Abstract
From 1935, in a way that now seems almost surreal, Ukraine’s UNKhU (Directorate for National Economy and Account) challenged the figures on births and deaths registered between 1930 and 1935. In a note addressed to the leadership of the Republic’s Communist Party, presenting them with some figures on annual change in the Ukrainian population between 1926 and 1934 (Table 2.1), Aleksandr Asatkin, Director of the UNKhU of Ukraine, expressed his amazement at the peak in mortality observed in 1933, and attempted to explain it through errors in the registration system (ZAGS), without, of course, ever mentioning the famine that had reached its highest level in that year. However, checks made in 1934-1935 on the way ZAGS functioned showed that deaths in the regions most affected by the disaster had in fact been under-registered. Moreover, ZAGS’ final results for 1933 were much higher than this 1935 document showed (see N.B. in Table 2.1; Annex I, Tables 1 and 2 on the CD-ROM). In reality, the presence of famine was clear, but everything was done to conceal it. Monitors from the TsUNKhU (Central Directorate for National Economy and Account), covering the whole USSR, systematically reclassified deaths initially classified as “from starvation” under either “cause of death unknown” or “from exhaustion”.
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Notes
- 1.
The ZAGS Monitoring Commission was created on 20 February 1934 by the Central Committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). It was made up of civil servants from the TsUNKhU, the CPSU Monitoring Committee and the Committee for Soviet Control. It probably functioned up to September 1935.
- 2.
Document from the Russian State Archive of the Economy, fonds 1562, series 329, file131.
- 3.
TsUNKhU compiled three forms of statistics on births and deaths: monthly provisional statistics, final annual statistics including late reports, and final statistics adjusted by estimating births and deaths for territories not covered by ZAGS.
- 4.
In his 1996 publication (Pyrozhkov 1996), several typographical errors have crept into the table that gives the population observed in 1939 (Table, Annex 1, p. 1039). It should read: for the total, both sexes, all ages, 30,946,000 (instead of 30,046,000); it should also read, for 15–19 years, both sexes 2,962,000 (instead of 2,062,000); finally, for the female sex, it should read 1,526,000 for 15–19 years (instead of 1,626,000) and 909,000 for 40–44 years (instead of 809,000); there are no errors on the male side, however.
- 5.
Assessed by interpolating the available life expectancies for 1926–1927 and 1938–1939 and then deducing age-specific probabilities of death from these, using Coale-Demeny (1983) model life tables.
- 6.
Assessed on the basis of the Coale-Trussell model (1974).
- 7.
It is difficult to estimate the rate of coverage of births by ZAGS registration, but at the very least we must increase the registered births by a number equal to the excess infant deaths produced by the correction of infant mortality rates.
- 8.
If we take the ratio of observed births to the expected population, the general fertility rate rises to 130 per 1,000, but that under-estimates the true situation, since the actual population is obviously lower than the expected population.
- 9.
Gulag is an acronym of Глaвнoe Упpaвлeниe ЛAГepeй (Chief Directorate for Camps). Therefore, we could refer to deportations ‘by the Gulag’. However, the word ‘Gulag’ has passed into other languages to designate the camps themselves and so we can also refer to deportations ‘to the gulag(s)’. Therefore, when referring to the Directorate, we shall write this word with an initial capital letter, while in the second instance we shall treat it as a common noun.
- 10.
- 11.
Document from the Russian State Archive of the Economy, fonds 1562, series 329, file 200, item 191.
- 12.
It should also be made clear that people who were deported, once outside Ukraine, also suffered from high excess mortality, which is not taken into account here.
- 13.
For the specific needs of this comparison, our estimate of ‘non-crisis deaths’ had to be adapted. In effect, we had to base our reasoning on the deaths that normal mortality would have produced in the actual population resulting from the crisis. In order to do this, we used our forward projection, as if there had been no crisis, from the population observed in the 1926 census – but, in this case, we took the results only as far as 1932. For the years 1934–1938, we made a backward projection from the population observed in the 1939 census. Finally, for the year 1933, the hardest hit by the crisis, we took the mean of these two types of estimate.
- 14.
It can well be imagined that, for various reasons of an administrative or cultural nature, under-registration of girls’ deaths was higher than boys’.
- 15.
Word coined from kulak (wealthy peasant), to designate Stalin’s policy of destroying this socio-economic group.
- 16.
The correction made to the infant mortality rate led to an estimated proportion of 44% of deaths at under 1 year of age being ZAGS-registered. We hypothesised that this rate of coverage increased rapidly with age between 1 and 5 years, rising from 55% at age 1 to 84% at age 4. Once the remaining deaths were distributed between the older ages, the rate of coverage at age 5 went up to 98%. It then remained more or less at this level until it reached the oldest old, falling to below 90% again after age 90.
- 17.
We should clarify that this in no way relates to our correction of under-registration of deaths, since we estimated that there was almost total coverage (98%) at this age.
- 18.
Firstly, we needed population estimates to match to the denominators of the rates; we used the results of the forward projection up to 1 January 1933 and those of the backward projection from 1 January 1934. However, the result for the year 1934 proved implausible at ages over 80, since the total population numbers were much too high in comparison to the estimated deaths. This relates to the fact that the 1939 census greatly overestimated the total number of very aged people, claiming to have observed over 1,000 centenarians – in an era when there were only 200 in France. With backward projection, this over-estimate of the total numbers of the oldest old affects the younger age groups and hinders the calculation of rates. We therefore made a new forward projection up to 1 January 1934, on the basis of estimated mortality for 1932 and 1933, and took a mean between the forward- and backward-projected populations as our denominator for the 1934 rates.
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Vallin, J., Meslé, F., Adamets, S., Pyrozhkov, S. (2012). The Crisis of the 1930s. In: Mortality and Causes of Death in 20th-Century Ukraine. Demographic Research Monographs. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2433-4_2
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