Databases on the history of local population migrations in Russia at the end of the XIX – XX centuries: information capabilities and processing methods. Part I.

Dyachkov Vladimir Lvovich ORCID: 0000-0003-3365-9111 PhD in History Associate Professor, Department of History, G.R. Derzhavin Tambov State University 392036, Russia, Tambov region, Tambov, Kommunalnaya str., 70, sq. 27 mayormp@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

     Today, the researcher of Russian migrations of the late XIX – XX centuries has never been "easy and simple" with sources at levels from the rural sub-region and above. Today, the Network contains both materials of Russian and Union censuses with annual population cuts of old cities and large villages that have become cities, as well as the richest electronic databases in potential, which allows you to quickly and efficiently process large amounts of information, which in the XX century would have taken more than one academic life. However, the key to research success lies in the correct formulation of questions to historical material.

     Let us say that we sufficiently represent the state of the historical and demographic literature devoted to migration issues. But at the same time, we draw attention to the fact that the largest works of this kind are based on aggregated unnamed sources that allow us to see the broad processes of the directions and results of resettlement, but cannot sufficiently show the internal personal motivation of the settlers. Thus, the works of V.M. Kabuzan were based on the generalized data of the audit censuses ^[1],[2]. B.V. Tikhonov's book was based on the materials of the First General Population Census and passport statistics ^[3]. B.N. Mironov builds his quantitative calculations of the migration movement of Russians on the already published materials of fellow historians ^[4]. In the largest study on the demographic history of Russia of the XX century, migration plots were also considered on the basis of published non-personalized statistical data from the works of historians, publications of the results of the All-Union Population censuses, as well as documents of the RGAE. But the archival data, again, were purely statistical in nature ^[5].     

     Even the most interesting works on the migration movement of the population of Russia in the XX century at the interregional level are based on statistical, in some cases quantitative sociological data ^{[6],[7],[8],[9],[10],[11],[12],[13],[14]}.

     Only in isolated works on the history of migrations, primary sources have recently been used. In particular, A.A. Solovyov studied the reasons for eviction and the circumstances of the resettlement of settlers in new places of residence of peasants of the Vyatka province on the basis of petitions and petitions of residents of specific villages to the provincial presence for peasant affairs, and O.V. Smurova analyzed personal data on the offshooters of the Kostroma province to work in Moscow and St. Petersburg at the end of the XIX century.   ^[15],[16].  

     At the end of the 1990s, studies of migration processes appeared from the standpoint of historical informatics. But they were originally based on aggregated statistics. In particular, this applies to a very interesting innovative article by L.I. Borodkin and S.V. Maksimov ^[17].

     It was only in the 2000s that electronic databases of micromigration processes began to be created on the basis of primary sources (audit tales, Moscow census materials, primary sources of places of departure and places of settlement of peasant migrants, etc.) ^{[18],[19],[20]}.

     The publications of the Association "History and Computer" periodically publish articles on historical and migration topics using a variety of information technologies and quantitative methods. But even in these, of course, solid works carried out within the framework of large projects, primary data on specific migrants are not always used ^[21],[22].

     In the course of our research, we took into account the works devoted to the methods of studying population migrations both at the all-Russian statistical level and based on primary personalized materials ^{[23],[24],[25]}.     

     Studying the historiographical context, knowing the work of colleagues, we began to create author's historical and demographic electronic databases, including, along with other stories about the migration movements of specific people.           The separate databases presented in this article were created by V.L. Dyachkov together with colleagues from the Laboratory of Social History of Tambov State University (materials from metric books, various population censuses, information about leaders and other activists of peasant demonstrations). Information for the database about the fallen in the Great Patriotic War, who returned with Victory, about the Heroes of the Soviet Union, victims of political repression, participants of the white movement were extracted from published primary sources, but were organized by V.L. Dyachkov in original forms. Databases of student genealogies, women's questionnaires, information about the Tambov regional political elite are completely copyrighted. All these databases were processed and methodologically comprehended by the author of this article. We emphasize that in our case, behind each fraction of a percent in the tables, behind the curves of the graph lines, behind the dots and arrows on the maps, behind the multicolored segments of the diagrams, there are not sheets of faceless, often blind figures, but the intertwining and diverging destinies of millions of concrete, living people gathered by history into cohorts, stages, directions of their movements along the the country and beyond.

