Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2014 number

The paper deals with the problem of registration of the prisoners of World War I in Russia and the 1917 census (on the materials of the Perm province). The author asserts that the census was conducted on a nation-wide scale not only because of the «defects» in prisoners registration. The vagueness of quantitative characteristics of the Russian captivity was above all due to its polycentric nature. Rapid integration of captives in production processes led to the fact that in 1915 the captured enemy soldiers were sent to 891 sites, of which 317 were considered as «places of permanent settlement» and only 68 as camps. In the camps registration was conducted in one way or another but it was lacking in those places where forced labor was used. Captives often arrived at such places bypassing the points of permanent settlement and while being there they could be removed from one production site to another. However, all this was only the beginning. Since 1916 accurate prisoners registration as well as their categorization by age, national, ethnic, confessional and other criteria had been turned into unachievable goal. Its realization was blocked by fierce «battle for prisoners» between Russia’s industry and agriculture. As a result, by the middle of 1917 any available registers of captive foreigners in Russia reflected neither their total numbers nor composition nor actual captivity geography. The solution of this problem was seen in conducting the prisoners census for which a set of documents was developed. However it created another problem since the military authorities had been overzealous and made perspective system of the prisoners registration so unwieldy that it turned out absolutely unpromising. For all that even if the All-Russian census of captives had been held successfully, the collected data would have required certain time to be processed, which was impossible in the context of political developments of 1917. The late 1917 census campaign failed to produce reasonable statistics and confirmed once again that the pattern of Russian captivity was initially too complex to retain its transparency.