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In the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1990, the political inequality of the nationalities’ representation in institutions of governance was overcome, non-Russians’ participation in the power structures increased, and Russians’ role in administration correspondingly decreased. The increased non-Russian percentage in governance was mainly due to the introduction of the democratic principle in government formation, according to which ethnicities should participate in proportion to their number. By 1990 in the USSR overall, Russians had a slight majority in all power structures, corresponding roughly to their higher share in the country’s population. In the union republics, however, the situation was different. Only in the RSFSR did all peoples, Russian and non-Russian, participate in government administration in proportion to their numbers, following the democratic norm. Elsewhere, Russians were underrepresented and therefore discriminated against in all organs of power, including the legislative branch. Representatives of non-Russian titular nationalities, who on average filled two-thirds of all administrative positions, predominated in disproportion to their numbers. Given these representatives’ skill majority in legislative bodies, republican constitutions permitted them to adopt any laws and resolutions they desired, including laws on secession from the USSR; and the executive and judicial authorities, together with law enforcement, would undoubtedly support them. Thus, the structural prerequisites for disintegration were established. Thereafter, the fate of the Soviet Union depended on republican elites and the geopolitical environment, because of the Center’s purposeful national policy, aimed toward increasing non-Russian representation among administrative cadres and the accelerated modernization and developmental equalization of the republics.

This article analyzes changes in both the nominal and real salaries of Russian officials and officers. The study draws upon data concerning provincial administrations, which employed a significant portion of officials, and the infantry, in which most of the officer corps served, from the introduction of monetary salaries in 1763 (for officials) and in 1711 (for officers) to 1913. A table of the changes in nominal salaries was compiled from legislative and regulatory documents, and, with the use of a consumer price index constructed by the author, time series of the real salaries of officials and officers of various ranks were obtained by decades over 150 years.

Non-Russian peoples were represented in Russian power structures long before the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, but less than the democratic norm, which suggests de facto ethnic discrimination in the Empire. In Soviet times, the actual ethno-political inequality of peoples in the USSR was gradually overcome, and participation of non-Russians in power structures grew systematically and even accelerated, and the role of Russians decreased accordingly. The increase in non-Russians’ share in governmental bodies was almost exclusively due to an increase in their ethnic status. By 1979, Russians had a very small majority in all government structures in the USSR as a whole, except for the legislative branch, which roughly corresponded to their higher share in the country’s population (50.8 % in 1989). However, the situation was different in the Union republics. Only in the Russian Federation did all peoples, Russian and non-Russian, participate in governmental bodies in proportion to their numbers and in full compliance with the democratic norm. In Belarus, Moldova, and Uzbekistan, titular ethnic groups were underrepresented, and Russians were overrepresented. In Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Estonia, the representation of Russians was below the democratic norm, and in nine republics it was higher, but despite this, they did not have a majority in any union republic. This situation developed as a result of the center’s national policy, which aimed at strengthening the authorities with national personnel, accelerating the modernization of the Union republics and raising the level of development in the lagging republics to the level of the most developed republics.

Over the period of 30 years various scientists representing different fields have been studying disintegration of the USSR with unflagging interest. As of August 1, 2020, more than 300 books, 3000 articles, and 20 dissertations have been written in Russia alone. Generalization and critical analysis of this literature requires a monograph. But this task is so complex that for the time being the case is limited to historiographical articles. The purpose of this article is to identify the most popular points of view expressed by well-known experts on the problem of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The analysis enables to draw the following conclusions. The existing explanations can be divided into two large groups. The first one includes works whose authors consider disintegration as the product of a combination of random circumstances, external causes, and mistakes of party and Soviet leaders, and therefore focus first on the study of the role of subjective and external factors, and, second, on the short period of time, 1985–1991, immediately preceding the disintegration. The second group includes works whose authors consider disintegration as a natural result of long-developed processes, search for its historical background, study trends in the development of the Soviet Union and the Union republics, and look at the disintegration systemically and comprehensively. In other words, the former consider disintegration to be a random phenomenon generated mainly by the events of 1985–1991, while the latter consider it to be a natural phenomenon with deep historical, economic, political, cultural, and social prerequisites and causes.

