The tumultuous and agonising transformation of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in the first half of this century brought about dramatic changes in the size and structure of the population.

On the one hand, broadly in common with other industrialising countries – at first in Europe and then elsewhere – there was a long-term improvement in prosperity, living conditions and health provision affecting a large number of the population. In the mid-nineteenth century, birth rates and death rates were extremely high. But from the 1880s onwards both the death rate (CDR – crude death rate) and the birth rate (CBR – crude birth rate) in the Russian Empire as a whole steadily declined. This decline continued with interruptions through all the upheavals of the next eighty years, and by the 1960s the Soviet Union was already a society with the low birth rate and the low death rate characteristic of most industrialised countries. Simultaneously, the proportion of the population living in the towns greatly increased, from a mere 12–15 per cent in the 1890s to 33 per cent on the eve of the Second World War and over fifty per cent by the 1960s.

Our three decades were dominated, however, by three unprecedented demographic convulsions which distorted and disguised the long-term trends. In each case a large number of people died from violence, famine or epidemics; in the discussion which follows we shall refer to these premature deaths as ‘excess deaths’.

Statistics have very seldom been collected for purely historical analysis. They have normally been collected to assist in such functions as administration, planning, and levying taxes. Historians by the very nature of their subject are forced to use other people's statistics. They cannot redesign the surveys and questionnaires that were used in the past, they cannot measure things that were not measured or affect the timing and location of those surveys, censuses, investigations and registrations that were carried out. They have to make the best use of what statistical data and accounts are available to them. Before they begin using these data, however, they should attempt to discover how the data were collected and calculated, and by whom these operations were carried out. They should attempt to see whether there are any reasons for doubting the reliability of these data. Where doubts do arise as to their reliability, they should attempt to make an assessment of the possible scale of the inaccuracy. It is extremely dangerous to accept figures on trust without understanding their origin and history.

These homilies apply to the study of the economic and social development of any country at any time. They are even more important in the case of Soviet history. It is true that Western historians working on the economic and social history of the USSR have the advantage of dealing with a country that had a well-developed central statistical agency and was gathering and publishing data on all sorts of social phenomena.

This volume examines the main quantitative features of the economic development of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union from the eve of the First World War in 1913 to the end of the Second World War in 1945.

It is primarily intended as a textbook for students taking courses in comparative economic history, economic and social history of the Great Powers, and Russian or Soviet history. We hope that it will also prove to be a useful handbook for graduate students and for teachers of economic history, Russian and Soviet history and Communist affairs; the book is accordingly equipped with full references to text and tables, and with an extensive bibliography.

The years from 1913 to 1945 were a crucial period in Russian industrialisation. Between 1913 and 1939 the urban population increased from 26 to 56 million people, rising from 17.5 per cent to nearly 34 per cent of the total population. By 1914, the foundations had already been laid of modern iron and steel, fuel and cotton textile industries; some important branches of engineering had also been established. But these were islands in a sea of peasant agriculture and urban and rural handicrafts; Russia was industrially by far the most backward of the Great Powers. By the time of the German invasion in 1941, these industrial foundations had been greatly enlarged. Major new industries had also been established; these produced tractors, combine harvesters and motor vehicles, most kinds of capital equipment (including machine tools) and a wide range of sophisticated armaments.

In the quarter of a century between the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars – normally a brief period in agricultural history – the agricultural economy of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union suffered a series of shocks and convulsive changes.

During the agrarian revolution of 1917–18 the peasants seized the estates of the landowners, for centuries masters of the Russian land; nearly all private land and agricultural property were distributed among the peasants. Until the end of the 1920s almost all agriculture on Soviet territory was carried on by over twenty million peasant households, largely organised in traditional village communes. But in the early 1930s the collectivisation of agriculture was imposed from above. Better-off or recalcitrant peasants were expelled from their farms, and collective or state farms, controlled by the state, were everywhere established. The collective-farm system still dominates in most former Soviet territory today.

Agriculture experienced two periods of crisis (1916–21 and 1930–3) and two periods of recovery and growth (1921–8 and 1934–40). During the first crisis, world war, revolution and civil war were accompanied by the huge population movements described in chapter 4. During the civil war food requisitioning was imposed on the countryside by both Bolshevik and anti- Communist governments. By 1920 grain production had fallen to a mere two-thirds of the 1909–13 level. Following the introduction of the New Economic Policy, the restoration of a market relation between the state and the peasants enabled rapid recovery, and by 1928 production exceeded the pre-war level.

The ultimate aim of Materials for a Balance of the Soviet National Economy 1928–1930 was to produce an elaborate tableau économique for the whole Soviet economy. The work as completed in 1932 was, as the authors declare in their preface, ‘only a first attempt’. The methodology was not fully worked out. Data were often inadequate. The volume was produced in haste. While the authors seek to explain what they are doing quite fully, their explanations are often confused, and they are distributed more or less stochastically between Pervukhin's article and the notes on pp. 256–311, 441–60. The tables themselves are presented in four bundles, reproduced in chapter 3 of Materialy: section I (Summary tables), section II (Constituent elements in the balance), section III (Integrated tables in the balance) and the four tabular appendixes of section V. This division has a certain logic, but the logic proves to be complicated and elusive.

We resisted the temptation to rearrange all the tables and the explanatory notes into a systematic order. Materialy is an important collection of documents in the history of Soviet planning, and in the circumstances of its time was an outstanding achievement. We have no right to tamper with it; the reader will wish to explore it in its original form. But to spare you from some of the agonies we have suffered in trying to understand the interconnection between the tables and their statistical foundation, we have provided this summary guide to the tables and the explanatory notes.