     The purpose of this article is to present to colleagues long-term methodological and methodological developments in the creation and analysis of the information potential of unique personalized databases on historical and migration subjects.

    Since this publication is part of a large article, we will indicate that it presents a source assessment and methodological generalization of the results of work with two groups of sources so far.        

     The results of our research serve as a materialization, I hope, of the correctly posed questions to the historical material and the answers received to them in order to achieve the super–task set - opening the mechanism of population migration at different levels as the most important part of the socio-natural synergy of human population control. (Hereafter, the terms "synergy", "synergism", "synergistic" are used in their usual meaning of the reinforcing effect of the interaction of two or more factors, characterized by the fact that the combined effect of these factors significantly exceeds the simple sum of the actions of each of these factors. The term "mobile synergism" embraces the first two requirements of the triune principle of historicism – to take what is being studied in development and in the totality of all its aspects, i.e. as a system.)

     The proposed study is the first part of a voluminous work on the study of local migrations; the author hopes to present further parts.

Object and methods

The immanent principle of historicism is the correct understanding of the object of research and the ability to put the right questions to historical material. In the case of population migrations, the physical movement of a person across the country or beyond to a new place of residence and work is accompanied by a change in the social status of a migrant in the aggregate of intermediate finals of horizontal and vertical mobility. That is, the migration of singles merging into streams and giant human streams is always a fundamental change in social status. According to the initial incentive of migration, it can be divided into voluntary, voluntary-forced and directly forced with all the variety of their mass variants-combinations. The range of migration (which in cases of voluntary, initiative movement is directly proportional to the degree of social activity, aggression, and ambition of the migrant) is distributed in its levels. According to the parameters of the range-ambition and the size of the source zones, we consider migrations in the inter-rural (for example, the breeding circle of the population of a rural locality (hereinafter referred to as the SNP), sub-regional (small county, Soviet rural district), regional (large county, province, Soviet regions, ASSR, krai, SSR without regional divisions), macro-regional (groups of provinces or regions like the Central Democratic Republic or the Central Democratic Republic, the SSR with regional divisions, national geographic groups of regions like the Baltic States, Transcaucasia and Central Asia). The socio-historical features of Russia oblige us to single out immigration to the capitals – Moscow and St. Petersburg-Leningrad as the most important "ambitious" flow.

Comprehensive comprehension of the mobile complex of migrations at all declared levels is provided by a single set of sources.

The main requirement for mass sources on social history is their informativeness and quality of execution should ensure the opening and study of "ordered" processes and phenomena on the longest and most continuous lines of representative and complex sociographic information. In this case, a specific research "order" consists in an "illustrated" description of the methodology for identifying stages, moving volumes and structure of migrations at levels from populations of individual villages to the country on an extremely uneven and saturated segment from the Great Reforms to the Second World War inclusive.

The required sociographic lines and their visual reflections, including the necessary and sufficient information about the migrations of the period under consideration, are created on the Excel platform as the most convenient.