The level of ethnopolitical inequality is estimated as the ratio of the share of an ethnic group employed in public authorities to the share of this ethnic group among the entire employed population. This indicator can be called the coefficient of ethnopolitical representativeness. In Imperial Russia, almost all major non-Russian ethnic groups had representatives in power structures, although in most cases this was unrepresentative; the number of nominees from an ethnic group did not correspond to its population size. During the entire Soviet period, 1917–1990, there was a steady and systematic decrease in the inequality of ethnic groups in power structures. In 1989, discrimination in the authorities as a whole practically disappeared. The advantages of Russians in forming the Soviet government were minimized; their percentage in government corresponded to their share in the population. In some areas of government, ethnic inequality was leveled at different rates. In the state apparatus, equality in representation was already achieved in 1959. In the apparatus of party and public organizations, there was also a tendency to overcome discrimination, but in this area, by 1990, the percentage of non-Russians remained slightly lower than their share in the population. Minimization of ethnic inequality was a natural consequence, on the one hand, of the national policy of the country’s leadership, on the other — the desire of ethnic elites for equality in political rights.

The article is dedicated to the memory of L.I. Moskalev – renowned bio-oceanographer, zoologist who spent his entire scientific career at the Laboratory of Ocean Bottom Fauna. L.I. Moskalev participated in more than 30 deep-sea voyages, spent 200 hours diving in manned submersibles “Pisces” and “Mir”, published about 100 scientific papers and a popular book «Masters of the Deep» (2005). Colleagues will remember Lev Moskalev – an extraordinary and deep person and a true patriot of the Laboratory and P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology

In Russia of 1917, two-thirds of the male and female peasants age 10 and older had not had systematic schooling and were illiterate; the rest were able to read and do basic arithmetic. Only 0.1% of peasants studied in secondary or higher educational institutions. As a result, 99.9% of all peasants had a particular mode of thinking - concrete, situational, and directly related to sensations and actions. Mastery of the world in practical terms, through the window of the senses, left a deep imprint on the nature and content of peasants’ knowledge, on how they conceptualized the social and physical world, and on how they behaved.

After the Great Reforms of the 1860s – 1870s the Russian government embarked on the construction of a modern nation-state and was faced with the need to unify all parts of the empire administratively, culturally, legally, and socially. The new ethno-confessional policy in Russian historiography is often called Russification because the order established after the Great Reforms in the Great Russian provinces served as a model for the transformation of all parts of the empire. The Russification policy included many aspects, including Russifying [obrusenie] - the introduction of the Russian language as obligatory in the record keeping of public institutions, in court and administration, in education and everyday life. While the policy of Russifying has found ample reflection in the historiography, its results have been insufficiently studied. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap and to try to assess the process of Russifying ethnic minorities at the imperial level, drawing upon the first general census of the Russian Empire in 1897. The analysis has led to the conclusion that the policy of Russifying did not provide the expected results.

This research was supported by grant No. 19-09-00365 from Russian Foundation for Basic Research “Comparative analysis of the economic and social consequences of the February 19, 1861 reform in metropolitan provinces”.

Territorial expansion led to the fact that Russia gradually developed into a multiethnic empire in which the titular nation was the minority. Long-term preservation of the unity of the multiethnic and multiconfessional Russian empire is explained by the relatively flexible ethno-confessional policy of imperial ethno-paternalism, which respected the status quo of an attached territory and the population living upon it; cooperated extensively with local elites; demonstrated religious and ethnic tolerance; instituted some advantages in the legal position of non-Russians compared with Russians; and offered indigenous peoples of annexed territories the right to be civilian actors equally with Russians. The principles of ethno-paternalism, which at first glance are not compatible with autocracy and serfdom, were in fact the reality and were dictated by a twofold need: the small proportion of those of strictly Russian ethnicity in the imperial population as whole and in some particular areas, and the lack of administrative and financial resources and the underdeveloped information and transportation infrastructures necessary for the rapid and thorough assimilation of the non-Orthodox borderlands. These principles represented a kind of “technology” of management of the ethno-confessional diversity in the empire, enabling the realization of both the “assembling” of imperial space, and the gradual, relatively flexible and non-linear integration and modernization of traditional society and “national borderlands” into the modern polity. When and where these imperial technologies were not applied with sufficient consistency, ethno-confessional conflict arose, as did issues with the loyalty of local ethnic communities and their leaders in relation to the imperial center, and problems with regard to general regional stability and security.

