is to find a way of comparison of aggregated censuses from 1897, 1926 and 1959. The Russian imperial (All-Russia) census that took place in 1897 was the first and the only census carried out in the Russian Empire (no including Finland). It recorded demographic data as of 28 January 1897. The second general census was scheduled for December 1915, but it was cancelled because of the World War I. So, the next census happened already in the USSR at the end of 1926, almost three decades later. The first Soviet post-World War II census was conducted only in January 1959, because a proposal for a new Soviet census for 1949 was rejected. The usual problem for spatial dynamic comparison of these three censuses is the significant difference of regional boundaries. Imperial gubernii (provinces) were mostly of different contour and area, even if their name didn’t change. In such case spatial visualization of censuses data needs some stable elements to make results comparable in historical retrospective. In this case study we’re going to compare quantity of population, but not attached to differing bounders, but to stable points on the map as cities and towns. Cities and towns almost never change their coordinates, that’s why mapping urban statistics gives us an opportunity to visualize dynamic processes of urbanization in limits of any of three statistical observations.