The sources of the necessary data include:

a) continuous long (from 100 to 250 years) lines of complete vital "metric" and "registry office" statistics for individual SNPs;

b) materials of the All-Russian and All-Union population censuses; materials of the audit, zemstvo and diocesan population records; regional documents of the Soviet accounting and organization of population movement in the interwar period and in the 1940s.;

c) "author's" electronic databases (EBD) of new mass sources (surveys of women - (more than 11.5 thousand personalities), student genealogies (more than 140 thousand personalities));

d) publicly available all-Union databases of Soviet losses and active participation of Soviet citizens in World War II (more than 50 million persons; https://www.obd-memorial.ru /; podvignaroda.ru /; http://old .v-ipc.ru/);

e) database of victims of political repression in the USSR (more than 3.5 million people; http://lists.memo.ru /) with a special "Tambov part" on the Excel platform (8000 personalities) and the "author's" database "Peasant Memorial" (3500 Tambov peasants repressed during collectivization);

f) a group of "author's" and publicly accessible databases of social activists of the period: database "Leaders" and "Greens" (leaders and active participants of peasant protests of the 1880s - 1921; 3523 people); Database for Heroes of the Soviet Union (SCS; 12.5 thousand people)) and for full knights of the Order of Glory (PKS; 2671 people); database on the all-Russian and regional social and political elite of the 1860s – 1940s (more than 10 thousand people); DATABASE of the Tambov regional socio-political and cultural elite of the XIX - XX centuries. (about 3.5 thousand people); database of participants of the white movement (more than 500 thousand people; http://ïîãèáøèå .Russian Federation/arhiv/uchastniki-grazhdanskoj-vojny/uchastniki-belogo-dvizheniya-v-rossii/) and "red activists" – Red Banner (more than 14 thousand awarded the Order of the Red Banner in 1918-1925; http://kdkv.narod.ru/WW1/index.html ) and repressed commanders of the Red Army (3 thousand officers who were above the rank of major at the time of the repression;  http://www.rkka.ru/handbook/personal/repress/main.htm); 

g) the databases formed by the author on the Russian socio-anthroponymic processes of the XVII - early XXI century, the lines of birth years of outstanding figures of world and Russian history of the last two millennia, as well as the chronology of wars and revolutions in Russian and world history;

h) Database of the movement of environmental characteristics;

i) materials of regional state and departmental archives;

k) collections of photographic documents and sources of personal origin (letters, diaries, memoirs).

Conclusions-calculations made on the basis of a correct analysis of a representative sample (all representatives, characteristics of the studied phenomenon, process, or a random sample from several thousand to several tens of millions of persons involved) are accurate and final.

This article discusses the possibilities of studying the migrations of the Russian/Soviet population by the first two groups of databases compiled a) by the "metric-registry Office" vital statistics of individual settlements of the Tambov region and historically related territories; b) by information from the genealogies of Tambov students and surveys of women who have completed the period of fertility.

1.     Analysis of local migrations according to the data of the "metric-census" block

Let us turn to the study of the marriage circles of the villages of Bolshaya Rzhaksa and Semenovka of the Rzhaksa district and the village of Pavlodar of the Zherdevsky district of the Tambov region in the second half of the XIX - early XX century.

Complete (i.e., taking into account all personal and time-moving information about births, deaths and marriages) databases compiled according to the "metrico-registry office" accounting of individual SNPs and church parishes in combination with "snapshots" of censuses allow you to directly and accurately judge migrations (local and not only) in the paradigm of the movement of the marriage circle (places of birth and socio-class origin and position of the grooms and brides), about the movement of the population of the SNP and their households, subregions and regions with corresponding changes in gender, age, ethno-confessional and socio–professional structures (see Fig. 1-8).

The analysis of migrations according to the documents of the current accounting of population movement (parish registers and Soviet and current "registry office" cards) and according to the materials of various types of censuses (audits, agricultural, professional, party censuses, reports of zemstvos and governors, general population censuses at the levels of the subregion, region, macroregion and country) is carried out in different ways, based on the content of the source, which, in turn, is determined by the purposes of its compilation. According to metric books and "registry office" cards, the researcher works with specific "living and dead" people, collecting them all, without exception, by days, months and years of records in multi-thousand-century cohorts. Migrations in this case are manifested in indications of the socio-class and geographical origin of parents and "recipients from the font" of newborns, grooms, brides and guarantors (witnesses) at the conclusion of marriage and, finally, in the records of the deceased. In the "census" block, the same individualization is present in the revisions of the serf period, but, like any "snapshots" taken with uneven multi-year intervals, audit tales do not contain information about the movements of people in the "dead zones" between censuses, tempting inexperienced and hasty historians with unacceptable interpolations.