The Russian people did not like Tsar Nicholas II and got it into their heads to remove him. The tsar carried out the desire of the people and abdicated. Having received freedom, the people began to rob and kill each other. On the first of March tsarism was overthrown, and the Provisional Government took its place. But it soon reduced Russia to an impossible state. --From essays submitted by students in the lower grades of a Moscow gymnasium, 1917 (1) The comments offered by my discussants are at once interesting and open to debate. All three wish I had engaged a greater number of issues in the article and gone into greater detail, but it is simply not possible in a text of 7,000 words to take on the entire issue of the history of the working class. The specific objective of my article determined its perspective and focus, which was primarily to show the untenability of the Marxist claim that the workers represented the most progressive class in Russian society in the early 20th century. Naturally I focused on those themes that seemed most pertinent to this particular question. Thus I paid special attention to the workers' cultural level, because I see this as having been critical in determining their mental outlook, their ability to assimilate Marxist ideas, and their ability to serve as leaders of the revolutionary movement. My interest in describing the workers' social marginality as well as their age, gender, and family profile stems from the fact that these factors, too, help us understand their mentality. I devoted considerable space to their length of employment, social origin, and ties to the village for the same reason. It is important to distinguish between the transformation of workers into a social class in generic sociological terms--that is, as one part of the broader process of the creation of an industrial society--and the formation of the proletariat as a class in the Marxist sense. Like any other social class, workers possess a distinct status, power, material position, education, and way of life. They have an image of themselves as well as of other groups and the broader social hierarchy around them. They may even perceive the need and the means to change their social circumstances. But their ideology need not necessarily be pro-Marxist. (2) Russian workers in the early 20th century did not possess all the essential characteristics of a class not only in the Marxist sense but also in the general sociological meaning of the term. Their community did not have welldefined social boundaries. Their class identity was also problematic from the perspective of self-identification and cross-identification. By law individual workers did not possess equal rights either in their own milieu or beyond it. Instead, their rights and obligations were those of their estates of origin, and they indeed took their origin from all the social estates of the empire, including the nobility and clergy. The majority of workers characterized themselves in estate terms, while other social groups perceived them (and themselves) in the same way. (3) This was because a class-based society was only just coming into being in the late imperial decades. Meanwhile, for workers to have acquired a class-based identity the classes around them would have to have acquired this class-based outlook as well. The prevailing age and gender structure among working people was such that Russian workers could not reproduce themselves, demographically speaking, which further compounded the situation. The ranks of the workers, in effect, always needed replenishment, and these new members came largely from the village. Furthermore, those working people who managed to obtain more education and move higher up the social ladder ultimately ceased to be employed as workers. This upward social mobility also impeded the workers' maturation as a social class. Sarah Badcock's critique reflects the values of traditional historical research--that is, the importance that all historians place on drawing from and speaking to one's sources and of reasoning from the particular to the general. …

