ИСТИНА

This paper investigates occupational change in Russia over a period witnessing two waves of industrialisation – late-nineteenth century capitalist industrial take-off and mid-twentieth century non-market Soviet industrialisation. It relies on data from the Electronic Repository for Russian Historical Statistics (basically retrieved from the all-Russian population censuses of 1897 and 1959) for two cross-sections (1897 and 1959), coded in the Primary-Secondary-Tertiary system (PST) developed by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure to measure occupational and sectoral change and investigates to what extent Soviet non-market industrialisation produced a distinctive pattern of occupational change. The paper relies on provincial level data and geographical shifts in the professional and sectoral make-up of the population take centre-stage in the analysis. In this paper we measure occupational change in Russia between 1897 and 1959 using the PST classification. This is a purely pragmatical choice – the census data for 1897 are sectoral rather than occupational, and although for 1959 we could use HISCO, it would preclude a comparison over time. Using PST, however, we can compare sectoral shifts over time and still add on the occupational information for 1959. The 1897 and 1959 population censuses allow us to identify 103 out of the full PST range of 130 ‘groups’. Not for all of these groups neatly separated data are available – some of them are indistinguishable from each other in either the 1897 or 1959 dataset, or both and are therefore listed as combined ‘groups’. However, we have a good opportunity to compare the occupational situation both at the national level and in regional distribution. We reveal some important occupational changes over time. First, agriculture is by far the largest sector of employment both in 1897 and in 1959, even if its share is slashed notably over the sixty-year period under study. We face to deal with some peculiarities of the 1897 population census which recorded many of family members as dependants without any occupation, thus hiding the real occupational distribution especially in agriculture. If we consider in some more detail the rise of the other sectors, the main trends are (1) the rise of heavy industry, in particular metal-working and machine-building, (2) an increase of employment in transport and communication, in (3) various branches of construction, and (4) a significant increase of employment in services. The increasing importance of heavy industry is a finding entirely in line with what we know of the priorities in Stalinist and Soviet industrial development, which aimed to build up an industrial basis for further autarkic economic development. Indeed, the shares of metal-working and machine-building are in fact perhaps smaller than one would have expected given the sustained development of heavy industry since at least 1929. The main trend in regional distribution over time in this branch is the spread of employment in manufacturing from two industrial heartlands in European Russia, around Moscow and St. Petersburg, to other areas of the country in the East and North. This conforms well with what we know about Stalinist industrialisation, which aimed for the exploitation of the mineral resources of the country’s Asian territories, building factories right along the main extraction sites. A similar increase of employment took place in transport and communication, accounting for 2.3% of the workforce in 1897 and 8.5% in 1959. On the one hand this reflects general, worldwide increases in this sector, due to technological change and increased mobility. But in the Soviet case it is likely also a corollary to the industrial and agricultural development of many remote parts of the country starting from the 1930s on. In 1897 employment in transport appears to have been spread rather evenly across the country, with the only outliers being the Far Eastern coastal province with 5-7% of the workforce, and the coastal province of the North Caucasus (7-10%), where some of the ports were located through which grain produced on the steppe hinterland of the Black Sea was exported to the world market. Internal river and rail transport does not appear to have been accompanied by any regional or local concentrations of employment in this sector. By 1959, however, a completely different picture has emerged - the Eastern and Northern territories of the country consistently show the highest percentages of the workforce employed in transport and communication, which is a vivid illustration of the deliberate infrastructural development effort in these remote and relatively thinly populated regions. Most impressive, however, in terms of the numbers of people involved, is the rise of the service sector. To be sure, in the Soviet state-run economy this does not reflect the rise of a private service sector, but the expansion of the state one. The sector includes the ‘professions’ group i.e. doctors, teachers, engineers and scientists (all of whom were state-employed in the 1959 Soviet Union), as well as the auxiliary workers assisting these qualified professionals etc. What is remarkable is that actual government service accounts for only a relatively modest share of the workforce (2.1%), and does not show the sort of rapid increase one would have imagined considering the fundamentally different role of the state in all walks of life respective to 1897. In contrary, the data reveal the second set of occupational shifts – the demise of several groups which were important in 1897, but no longer so in 1959. These are, significantly, domestic service (generally included into the rising service sector), light industry and trade. Conclusively, some of the changes found over time are entirely consistent with the transition from a capitalist to a socialist economy, in particular the decrease of trade in sectoral employment. Within manufacturing we observe a manifest shift in labour allocation from light to heavy industry, indicative of Soviet investment priorities and forcibly reduced consumption in the USSR.