Abstract
The history of the Russian industry, from the nineteenth century to the present day, is a narrative of the rise and fall of a unique civilization. The narrative shows the transformation of a huge agrarian country into a formidable military power equipped with sophisticated technology and how it remained powerful for a limited time. The living standards of the population did not advance with the country’s armed forces, and, eventually, public dissatisfaction caused the regime to collapse. This chapter discusses the Russian industry’s history from a statistical perspective. We describe industrial development during the Russian Empire, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and the newly born Russian Federation, showing relevant statistics and illuminating the characteristics of industrial statistics in respective ages.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For details of criticism leveled against the factory statistics, see Tomioka (1998, Chap. 4, sections 1, 4).
- 3.
Categorization, based on the number of workers and the existence of mechanization, was used even after the October Revolution. In the USSR, for example, a large-scale industrial enterprise was defined as an entity with a labor force of 16 workers or more in the presence of mechanization or 30 workers or more without mechanization (TsUNKhU 1934, p. 25).
- 4.
Apart from the so-called factory industry, the household industry (often called kustar’ industry) also existed in the Russian Empire. This is discussed later in this section.
- 5.
The following descriptions in this section are based on Suhara (2013, Chap. 8).
- 6.
While this index is typically called the Kondrat’ev index after the name of the world-renowned Soviet economist, the real author was, probably, Ia. P. Gerchuk, a researcher at the Conjuncture Institute (Suhara 2013, p. 482).
- 7.
The growth rates actually calculated from production indices shown in Table 7 in Goldsmith (1961, pp. 462–463) are clearly different from the growth rates displayed in Table 8 (Goldsmith 1961, p. 465). While the average annual growth rate, for example, for the period 1860 to 1913 calculated from the linked production index (imputed weights) shown in Table 7 is calculated as 4.7%, Goldsmith calculated this rate as 5.3% in Table 8.
- 8.
This figure of 4.7% is not the figure Goldsmith himself showed in Table 8 of his paper but was the figure calculated by the author of this chapter.
- 9.
Note that since the boundary between the factory and kustar’ industry was ambiguous, factory statistics substantially included the production of the kustar’ industry as Lenin repeatedly noted in his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia. (see Lenin 1954a, Chap. 6).
- 10.
TsSU was renamed several times. It was called the State Statistics Committee (Goskomstat) in the Gorbachev era.
- 11.
While this book was issued with the subtitle Statistical Anthology in 1957, it was altered in the year after next to a yearbook in just the same manner as the USSR edition.
- 12.
It seems that there was no case in which “fish catch” or “timber hauled” was included in the industrial statistics of Imperial Russia.
- 13.
Although physical output data of individual products in the nonferrous metals branch were disclosed in the same way as products in other branches until the mid-1930s, thereafter, no output data for nonferrous metals were published, and this situation continues to the present. The reasons are conjectured to be that nonferrous metal products are related to military production, and the labor camps managed by the Gulag were a significant factor in the production of nonferrous metals.
- 14.
G. Grossman called the attitude of statistical authorities that could mislead readers of statistics by intentional obscurity “descriptive distortion,” distinguishing it from “numerical distortion” in which figures were rewritten arbitrarily outright (Grossman 1960, p. 107). In addition to descriptive distortion, there was utterly unnecessary and meaningless concealment of statistical data in Soviet statistics. For example, in various statistical yearbooks, approximate production indices for industry rounded off to the nearest whole numbers were listed one after another with changes only to the reference base years instead of showing the time series of real production values.
- 15.
Concrete figures of wholesale prices for individual industrial products are shown with detailed explanations in Suhara (2013, Chap. 3).
- 16.
The shares of value added for each industrial branch are estimated by Suhara (2013).
- 17.
It was presumably in the 1989 edition of the RSFSR statistical yearbook (Goskomstat RSFSR 1990) that actual estimation values of fixed capital were revealed for the first time.
- 18.
For a debate between US and UK scholars on the inflation of the value of fixed capital, see Suhara (1989).
- 19.
“Workers” in this case referred to blue-collar workers, whereas “employees” referred to white-collar workers.
- 20.
“Junior service personnel” refers to the people engaged in offering services to workers in an industrial enterprise such as cloakroom clerks or drivers of company automobiles.
- 21.
The number of transferred workers was estimated based on the description “the number of members of producer cooperative enterprises was 1.1 million in 1955, whereas in 1956 the number decreased to 800,000” (TsSU RSFSR 1957, p. 265). It is thought that all, or the majority of, cooperative members transferred to the industry sector from the expression “members of producer cooperatives so far who changed to their jobs as workers and employees in relation to the transition of many producer cooperative enterprises to state-run industrial enterprises in 1956.”
- 22.
The following descriptions are based on the supplement of Rosstat (2004), Otdel’nye statisticheskie pokazateli deiatel’nosti organizatsii Rossiiskoi Federatsii po vidam ekonomicheskoi deiatel’nosti.
- 23.
According to the League of Nations, for example, manufacturing production in Tsarist Russia in 1913 was 15.4% of that of the United States, whereas for USSR territory in times to come, manufacturing production was 12.3% of that of the United States (League of Nations 1983, pp. 296, 304; Suhara 2013, p. 550).
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Appendix
Appendix
Appendix Tables 6.1 to 6.20 are available in http://www.ier.hit-u.ac.jp/histatdb/projects/view/2.
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Suhara, M. (2019). Industry. In: Kuboniwa, M., Nakamura, Y., Kumo, K., Shida, Y. (eds) Russian Economic Development over Three Centuries. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8429-5_6
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