In the rest of the census results, specific destinies are replaced by accounting categories and numbers, and migration has to be looked out for from different angles – in the synergistic movement of volumes and ratios of permanent and available population, ratios within gender and age structures, shares of rural and non-rural population, in changes in national and socio-professional composition, in comparison of synchronous micro, meso- and macro-regional images within the same geographical boundaries. Combining the results of work with databases compiled from current accounting materials and various population censuses forms a fairly complete "film" about local migrations up to and including the region level.

Indirectly, but no less accurately, the databases of the sources of this block reveal points, periods, rhythms and causes-stimuli of surges of immigration-emigration, gender and age structures of migrant flows (See Fig. 9).

Brief interpretations of individual significant results of processing our databases are given in the detailed explanations of the graphs, diagrams and maps presented.

Fig. 1. Marriage circles of the villages of Bolshaya Rzhaksa and Semenovka of Rzhaksa district (red (brides) and blue (grooms) markers and lines) and the village of Pavlodar of Zherdevsky district (yellow markers and lines) Tambov region in the second half of the XIX – early XX century, reconstructed according to the metric books and localization of surnames according to district memory books.

According to B. Rzhaksa, 2480 married couples were taken into account, according to Semenovka – 1259, according to Pavlodar – 970. In addition to the size and vectors of marriage areas, the proportion of the number of "out-of-parish" grooms and brides of large Tambov villages, the figure demonstrates a fundamental discrepancy, even in the post-reform half-century, between the general marriage circle of B. Rzhaksa and Semenovka, inhabited by descendants of service people "on the device", and the marriage circle of Pavlodar with its former serf population. The long inertia of such social-class "partitions" within the post-reform peasantry acted as a factor of tension in sub-regional populations, having among the principal consequences an increase in peasant social aggression with the activation of peasant emigration as one of its components.

Fig. 2. The movement in 1758-1924 of the marriage circle of the village of Kuzmin Gat of the Tambov district on the 7th anniversary of the 28–year natural demographic rhythm ^{[1, 2, 3]} (the shares of the places of origin of the grooms and brides of the parish of the Nikolskaya Church of the village of Kuzmin Gat). Compiled according to the section "Marriages" of parish registers.

Here 3233 married couples are taken into account (2947 in the segment 1758 – 1913, 94 in the segment 1914 – 1917 and 192 in the very damaged segment of the account 1918 – 1924). Continuous lines of the drawing reveal the following connected local migrations in the mirror of the segment of the marriage circle of the old and large Tambov village: 1) the fall by the 1840s of the share of local, "Kuzmin" grooms and brides due to the expansion of the village of Kombarovshchina as near settlements of the village of Kuzmin Gat, with 2) a predominant reduction in the share of "Kuzmin" brides due to the development of the marriage market of Kuzmin Gat towards the populations of Tambov and more than 120 neighbors (in 8-20 km) The SNP of the Tambov district, related by social class (service) origin – ss. Bokino, Nikolskoye, Olshanka, Otrog, Pady, Starchiki, etc.; 3) relative stabilization of the marriage market balance from the 1840s to the First World War - 75%-83% of "Kuzminsky" grooms with 40%-50% of "Kuzminsky" brides; 5) "invasion" in 1914 – 1917 of grooms (15%) and brides (9%) who arrived from distant counties and from outside the Tambov province due to the construction of the Tambov powder factory and the refugees of the First World War; 6) degradation, "autarky" of the marriage circle during the Civil War and 7) its weak opening in the early years of the NEP at the expense of the neighboring SNP.

Fig. 3. Geography of the origin of the grooms of S. Kuzmin in 1914 – 1917.

