Charity during the First World War: a statistical analysis of the materials of the newspaper "Yeniseiskie Gubernskie Vedomosti"

Kattsina Tatyana Anatolievna ORCID: 0000-0001-6566-9678 Doctor of History Professor; Department of Theory and Methodology of Social Work; Siberian Federal University 660041, Russia, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Krasnoyarsk, Svobodny, 79 tkatsina@sfu-kras.ru Other publications by this author     Shestakov Viacheslav Nikolaevich ORCID: 0000-0001-7737-2900 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor; Department of Modern Educational Technologies; Siberian Federal University 660041, Russia, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Krasnoyarsk, Svobodny, 79 shestakoffs@yahoo.com Other publications by this author     Pashina Natalia Vasilievna ORCID: 0000-0002-1684-2961 PhD in History Associate Professor; Department of Theory and Methodology of Social Work; Siberian Federal University 79 Svobodny Ave., Krasnoyarsk Territory, 660041, Russia ncheberyak@sfu-kras.ru

Pomazan Valery Aleksandrovich ORCID: 0000-0003-4690-0795 Senior Lecturer; Department of Modern Educational Technologies; Siberian Federal University 660041, Russia, Krasnoyarsk, Svobodny, 79 vpomazan@sfu-kras.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

Charity in the Russian Empire during the First World War represents an important aspect of everyday practices and cultural changes. The war exposed many social problems related to the provision of the army, rehabilitation of war invalids, organization of sanitary detachments and infirmaries, manufacture of bandages, collection of provisions, support for families of front-line soldiers, refugees, Russian prisoners of war, etc. Solving these issues required the active participation of Russian society, attracting its potential and resources. The active mobilization of the country's population to meet the needs of the front, as well as the mitigation of the consequences of sharply increased social mobility in the rear, was ensured by the development of various forms of charity, which during the First World War became not only an expression of public solidarity, but also an important element of social policy.

The purpose of this article is a statistical analysis of the materials of the newspaper "Yeniseiskie Gubernskie Vedomosti" in the context of donations and charitable events for the period from August 1, 1914 to March 21, 1917. Achieving this goal requires finding answers to questions about the most common forms of charitable donations and ways to attract them, initiators/actors of charitable actions and recipients of assistance, analyzing the direction of changes in indicators (volume of donations, number of charitable actions, etc.) and their spatial differentiation.

The social aspects of people's lives and measures to support them during the First World War are included in the range of topical issues ^{[1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10 et al.]} modern Russian historiography. Similar problems are being developed on the basis of Siberian historical material ^{[11; 12; 13; 14; 15 Relatively recently, the study of the financial aspects of social support for the population of the Russian Empire during the First World War began [16, 17]}. The result of these studies was the conclusion about the lack of resources and the contradictory nature of the social events held in the rear, that, compared with peacetime, the charity of the war years was widespread, partially compensated for the gaps in socio-economic relations, and was aimed at smoothing the acute socio-economic contradictions generated by the war. Donations and charitable events organized by private, public and government initiatives were covered in the press, which became a channel of communication between citizens and state institutions, aroused the interest of readers due to the involvement of many of them in ongoing philanthropic actions. As the research materials on the history of mass communications in Siberia ^{[18; 19; 20]} allow us to judge, the Yenisei Provincial Gazette was not the subject of special study ^{[21, p. 42]}, for the same reason, the coverage of issues of philanthropy and charity during the First World War turned out to be little noticed on the pages of the publication. The results of this study are intended to supplement the actual knowledge about the forms and practices of charitable activities during the First World War in the largest region of the Russian Empire – the Yenisei province, obtained on the basis of an analysis of the relevant thematic content of the newspaper "Yenisei Provincial Vedomosti".