According to Marxist theory, the working class represents the principal dynamic force of the revolution because of its important intrinsic qualities--namely, its discipline and capacity to organize, its sense of solidarity and collective spirit, and its ability to engage in collective action. The workers' most important quality, however, is their supposed understanding and mastery of the socialist creed (simvol sotsialisticheskoi very), which is itself understood to be the direct result of their class consciousness. A true proletarian understands the difference between capitalism and socialism, between bourgeois and socialist revolution, and he knows the path ahead. He also appreciates the leading role he is expected to play in the necessary destruction of capitalism and the building of socialism, fully aware of his calling as the obvious dominant power (gegemon) and vanguard of the revolution. According to the tenets of Soviet historiography, the formation of the proletariat as a class in Marxist terms had been effectively accomplished in late tsarist Russia by the 1880s. By that time, workers were fully conscious of themselves as proletarians, which was regarded as the necessary proof that the class itself had come into being as a social formation. By 1917, this established social class was primed to carry out a socialist revolution and therefore readily assumed its appropriate leading role in the revolutionary movement. Following the end of the USSR in 1991, the problem of how the Russian working class actually became mobilized to do this predictably lost some of its urgency. Certain studies, however, continued to engage the topic and offered at least a partial revision of the standard Soviet position, suggesting that the workers coalesced as a class not in the 1880s but later, during World War I. (1) As for historians writing outside the country, there has never been a Soviet-like consensus on the problem of the Russian working class. However, an influential school of social historical research nonetheless agreed that a bona fide working class had effectively formed by 1917 and that, by then, a significant share of workers had begun to self-identify as proletarians. Scholars from this school of thought acknowledged the legitimacy of the revolution based on the framework of modernization theory. The workers and the soldiers represented the driving force of the revolution, after all, not the Bolsheviks. (2) Soviet historians reached their conclusions by combining deductive reasoning with Marxist definitions of the proletariat and socialist revolution. By contrast, non-Soviet specialists based their views on inductive reasoning drawn largely from empirical analysis. The logic of Soviet historians was straightforward: if the workers were the social group that played the most active role in overthrowing the monarchy and later the Provisional Government and were the most ardent in displaying their revolutionary fervor, then, naturally, they possessed a proletarian consciousness. Using deductive reasoning to resolve historical questions, however, does not work. This is especially true when the original theory at issue is itself subject to serious doubt. The use of inductive reasoning, however, also has its limitations. The empirical material on which historians have drawn to support their conclusions about workers during the revolution, for example, rests solely on assessments of the workers' exterior involvement in revolutionary events. By contrast, their interior motivations, incentives, and self-reflections as to how and why they engaged in revolution have generally been overlooked. Yet it is precisely such interior questions that are critical to understanding the extent to which workers endorsed socialist doctrine. The mere fact that a deviant act occurs is not enough to describe it as a "crime." One has to determine criminal intent, the offender's awareness of the criminal nature of his/her intent, and his/her participation in the crime. …

Various forms of family organization among Russian peasants and urban dwellers coexisted from the sixteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The correlation of family types changed and was a function of circumstances and economic conditions. The available data indicate that from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, extended and multiple families predominated among peasants, though the relationship between single-family and multifamily households changed. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a steady process of nuclearization of family structure began, as a result of which the simple family gradually replaced multiple families at first in the cities later in the villages.