In 1914, 1 km from the village of Kuzmina Gat (5.5 thousand people in 1917), construction began on the largest gunpowder factory (the future city of Kotovsk), and the village of Kuzmina Gat with a one-parish satellite village of Kombarovshchina became the main local "donors" of the rapidly growing factory settlement (8 thousand people by 1917) and part of his marriage circle. In turn, the village of the powder factory "supplied" Kuzmina with grooms and brides of non-Tambov and even non-Russian origin from among the specialists, workers and guards of the Tambov Powder Factory (TPZ). Such mutual enrichment of marriage circles in conjunction with modernist innovations (supply, housing, health care) dramatically improved the local populations of the village of TPZ and its neighboring SNPs. At the same time, the average annual number of marriages in Kuzmina Gati fell from 33 in 1906-1913 to 20 in 1914-1916, demonstrating a huge both temporary and irrevocable "emigration" of suitors to the army and to the front.

Fig. 4. Geography of the origin of S. Kuzmin's brides in 1914 – 1917 (% among brides of the period).

Fig. 5. Geography of origin of S. Kuzmin's grooms in 1918 – 1924.

During this period, the Gunpowder Factory and its settlement fell into decline, the population of the TPZ settlement decreased to 2 thousand people, which led to the degradation of the marriage circle of S. Kuzmin Gat, the outflow of its young and active segment to Tambov and beyond the province, the undermining of modernist structures with a corresponding deterioration of all demographic indices.

Fig. 6. Geography of the origin of S. Kuzmin's brides in 1918 – 1924.

Fig. 7. Directions of immigration to the Tambov Region and flows of internal agrarian migration in the late XVI – early XX century. Compiled based on the materials of audits, censuses, the history of settlements of the Tambov region, as well as on the database of the movement of surnames in Tambov rural populations. Black solid lines delimit the historical and geographical stages of settlement of the Tambov region (the stages of the foundation of the SNP). Red markers indicate the first 10 large SNPs, for which long continuous rows of complete vital statistics were obtained. Today there are 50 such SNPs and urban parishes, and this addition took place mainly at the expense of villages in the southern strip of the Tambov region – in the current Znamensky (2), Mordovian (4), Tokarevsky (4), Zherdevsky (3), Rzhaksin (4), Uvarovsky (4) districts.  When drawing up the scheme, a map published by the cartographic institution of A. Ilyin (St. Petersburg, 1911) was used.

Student-genealogies and questionnaires of women who have completed prolific activities

On the question of questioning women – This is the definition of survey objects (and not "women who have gone beyond the fertile age") that has developed during the survey, which has been going on for more than 20 years. One of the main goals of the surveys was to identify the continuous movement through the XX century of the total number of children born during the fertile life of a woman, and changes in the socio-natural synergy of factors that provided (in our Russian case) such a rapid multiple collapse of fertility. At first, elderly women who had clearly reached menopause were interviewed. But our recent history has contained and contains many conditions of female secondary infertility, childlessness and childlessness that overtake at a completely fertile and even young age: untimely loss of a spouse, celibacy, hard and other unhealthy work, illness or accident, contraception, abortive practice. The dynamics of primary infertility should not be overlooked. Therefore, the key to the surveys of women was not the venerable age, but the exact knowledge that the respondent will certainly not give birth to anyone due to objective circumstances.

