Passport Statistics as a Source for the History of Migration in Russia (RSFSR) during the Second World War

The main objective of the article is to provide a description as detailed as possible of the corpus of statistical sources used by historians in the past, and by demographers, economists and geographers in the present. Accordingly, the author’s tasks primarily include identifying the origin of the source, analyzing the informativeness, completeness and reliability of statistical data obtained based on propiska (registration) – issuance of passports. From the standpoint of social history, propiska (registration) is a consequence of the strict passport regime that had developed by the mid-1930s. First, this regime was necessary for the state as an instrument of control over Soviet citizens. At the same time, it was used as a kind of socio-bureaucratic mechanism for recording territorial population movements, assessing their volume and structural characteristics. The operation of this mechanism, assessment of the reliability, accuracy and comparability of the data obtained because of its operation are of great interest to all those who study migrations of the Soviet period in one way or another. Based on the registration of the residence permit and deregistration, it is possible to identify the number of migrants, their composition by gender and age, and most importantly, the territorial and geographical directions of population movement across the country. In this aspect, it is important to determine the actual mechanism for obtaining data, to present the characteristics of the socio-bureaucratic process, because of which the registration and deregistration materials were transformed into digital data characterizing migration. For this purpose, statisticians developed two types of tabular forms that recorded information on the movement of the population by the place of departure and the place of arrival, as well as on the distribution of arrivals and departures by gender and age. These data were of particular importance during the Second World War, since they played a primary role in determining military mobilization and labor resources. Accordingly, the article pays much attention to the study of the actual mechanism for obtaining statistical information.

passport regime, migrations, registration, deregistration, registration of arrivals and departures, statistical source