I studied Russian history in school in the 1950s; my son studied it with my help in the 1970s, and my grandson in the 2000s. I attended St. Petersburg State University in the 1960s and have taught there since 1972. My experience tells me that the textbook under discussion is the best one so far) It is part of an Educational-Methodological Set (EMS) that also includes a teacher's manual, (2) a handbook on teaching methods, (3) a set of maps, (4) a lesson plan for school courses, (5) an electronic supplement, (6) and a supporting website (history.standard.edu.ru). The Teacher's Manual was published first and, after discussion of its contents, the rest of the set appeared. More than 3,000 people throughout the country took part in the debate about the manual, and another 2,000 participated in direct meetings with the authors, who then seriously addressed many concerns that the public expressed before publishing the second edition of the Teacher's Manual and the Textbook. (7) For example, they dropped the political evaluations of Soviet leaders and cut a chapter titled "Debates about the Role of Stalin in History," which argued that one of the causes of the repression was the "desire to achieve maximum efficiency of the management apparatus." The chapter also described the outcome of the purges as the "creation of a new managerial class adequate to the goals of modernization under conditions of a deficit of resources." Two new chapters were added to the Teacher's Manual'. "Nationalities Policy: The Situation in the Republics of the USSR," and "Russia in 2007-Early 2008." The authors also re-edited the last chapter, "Russia's New Course." In my opinion, it makes more sense to evaluate the EMS as a whole instead of dwelling on its parts. Conception and Methodology The authors designed the EMS as a tool to educate citizens and patriots by reevaluating the key events of Russian history between 1945 and 2008 as well as redefining Russia's place and role in the world and the Russian leadership's new strategic course. The Textbook attempts to form positive values and a positive attitude toward the country and toward oneself. It also encourages civic values. The conceptualization of the EMS aims to fulfill these goals by offering a "Russocentric" analysis and evaluation wherein Russia's national and state interests are the point of reference. (8) The EMS treats Russian history as continuous in terms of "path dependence" and "erases the artificial barrier between pre- and postrevolutionary Russian history, which demonstrates the continuity and stability of its historical path." Above all, the texts posit continuity in the nature of political institutions and in principles of domestic and foreign policy. "The most significant of these principles was the concentration of power in a single center and a firmly centralized system of state administration.... The formation of a firm, militarized political system acted as an instrument for solving extraordinary goals in extraordinary circumstances, while the system as a whole was a modification of that which existed during the Muscovite period and the Russian empire" (Teacher's Manual, 83-84, 88). The EMS, however, also maintains that Russians have the freedom to choose an alternative form of development. "To maintain that the [Soviet] system was incapable of renewal and had to be destroyed is highly naive, given the examples of China and Vietnam" (Teacher's Manual, 368). "Russia's fate, the determination of its unique historical path, is in the hands of its citizens" (Handbook on Teaching Methods, 3-4). The Textbook maintains that democracy is the best political system. "In today's world, a democratic political regime ensures effective direction.... The separation of powers and a system of checks and balances prevent personalized and hasty decisions and involve society in decision-making. In contrast, power struggles within the Soviet system took on a destructive character; decisions were made by either single individuals or narrow groups; society was completely removed from participation in the articulation and execution of political decisions. …

The trend in mean height in the Russian province of Saratov is estimated for birth cohorts from 1755 to 1892 on the basis of newly gathered archival data and published sources. Heights fell in the late eighteenth century due an increasing burden of taxes and feudal dues. Stature increased slowly throughout the nineteenth century, offering no support for the hypothesis of an agrarian crisis that provoked or followed from the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Improving living conditions can be attributed to economic development, rising productivity in agriculture, and diversification of peasant economic activity into other sectors.

In his critique of one chapter of my book, Steven Hoch begins with a quotation from Sotsial%naia istoriia Rossii: "Burdensome peasant labor exhausted and aged woman at an early age; soon after age 23-24, a peasant woman lost her attractiveness and especially her health." But I did not write "especially"; I wrote "partially." The word otchasti means partly or to some extent. By translating it as "especially," Hoch distorted the meaning of the phrase. Criticism is fine. But when the criticism makes no sense, I will skip it. But this is only part of the story. Hoch exposes this phrase to a second distortion by ignoring two words: "soon after." And, in this context, "soon after" does not mean tomorrow or the day after tomorrow but in several years. Therefore his assertion that "the women Mironov identifies, those aged 23-24, could in fact look forward to 15 to 20 very healthy years," must be replaced with "the women . . . those aged 25-30, could in fact look forward to 13 to 14 healthy years." Hoch overestimates the average duration of life by 2 to 6 years. So, the sense of this phrase suffered twice. This strikes me as an unfair method of criticism-to misstate the author's point of view and then to criticize this new, misstated point of view. Hoch's criticism continues: "Mironov offers yet another unusual explanation for early age at marriage in Russian society: 'Early marriages were a means to give a legal outlet to the hypersexuality of youth.' Mironov offers no explanations for why hypersexuality resulted in early marriage. As northern and western European demographic patterns and social practices make clear, other outlets were possible. Were the Russian state and the Orthodox church really so powerful that they could control illicit behavior and force Russian youth into early legal unions"? It is odd that a man who considers himself an expert in demography does not know what the hypersexuality of youth is. I will explain. The hypersexuality of youth is the culmination of sexual activity. Males reach it between the ages of 17 and 19; females somewhat later.' At this age, the great physiological need for sexual relations is yet more intensified by youthful curiosity and the aspiration for self-affirmation, since for a young man the initiation of sexual activity is the most important proof of his longed-for manhood. The desire for sexual activity incites a youth to search for a partner and thus stimulates premarital sexual relations. Early marriages helped solve the problem of premarital sexual relations, which were condemned in the countryside and could lead to disgrace for the young women involved. For illiterate Russian peasants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, early marriage provided an appropriate outlet for their hypersexuality.