We have already talked about the huge research opportunities of replenished author's databases of genealogies and questionnaires ^{[4, 5, 6]}. Their forms contain a direct question about the migrations of female respondents and our students with their relatives up to the 4th - 6th generation of ancestors, and the answers to it are linked in the database with the remaining forty information parameters from full name, exact time and place of birth to the "intimate block", which through the totality of individual destinies shows not not only the directions, starts and motives of migrations, but also determines their place in the mobile socio-natural synergism of life and death of populations (see Fig. 10). And this place is so significant that when processing the same questionnaires, we necessarily divide the interviewed women into the main groups-lines: "villagers" (i.e., those who were born and lived their fertile life in the village), "migrants" (those who were born in the village, but before or at the very beginning during the fertile period, they moved to cities) and "urban women" (who were born and lived their fertile years in an urban environment). Questionnaires and genealogies, with their growing representativeness, allow us to isolate and evaluate the mobile shares and the changing socio-demographic impact of less "populated" migration subspecies, such as rare moves of urban women to the countryside, agrarian migration due to the relocation of the parent family or marriage, movements in the rural socio-professional hierarchy after a period of study in the city, etc.

An example of a genuine completed survey form for women who have completed their prolific activities, with V.L. Dyachkov's methodological recommendations, is given in Appendix 1. The classification of socio-professional groups of women (professional groups of migrants to cities) is given in Appendix 2; in Fig. 8 they are shown in color.

Fig. 8. Movement on the 7th anniversary of the birth of socio-professional groups of women questionnaires (segment "migrants to cities").

The diagram is made up of 7.5 thousand questionnaires collected and processed by 2010, which at that time ensured the representativeness of up to 200 questionnaires for seven years of birth in 1892-1898 and in 1899-1905, and 600-800 questionnaires for eight seven years of birth in the period 1906-1961. The seven years of birth are unchanged and correspond to the 4th phases of the 28-year natural demographic cycle (rhythm). As of today, about 4.5 thousand more questionnaires have been additionally collected and are waiting to be entered and continued processing in the database. For obvious reasons, most of them were received from women born in the cyclical seven–year period of 1948 - 1982, which allows not only to significantly extend the scale of births, but also to develop representativeness to the possibility of an acceptably accurate reflection of socio-demographic processes already by the years of birth of the respondents. With the expansion in the 2010s of the geography of the origin of student interviewers, the geography of the origin of the interviewed women has been significantly expanded. If before about 70% of the questionnaires were received from the natives of the Tambov region, now the increase in their number is mainly provided by surveys of natives and residents of the regions adjacent to the Tambov region, and the regions of the European South of Russia, Eastern Ukraine and Central Asia. 10 as an example of the information capabilities of the questionnaires, a "female professional migrant" fragment of socio-natural synergy is given, which provided a catastrophic (7-15 times, from 7-9 children to 0.4 children for urban women) and a rapid (over 70 years, in three generations) drop in the number of children born to women of the Center of Russia during its lengthened (!) a prolific life. In the case of the group "natives of villages who migrated to cities at the beginning of the fertile period", the internally mobile synergy of the collapse of their fertility has developed and is developing from "non-child" professions requiring high levels of education, from the rise of contraception and abortive practice, from employment in "harmful" jobs, from growing celibacy and loss of a spouse in a mutually fertile age.

The database of surveys of women with sufficient representativeness (preferably from 100 respondents per year of birth) has a huge potential for revealing synergistic social processes, but, unfortunately, in the "micro-level" case with Yaroslavka and Sychevka, the fundamental migration reversal of these villages in the "railway" era minimized the presence of their natives born in 1885-1959 to 18 (2 from Sychevka, 16 from Yaroslavka; all from the group of "villagers", i.e., who were born and lived their lives in the fertile period in their native villages, and not a single "migrant" from the "scattered" populations, since the direction and purpose of emigration excluded the possibility of being interviewed within the Tambov region). On such a number of respondents, even with a possible addition from the still unprocessed part of the questionnaires, it is possible to build only the most general conclusions about the socio-demographic behavior of women from our Nikiforov villages. However, the questionnaires reveal especially sharp differences in the life of special micro-populations on a small number of them. Thus, a small (60) number of surveys of natives of a small (600 inhabitants) Tambov Tatar-Muslim village. Engurazovo, with the marriage circle isolated in the 1930s - 1970s, amicably shows both a three times (!) greater share of involuntary miscarriages than in the neighboring SNP of the Uvarovsky district, and a particularly low ceiling of vertical social mobility as a result of inevitable inbreeding. On the other hand, a small (140) number of questionnaires from Tambov Kotovsk with its "incident" reveals not only the proportion of miscarriages among its workers, but also much larger proportions of secondary infertility due to not too "healthy" chemical production, which provides life to this city ^[7].

