Statistical sources for the research of the military-mobilization and labor potential of Western Siberia (1939-1948)

The size and the composition of the population, professional standard and educational attainment of the human contingent, in a word, the human capital represented the determinant in the Second World War. The aim of this article is detection of basic information sources of government structures the State Planning Commission and the CSB and their local agencies used for determining the military-mobilization and labor resources, and also a brief characteristic of these sources. In the initial period of the war Soviet statisticians were guided by the materials of the Soviet census of 1939. This census was organized after the recognition of the census of 1937 as defective. Therefore, the main goals of the organizers of the census of 1939 were the correction of mistakes and the liquidation of the consequences of the deliberate sabotage. So the census of 1939 was turned from the normal statistical operation into a great political campaign. The scientific and practical goal of the census as gaining information of population yielded to the ideological interests. Modern researchers agree in opinion that the census of 1939 had overestimated the country's population and had distorted its structure. Falsification of the materials of the census had found a reflection in subsequent realizing statistical calculations which based on them. Thus, the beginning of the Great Patriotic War was characterized by the absence of reliable data on the availability of human resources. This fact impeded the military mobilization. In 1943 government authorities began to use no recurrent reports of rural councils about the size and composition of the rural population in order to determine the size of the mobilization potential. An important although indirect source of detection of the size and composition of the urban population in the war years were the data of the USSR People's Commissariat on the number of issued ration cards. A significant role in determining the size of the labor potential of the urban population played records of the unemployed urban population. After the war government structures used lists of voters from the elections to constitute the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1946) and the Supreme Soviets of the RSFSR and autonomous republics (1947) to determine the size and composition of the population, and also gender disparities arising as a consequence of large military casualties. The USSR People's Commissariat by order dated December 31, 1945 authorized statisticians to use voter lists for the calculations. Developments during the war years in the size and structure of the population younger than 18 can be traced using materials counting children and youth under age 18 the CSB organized from December 1947 to January 1948 in the urban areas. This account is a kind of a mini-census undertaken without survey of the population.

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