I thank William Wagner for his remarks on the problems of law and the state, which are key issues addressed in my book, and for his generally positive evaluation. Let me reply to the central questions he raises. Wagner highlights the price paid for using any sociological paradigm, in particular the theory of modernization, in historical research, when he says that my "analysis and argument also reflect the weaknesses of the concept of modernization and of the perception of Russia as a European society within the paradigm of modernization." He adds that at times "the argument becomes teleological and deterministic, with the concept of modernization itself serving as the primary or in some cases even the sole causal explanation." This remark reflects ajustifiable concern on the part of many historians that the application of theory leads to a priori judgments, and Wagner is right to point out that I did not entirely succeed in avoiding this danger. I found it impossible to analyze the social history of the country for three hundred years without drawing on some middlerange theory, however. If over the course of the imperial period Russian civil law had not progressively come to recognize and protect the rights and autonomy of individuals and criminal law had not been gradually recast on the basis of individual responsibility, if Russian statehood had not developed toward a state governed by law and society had not acquired civic mediating bodies, if families had not become smaller and more democratic, if the individual had not emerged from the collective, if social organizations had not moved from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, then the application of the theory of modernization, or of any other theory, would not be able to detect these processes. Wagner agrees that these processes were occurring, and of course if I had not posed questions about these tendencies the answers would not have appeared in my book. It seems to me that the application of theory does not predetermine conclusions but only helps to define interesting questions and to organize one's materials. I discovered the above-mentioned tendencies in the development of law, statehood, society, family, and individualism and became aware of their significance only after completing my research. I began work with some rather more pessimistic hypotheses about the course of Russia's development, as may be seen from the initial prospectus I submitted to Westview Press, the publisher of the English-language edition, in 1991. Although my initial hypotheses were not confirmed, they helped me to organize my materials without, as can be seen, predetermining the conclusions. During the years I was at work on the book, I changed from a pessimist into an optimist. One consequence of this shift was the addition of a subtitle: Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem'i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva (The genesis of individualism, the democratic family, civil society and a state governed by law). In my view, the theory of moderniza

Willard Sunderland raises an interesting question: is it possible to write a social history of the Russian empire from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, a history of the empire as a specific society? In my book, I wrote about the social history of Russia rather than about the social history of the Russian empire. Russia proper was the most important part of the empire, which is why it was the focus of my attention; yet it was only a part of the empire. Neither in the title, nor in the preface where I outline my intent did I claim to address the social history of the empire. Indeed I believe that it is virtually impossible to accomplish this specific task. In principle I do not believe that there can be such a subject as the social history of the Russian empire if we mean the social history, not of the separate ethnic groups within the empire, but of the empire as a whole, of the empire as a society. After all, the Russian empire never was a one-nation state, and Russia is still not one today. If you ask a citizen of present-day Russia of any age "What is your nationality?" that person will respond, "I am a Karelian, Tatar, Jew," and so on. None will say, "I am a Rossianin." But if you put the same question to a citizen of the United States, that person will answer, "I am an American." The Russian empire comprised many ethnic groups and the social life of each group followed its specific customs and laws. Ethnic groups interacted to a greater extent at the level of the elites than at the level of ordinary people, of course. But, in my opinion, they did not live a common life, did not share common thoughts and feelings, did not exist as a united society. At best, the central government was the conductor, but the orchestra-the people of the empire-played music primarily composed somewhere other than in the empire's capital, although the music was arranged and orchestrated by St. Petersburg. An explanation of how the ethnic groups interacted, what they thought of each other, how they treated each other, and how they influenced each other would produce an interesting and important study, but, in my view, such a comparative social history goes beyond the scope of the type of social history that I wanted to write. Yet, a comparative social history of individual nations and ethnic groups-Poles, Finns, Armenians, and others-within the Russian empire might provide an answer to the question about the relationship between pluses and minuses for non-Russians who lived in the empire. Given the views I just outlined, why did I touch upon the problem of nationalities in my book on the social history of Russia? I did so because one cannot write a social history of Russia without taking its environment into account. In the first chapter, which could be entitled "Nature and People," I considered almost all issues pertaining to the empire. This chapter provides the background to processes and events in the social history of Russia, and, for this reason, I did not elaborate on some of the nu

Russian Cities. An important peculiarity of Russian urbanization from 1740-1870 was the deceleration of its tempo at precisely the moment when urbanization increased in Western Europe (to the mid-eighteenth century Russia lagged behind only England and France in relative numbers of urban population). The main reasons for this deceleration, in the comparative context, are that the industrial revolution began later in Russia and pro ceeded more slowly than in Western Europe, and that the character of Russian indus trialization was more diffused, in particular industrialization took place in equal parts in the city and the countryside. As result, urban industrialization, the main factor in rapid urbanization in Western European countries was weakened by rural industrialization. In 1725, 78% of all industrial enterprises and 86% of the labor force were concentrated in cities, but by 1868 Russian cities controlled only 41% of industry and 39% of labor., Mironov Boris. Les villes de Russie entre l'Occident et l'Orient (1750-1850). In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 46ᵉ année, N. 3, 1991. pp. 705-733.

El problema de la relación entre educación y crecimiento económico es muy pertinente a la situación socioeconómica actual de la URSS. El pais con el nivel más alto, o al menos uno de los más altos, de educación entre las naciones desarrolladas tiene uno de los más bajos en términos de renta nationalper capita. ¿Es ello paradójico? Sí, si somos de la opinión de que la renta nacional responde de modo inmediato y directo a la educación profesional de la población activa de un país. No es paradójico, no obstante, si se acepta la hipótesis de que hay que dejar pasar un cierto período de tiempo para que la educación dé fruto. En este sentido se nos plantea la siguiente cuestión: ¿con qué desfase han tenido los cambios en el nivel educativo un efecto apreciable sobre la renta nacional en Rusia/URSS?

From 1700-1704 to 1795-1799 the average stature of Russian recruits decreased from 164.7 to 159.5 cm. It means that the eighteenth century is noted for the fall in the biological status of the Russian population. The decrease occurred against the background of a considerable economic growth and was caused not by economic depression but by the rise in taxes and obligations. Increase in payments to the state was linked with the wars Russia waged for outlets to the Baltic and Black seas, and for the status of a great power, and with reforms carried out by the supreme power catching up with the West European countries.

The history of literacy in Russia may be divided into four periods: 1) the Kievan, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries (before the Mongol invasion); 2) the medieval (Muscovite), from the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries; 3) the imperial, from the eighteenth century to 1917; and 4) the Soviet, after 1917. For each of these periods distinctive sources have been preserved that call for special handling and methodologies.

Soviet historical scholarship currently possesses an arsenal of approaches and methods for studying the past. Nevertheless, lacunae continue to exist in the data available for the investigation of certain problems, and their elimination is closely associated with the search for new ways to increase the informational output of a given source.2

Cereal Price Movement in Russia from the 18th Century to the Beginning of the 20th Century Between 1707 and 1914, whereas the general price index in Russia is six times greater, cereal prices increase tenfold. Ending in the Russian market being almost aligned on European prices, this movement is accompanied by a levelling of regional prices throughout the country, for the benefit, on the one hand, of zones closest to the markets, and on the other hand favouring the lowest price areas. Correlation analysis shows that price dynamics was determined by the evolution in money supply, the volume of exports, world market and grain export prices, production costs and extent of the crop. This indicates that even before the reforms in the 1860's, the principles of merchant production, had pervaded Russian economy and society., Mironov Boris. Le mouvement des prix des céréales en Russie du XVIIIe siècle au début du XXe siècle. In: Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations. 41ᵉ année, N. 1, 1986. pp. 217-251.