And the "Kotovsk incident" is a phenomenon of a sharp improvement in the quality of the population and its socio-demographic characteristics, a decrease and "re-targeting" of accumulated peasant aggression in overpopulated agrarian regions, "demographic bags". It was opened by V.L. Dyachkov on the example of the Tambov Powder Factory (Kotovsk), founded in 1914 20 km south of Tambov in the zone of the Tambov "demographic bag". The population of the rapidly growing TPZ was mixed and consisted of three-quarters of the most active and young peasants from the SNP in the district with a radius of 30-40 km . The dumping of the most aggressive parts of rural micropopulations into a better urban life turned out to be so effective that the peasant district that fed the TPZ not only did not take part in the peasant "green" protest, but also acquired an obvious "red" hue in the events of 1917-1921.

         Our student Excel genealogies lose out to questionnaires in complexity, accuracy and "intimate meticulousness" not only because of the slightly different form, but also because, unlike targeted surveys of women conducted by motivated enthusiasts, genealogies are compiled by students of different specialties  as a mandatory "admission to the exam" in history with a restriction on the thoroughness and depth of information received from parents and grandparents. Nevertheless, student genealogies are "taken by number" (more than 140 thousand persons involved today), a wide social and national geography (more than a hundred regions of birth and residence, thanks to the unprecedented human whirl of the last century and a half, are very representative), the depth of continuous time (at least 4-5 generations or representative before births in the middle of the XIX century.) and the ready-made possibility of complex search in a replenished summary database on an Excel platform, compatible due to common research goals with the rest of our EBDS.

         As a generalized "looping" of this part of the discussion of sources on local migrations of the period under consideration, we will say that the "metric-registry office" and "census" blocks, surveys of women and student genealogies with correct (historical!) the methods of obtaining and processing data turn out to be necessary, mandatory and often irreplaceable sources of knowledge and tools for revealing the mobile socio-natural synergy of the domestic new and recent history on the longest and continuous series of complex demographic and sociographic information. Local migrations are the most important, but part of this synergy.

     We hope that the methodological observations and samples of methodological techniques given in the article will help the interested reader to master the craft of processing information capabilities of various "traditional" and the latest mass sources on the social history of Russia of the late XIX – XX centuries.    

APPENDIX 1

An example of a completed questionnaire of a woman who has completed her prolific activity

The names of the interviewee were changed for the sake of "privacy", the answers were recorded in 2012 by a student of the TSU Faculty of History without changing the style of the respondent from the Michurinsky district of the Tambov region. The questionnaire form contains V.L. Dyachkov's methodological instructions to the persons conducting the survey.

Questionnaire No. 1

Prepared by Ekaterina Myakisheva

Questions to women who have completed prolific activity (any age, the main thing is the exact knowledge that the interviewee will not give birth to anyone else)

Attention!!!  It is advisable to write down the answers (especially to the questions of the "intimate" block - No. 15-19) verbatim, with the preservation of vocabulary and intonation. In the absence of information, put a sign "?" or "I don't know". If you refuse to answer, write "refusal". And no amateur activity!

1. Surname (maiden and married), first name, patronymic (If the respondent is embarrassed to give her full name, initials are enough, but this is not a very good option, because each item of the questionnaire is the most valuable and interrelated information)

Answer:  Kuznetsova Lydia Ivanovna. Maiden namePetrova

2. Date, month, year of birth (in extreme cases, year of birth)

Answer: March 22, 1940

3. Exact place of birth – locality, district, region

Answer: S. Old Hop, Apiary street

4.      Social origin – occupation, profession of father and mother

Answer: my own father died in the war on April 25, 1945, and my stepfather was in the 3rd group, because his head was smashed in the war, my mother was a worker on a collective farm.

