Labor and its value among the peasants of Western Siberia in the 80s–90s of the XIX century

The purpose of our article is to study the labor cost of peasants in Western Siberia at the end of the 19th century. Objectives: to show the importance of labor as the basis of the life of the population in any historical period of the development of society, to evaluate the results of existing developments in assessing and summarizing information about the labor resources of Siberia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to try to estimate the cost of labor of peasants of working age for a certain historical period, based on the works of their predecessors. The share of the gross domestic product is first compared to Western Siberia, and then compared with Russia's GDP to determine the economic location of the region. To solve general problems, we identified the role and importance of labor in the livelihood of the Siberian population in its peasant component, which dominated in quantitative terms among other population groups for the whole of Western Siberia. In the history of the economic development of Siberia in the second half of the XIX - early XX century, a number of significant results have been achieved in the historiography of the history of its development - the history of the Siberian working class has been written, the history of the Siberian peasantry has been studied, and in recent decades serious attention has been paid to merchant and financial capital. Such a component of the economy as labor resources is calculated in V.P. Zinoviev's work on the interethnic division of labor in Siberia based on the 1897 census. P.F. Nikulin characterized the internal structure of the peasant economy based on statistics from 1901 and 1916. Labor in a market environment, in our opinion, is the embodiment of dynamic coordinated action regulating social relations, which may be contradictory in some ways, but are necessary for a society with labor principles. We proceed from the assessments of labor in modern sociology as a ratio of its different types: "market - non-market" and "paid - unpaid" labor. Based on this general assessment of labor, it is possible to calculate its amount based on the available indicators of the number of peasants, the labor price of hired workers in stationary and seasonal agricultural work when engaged in the types of agriculture - agriculture and cattle breeding, as well as in commercial activities, which were an integral part of farming. We question the well-established point of view among historians about the impossibility of accurately accounting for the cost of labor in a peasant farm, based only on the fact that it was not completely connected with the market, but worked largely on self-reproduction for subsequent generations. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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