Sources and methods

The source for the analysis of charitable actions was the issues of the newspaper "Yenisei Provincial Gazette" for the period from August 1, 1914 to March 21, 1917. The chronological boundaries of the materials included for research are due, on the one hand, to the beginning of the notification of military action on the pages of the newspaper, on the other – the end of the publication of the newspaper under this name. The most complete set of newspapers is in the collections of the Russian National Library (St. Petersburg). Currently, the State Universal Scientific Library of the Krasnoyarsk Territory is digitizing the newspaper collection, including the Yenisei Provincial Gazette. The periodical press (a complex source in composition and diverse in form) of 1914-1918 opens up wide opportunities for studying the problems of the First World War. The newspaper in pre-revolutionary Russia was one of the main sources of operational information about events in the outside world, a tool for shaping public opinion and sentiment. The Yenisei Provincial Gazette was part of the government official press sector, published in Krasnoyarsk from July 2, 1857, aimed at creating a unified information system in the province, strengthening state guardianship over the socio-political life of the country ^{[19, p. 34]}. In the 1910s, the newspaper was published three times a week, each issue included two departments: the first – the official one, where the decrees of the emperor, the government, the orders of the Irkutsk governor-general, vice-governor, heads of county and volost boards were printed, in the second – the unofficial department there were private announcements, obituaries, resumes of applicants for various positions, posters and advertisements. During the First World War, the newspaper was supplemented with headings where news about the course of military operations was traced, lists of the dead and wounded were printed, announcements of donations and charity events, i.e. those issues that most fully concerned the reader.

The newspaper materials analyzed are conditionally divided into several groups. First of all, these are appeals and appeals, which are brief appeals from various government charitable organizations "to all Russian citizens" with a request to provide all possible assistance in the form of donations. On a par with them, you can put materials designated as "announcements" about fundraising, lotteries, etc. For example, about the "Most highly authorized charity lottery of 1914 in favor of wounded and sick soldiers, their families and persons affected by the disasters of the First World War", which provides information on the timing and tasks lottery, places of sale of tickets, the order of the draw. These documents, as a rule, occupy the front page of a newspaper, are printed in large type using a special font, which emphasizes their importance. Other types of materials published in the newspaper make up reports of charitable societies and government organizations on charitable events, thanks to the emperor, for example, to the volost assembly, for showing loyal feelings by transferring donations.

The heterogeneity of the newspaper's text material has created considerable difficulty in systematizing the data into a single summary table. On the one hand, it was necessary to find common formalized features among the various forms, content, effectiveness and orientation of charity events, and on the other, to preserve the unique characteristics of the described objects. By identifying common units for analysis in materials that are heterogeneous in their content and appearance (articles and notes), a Microsoft Excel 2013 spreadsheet layout has been developed to systematize the identified data. The volume of entries was 362 lines. Each of the records is structured with 50 attributes (columns). The data in the table is grouped into 15 pivot tables and pivot charts. Formatted summary charts are copied to a separate sheet, supplemented with filtering and analysis tools, forming a new analysis tool – an information dashboard. Combining MySQL technology with the popular PHP scripting language, widely used for web applications and interfaces, made it possible to integrate the database into a network resource running in test mode. Here we relied on our own experience, which concerns descriptive statistics and visualization of historical data on charitable institutions in Eastern Siberia of the XIX century ^[22], conclusions and generalizations affecting the sides of formalization of historical data ^{[23, 24]}, took into account the specifics of the Russian model of historical informatics, justified by L. I. Borodkin, V. N. Vladimirovym [24 25; 26], as well as an actual scientific direction in humanitarian research: from a database to a network analytical resource that is being successfully developed at Altai State University as part of project activities ^{[27; 28]}.

The analytical part of our research is based on statistical processing of an array of data, which increases the efficiency of using the information potential of the source – the newspaper "Yenisei provincial Vedomosti". Descriptive data statistics and statistical hypothesis testing were carried out using the Statisica 10.0 program (developed by StatSoft. Inc). In the case of describing quantitative indicators with a normal distribution, arithmetic averages (M) and standard deviations (SD) were calculated for the data. Sets of quantitative indicators, the distribution of which differed from the normal one, were described using the values of the median (Me) and the lower and upper quartiles (Q1-Q3). Nominal data were described with absolute values and percentages. Quantitative indicators were evaluated for compliance with the normal distribution, using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov criterion, the Shapiro-Wilk criterion, frequency histograms, normal probability graphs, and span diagrams. When comparing the average values in normally distributed sets of quantitative data, the Student's t-test and ANOVA analysis of variance were calculated. The Mann-Whitney U-test and the Kraskel-Wallis criterion were used to compare independent aggregates in cases where there were no signs of normal data distribution. The nominal data were compared using the χ2 (Chi-squared) criterion Pearson, which allows us to assess the significance of differences between the actual number of outcomes or qualitative characteristics of the sample falling into each category, and the theoretical number that can be expected in the studied groups if the null hypothesis is valid. In cases where the number of expected observations in any of the cells of the four-field table was less than five, the exact Fisher criterion was used to assess the significance of the differences.

Results: grouping data into a table

Let's describe the fields (columns) of the table (database) and their purpose in the framework of the study. The source is the output data of the newspaper and the messages inside it (title, date, number, page). Fields related to time: the date of publication of the newspaper is the main time identifier, but it is not unique, since there may be several messages related to charity in one newspaper; the year of publication is for tracking the dynamics of charitable assistance by year. The date or period of the charity event is to clarify the terms of the charity, since the period of the campaign may not coincide with the date of publication of the message about it. This feature is especially relevant for collection reports, which are sometimes published after several months have passed since they were conducted. The columns of the table related to the place: the place of the event (the name of the administrative-territorial unit: city, village, county, parish) is an identifying and grouping feature; the type of venue (province, county, parish, city, village) is a grouping feature; the name of the county is the main grouping feature.

Next, the fields related to the content: there is an announcement (appeal, appeal) for donations or a donation report ("yes", "no") – a sign separating newspaper issues with messages on charitable topics from issues without it; content (announcement, charity report, appeal, gratitude) – a sign, classifying the content; the name of the charity event (or the headline from the newspaper) is an identifier; the organizer/initiator of the charity event (individuals, local government, the imperial family, public associations) is a grouping feature; the organizer of the charity gathering (name) is an identifier. The object of charitable assistance or its addressee is another important feature that has formed 19 binary signs: families called up for war; victims of military disasters; active army; sick and wounded soldiers; war invalids; families of war invalids and wounded; allies in the war (Serbia and Montenegro); prisoners of war (Russians); refugees; orphans (children); educational institutions; students in need; families of fallen and wounded soldiers; children of maimed and fallen soldiers; children affected by the war; the poor; poor Jews; charitable institutions. In favor of charitable organizations – a sign containing the name of the charitable organization in respect of which donations were collected. As a rule, funds (monetary and material) collected during one charity event were placed at the disposal of the organizer himself to "strengthen funds". In some cases, deductions were made from the total amount of donations in favor of a higher-level charitable organization, in the structure of which the founder of the charity event himself was located, and/or in favor of one of the numerous government charitable institutions operating during the designated period. In fact, this problem has not been solved and this material is not amenable to analysis.

A significant place in the table is occupied by a group of signs characterizing the financial performance of various charitable organizations. Gross collection is the total amount of money received by summing up receipts from various sources within the framework of a specific charity event. Collection costs – the amount spent on organizing a charity event. These include: postal; sums of money spent on the purchase of things for lotteries; expenses for renting and heating premises, placing ads in a newspaper, pasting posters, printing costs for printing tickets and tables, payment for couriers, attendants, watchmen, musicians, production of special attributes (showcases, signs, etc.), logistics costs, etc. The percentage of expenses for the cathedral is a relative indicator that allows you to identify the share of funds spent on organizing the collection, calculated from its gross profit. The net fee is a feature calculated as the difference between the gross fee and its expenses, which allows you to establish the economic efficiency of the event.

A consistent study of the sources has changed the original structure of the table, supplementing it with new columns (features), excluding rare and uninformative characteristics from it. So, when working on the summary table, the column "Form of fundraising" (the method of organizing the collection of donations) has undergone significant changes compared to the original version, which assumed that the collection of donations would be recorded here. A detailed study of the material showed that one unit of analysis could simultaneously include several different forms of raising funds for charity. As a result, this feature has turned into 12 binary features (indicators) with the value "yes" or "no". Here is a list of them: subscription lists, membership fees, lotteries, mug/plate collection, charitable sale of items, entertainment events, deductions from salaries, cash donations, clothing donations, food donations. The sign that was supposed to contain information about the form of the charitable collection turned out to be uninformative. Initially, it was assumed that this feature would allow differentiating donations into "cash", "natural" and "mixed" and comparing their prevalence and effectiveness. However, a close examination of the documents showed that neither the announcements of charity events nor the reports on them (which make up the bulk of the processed documents) often had no direct indication of whether the collection was carried out only with money or only with things. A similar situation arose with the sign "donors". There is a difference between the "de jure" provision (as a rule, we do not see it, because the provision on the collection was not printed) and what was in fact. But if you try to fill it out "in fact", relying only on a note in the newspaper, then the information was given incomplete.

Results: summary tables and charts

Figure 1 shows the structure of the content of publications about donations in the newspaper "Yeniseiskie Gubernskie Vedomosti" during the imperial period of the First World War. The ring diagram shows the absolute values and percentages of the content options.

Fig. 1. Structure of types of publications about donations in absolute values and percentages

Charity reports are in the lead in publications by a wide margin (64.3%), there are fewer appeals (24.9%), the share of ads is only 9.9%, and the number of thanks is insignificant (0.9%). Quantitatively dominant reports indicate the importance of this stage of charitable activity. Detailed information about the events held, the total expenses, the namesake transfer of donors indicating the size of the donation and the channels of distribution of funds, supported public confidence in charitable practices. At the same time, the publication of reports was also a way to encourage the population to take similar actions, by forming an idea of the widespread dissemination of desired behavior.

In Fig. 2 shows the structure of the venues for collecting donations in newspaper publications. The horizontal histogram shows the frequency of occurrence of territorial units of different scale and other characteristics.

Fig. 2. Donation collection locations

Reports of actions on a provincial scale prevail, followed by the scale of a city, village, county, parish. The remaining options are marginal. It is noteworthy that the village as a place of collection of donations is among the three leaders in frequency of occurrence, ahead of larger territorial and administrative units (county, parish). But this does not indicate the different potential of agitation and coordination activity, but only reflects the frequency of publications. Most of the charity events were carried out by local governments – local committees to assist families of people called up for war. And here, on the one hand, there are numerically fewer counties than villages and cities combined, and therefore there are fewer county reports. On the other hand, it is not known for certain whether all local committees published their reports in newspapers. Since such aid committees were created everywhere and they carried out some kind of activity (once a unit was created, it should work), but there were no opportunities or funds to print a report competently.

It should be noted that, since 1916, the content of collection reports has lost important qualitative characteristics. If in the previous war years these included information about the organizers, the objects of the aid, the namesake list of donors indicating their positions and place of residence, then since 1916 the report has often been limited only to indicating the venue of the event, the income received from it and the direction of spending funds.

Figure 3 shows the frequency of publications on donations in the context of counties of the Yenisei province from August 1, 1914 to March 21, 1917.

Fig. 3. Number of publications on donations by county (1914-1917)

In the representation of the newspaper "Yeniseiskie Gubernskie Vedomosti", the activities of organizing and conducting fundraising in Minusinsk, Krasnoyarsk and Achinsk counties were equally active during the period under review, and Kansk county was twice as active. Yenisei County is an outsider (6 mentions).

Table 1 shows the rating of donation collection forms. There are 11 collection forms, and they are not mutually exclusive.

Table 1. Rating of donation collection forms

The predominant form of collecting donations is monetary donations (135 mentions). Lotteries (90) and clothing donations (90) are equally common, subscription lists (37), sale of items (26) and entertainment events (26), deductions from salaries (19) are less common. The motives of excitement (lottery), entertainment (entertainment events) and acquisitions (sale of items) are in use.

For example, for a lottery, as a rule, money was first collected by subscription and things, then this money went to organize the event itself and purchase additional things, followed by the sale of lottery tickets. All this revenue is gross profit. If, along with money, donations of things or products were received as a result of the collection, they were estimated in rubles in the reports.

An example in the source ^{[29, p. 3]}:

coming:

donations have been received for the lottery device based on subscription lists:

a) in money – 608 rubles. 40 kopecks.;

b) things – 696 rubles. 66 kopecks. – 1,305 rubles. 66 kopecks.;

6,000 tickets were sold and 1,500 rubles were earned from them.;

donated by different persons during the lottery draw – 29 rubles 59 kopecks.

TOTAL – 1,529 rubles 59 kopecks.

It should be noted that the amount of donations collected, according to the materials of the Yenisei provincial Gazette in the period under review, amounted to 146,204.08 rubles, and the total cost of fees was 36,713.01 rubles. The average amount of one collection was 1,160.39 rubles, and the average cost of collection was 319.24 rubles. At the same time, the average percentage of collection costs was 35.60 (±24.61).

Table 2 shows the frequency of occurrence of recipients of social assistance.

Table 2. Frequency of occurrence of recipients of social assistance

The theme of the war is clearly visible in the direction of donations. Priority objects (recipients) of assistance: military families, the wounded and crippled of war, the army.

Results: dynamics of charity events in a time frame

Figure 4 shows a graph of the number of absolute and normalized appeals for charitable actions, or reports on charitable actions for the years from 1914 to 1917.

Fig. 4. The number of appeals/reports on charity events by year

The temporal unevenness of the annual periods of the First World War was reflected in the time line. In 1914, only five full months since the beginning of the war, a full year in 1915 and 1916, two full months in 1917 (the newspaper ceased publication on March 21, 1917).

Figure 5 shows a histogram of the structure of types of newspaper reports on donations in the interannual dynamics of the First World War. The structure is represented by absolute values.

Fig. 5. Structure of types of publications on donations in the interannual dynamics

The histogram shows that the reports dominate, as in the undivided sample for years. To verify the impression of descriptive statistics, a statistical analysis of the differences was carried out (Table 3). The number of content options has been reduced: the "no" option has been deleted; "announcement" is equated to "appeal", since this is also a call for donations; "gratitude" is equated to "report", since this is a kind of report. The absolute frequency of occurrence and the percentage of types of publications on donations by year are presented, the significance levels of the criterion (Pierson'sχ2 / Fisher's exact criterion) are calculated.

Table 3. The result of testing the hypothesis of differences in the structure of types of publications on donations depending on the year

*Differences are significant at the p level<0,05

According to Table 3, statistically significant differences were found in the ratio of the number of reports and appeals between 1915 and 1916. Comparing these years, it can be argued that in 1916 there were 15% more reports and 15% fewer appeals than in 1915. No statistically significant differences were found between the other periods.

Figure 6 shows a histogram of the dynamics of the amounts of gross fees and charges. The data is not normalized by year. Unit of measurement: thousand rubles.

Fig. 6. Dynamics of fees and expenses on fees, thousand rubles.

The histogram shows the inequality of amounts, the proximity of gross fees in 1915 and 1916, the increase in fees and expenses from 1914 to 1915. The amounts from the reports published in 1917 related to the fees of 1916, therefore 1917 itself does not appear in the figure. The detailed descriptive statistics in table 4 clarify this observation. In it, the signs "gross collection" and "collection costs" are described both for the period 1914-1916 and segmented by individual years. For each feature, the following are presented: Valid N – the number of non–empty values to find out the volume of newspaper reports on which conclusions are based; % Valid - the percentage of non–empty values to understand what percentage of the found messages contains information about the amounts of fees and expenses; Me (Q1-Q3) - median and interquartile range to compare donations; Sum – the amount of donations to compare the total amount of donations; Min and Max – the minimum and maximum donations to clarify the structure of donations; p – the significance level of the Kraskel-Wallis criterion, to compare features by year.

Table 4. Descriptive statistics of collection data and hypothesis testing

Table 4 shows that the volume of reports on donations, with information on the amounts and costs of fees, varies by year. For example, in 1915 there were 68 reports on fees, and in 1916 there were two times less – 34. Not all reports contain information about the gross fee. The total percentage of such reports in the period under review is 91%, and for individual years: from 81% to 100%. There are fewer valid messages with information about expenses: from 74% to 89%. It is important that the messages containing information about the gross collection only partially match the messages with information about the collection costs. These circumstances indicate the incompleteness of these sources, the need to carefully interpret quantitative indicators and remember that in fact it is not data on donations that are being analyzed, but the representation of these data in the newspaper "Yeniseiskie Gubernskie Vedomosti". Comparing the gross fees and collection costs in the newspaper representation in different years of the First World War, one should focus on medians and interquantile scales, since these quantitative indicators do not correspond to the normal distribution. In table 4, the smallest values within the indicator are highlighted in bold and italics, the largest in bold and underline. The highest median value of the gross collection was in 1914, and the lowest in 1916, but the total donation was the largest in 1915. The minimum median cost of fees was in 1914, and the maximum in 1915 (as well as the largest total cost of fees). The application of the Kraskel-Wallis criterion clarified the significance of the differences in annual median fees and fee costs. In both cases, the differences were statistically insignificant. This means that the newspaper representation does not give grounds to talk about the presence of a pronounced three-year dynamics of donations.

Results: visual dashboard

An additional result of the work was an information dashboard created in Excel – a visual interface that allows you to visually present quantitative indicators, quickly and conveniently evaluate them, conduct comparative analysis and find patterns. The main characteristics of the dashboard are as follows: 1) data visualization (using graphs and diagrams to present information), 2) interactivity (the ability to filter data by time, territory, events or other criteria), 3) analytics (the ability to identify trends, patterns and other significant relationships in the data).

Figure 7 shows the first dashboard screen.

Fig.7 The first dashboard screen

As can be seen from Figure 7, the dashboard is represented by filtering elements and diagrams. The following diagrams are available: the number of appeals / reports (linear), the content of the message (circular), the presence of the appeal / report (circular), the initiator / organizer of the collection (circular), the content by year (histogram), the type of venue (histogram), county (histogram), the amount of collection and the average collection (normalized a histogram with accumulation), the dynamics of fees and expenses for fees (histogram), the average percentage of expenses for fees (histogram), the form of collection of donations (petal), the object of assistance (petal).

To control the dashboard, there are the following buttons for filtering data: year of release, content, availability of an ad / report, county, type of place, locality.

The dashboard helps users better understand the information presented in numerical values, and draw conclusions based on facts presented in a visually convenient and structured way.

Conclusion

Statistical processing of the materials of the newspaper "Yeniseiskie Gubernskie Vedomosti" increased the efficiency of using their information potential, made it possible to establish ways of organizing and attracting donations, identify initiators/actors of charitable actions, recipients of assistance, establish the dynamics of indicators (volume of donations, number of charitable events, etc.) and their spatial differentiation on a provincial scale. Collection reports dominate publications (64.3%), appeals and announcements make up a smaller proportion (9.9% and 24.9%, respectively), and acknowledgements – 0.9%. Fees at the provincial level prevail, followed by cities, villages and counties. Particular attention is drawn to the activity of villages in the fees, which may indicate a difference in the potential of campaigning and organization in different administrative units. Cash donations are the most popular form of charitable collection. Lotteries were widely covered, less often information about donations based on signed lists, income from the sale of items and entertainment events. Military families, wounded and maimed soldiers, and the army are the most frequently mentioned objects (recipients) of assistance, much less attention was paid to helping orphans, refugees, and educational institutions. In 1915, there was a significant increase in publications and fundraising compared to 1914, and in 1916, the number of reports on donations and their volume decreased significantly. In 1917 (after February), the newspaper practically stopped publishing, and the reports reflect only 1916. Statistical analysis of the structure of messages and financial data showed the asynchronous and nonlinear development of social fundraising campaigns aimed at supporting the front and needy segments of the population during the study period.