5. Dates of birth of mother and father

Answer: mother – 1915, August, father – 1916, stepfather since 1922.

6. Places of birth of the father and mother

Answer: mother and own father – S. Old Hop, stepfather – S. New Hop

7.      The year (it would be good and the month) of the parents' marriage

Answer: the first in 1938, the second in 1953.

8.      The level of education of parents (Briefly, for example, 7 kl – father, 4 kl – mother)

Answer: I don't remember

9. The number of children of parents – survivors and deceased, indicating gender (for example, only 6m +2d, died in infancy 2m)

Answer: 1 d +2 m (daughter from the 1st marriage and 2 sons from the 2nd marriage)

10. Year and cause of death of the parents (if, for example, the father died – 1997, stomach ulcer, mother – 2001, stroke)

Answer: my father died in the war on April 25, 1945, my stepfather died of old age in 1980, my mother was crushed by her grandson with a faulty car in 1984.

11. The level of education of the interviewee

Answer: I graduated from 7 classes

12. Occupation of the interviewee (if there are several professions, then in chronological order)

13.  Answer: after graduation, a milkmaid for 10 years, a janitor in a dorm for 12 years, then for the 2nd group.

14. The year and month (or age) of marriage, the age of the husband at marriage (specify the nature and number (if several) of marriages – official, civil. Indicate if the marriage has been dissolved.  Answer option – 21j – 24m)

Answer: the 1st marriage -1957, I don't remember the number, in 1958 the divorce, the mother-in-law climbed a lot, the husband drank, beat, in 1959 she went to Ryazan to sell seeds and met the second, and in 1959 she married him, and we came to Michurinsk. Both were officially concluded.

15. The number of children alive and dead, indicating their gender (for example, 1m + 1d). It's not a bad idea to specify the years of birth of children.

Answer: 2m+1d daughter since 1961, son since 1963, another son since 1970.

16. The presence of stillbirths and involuntary miscarriages with a desirable indication of the cause (for example, 1 miscarriage – overworked at work)

Answer: there was no such thing

17. The presence and, if yes, the number and nature of abortions (for example, 2 – 1 – at the midwife, 1 – in the hospital, or – no, did not)

Answer: 6 abortions for 6 months, each at the grandmother.

18. The presence and nature of contraception (for example, - yes, a condom and or - yes, interrupted sexual intercourse (PAP)

Answer: they were not protected

19. The presence of premarital sexual life (for example, - yes, at the age of 17, with a future husband)

Answer: it was not before marriage

20. The age of the beginning of menstruation (Preferably more precisely, for example, 13.5 years. It is useful if a woman also names the age of menopause, menopause)

Answer: 17 years old

21. Migration, change of residence (for example, Sosnovka – in 1975, Sakhalin – in 1997, Moscow)

Answer: did not migrate

22. Unnatural deaths of the closest relatives (the closest relatives include: parents, siblings, own children; unnatural deaths include: death in war, murder, death by accident, suicide, death at a young age. For example, father – WWII, 1943; brother drowned, son was stabbed, etc.).

Answer: my stepbrother, at the age of 27, crashed in Moscow on a motorcycle, worked as a security guard in the police, my father died in the war on April 25, 1945, my grandson crushed my mother on a faulty car.

APPENDIX 2

Designations of professional and educational groups of women

Here and in our other studies of the movement of Russian structures of occupations, their author's classification, developed 15 years ago, is used. The first digits of our classification code are the code of the professional group in the HISCO international classification, followed by the number of the professional and educational group in our classification. The code of vocational and educational groups that do not have a place in the HISCO classification has a sequential number only in our classification. As a result, our professional and educational groups in the proposed combined classification with codes and abbreviations of groups look like this: