Vladimir Anatolievich Isupov,
Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, Pushkin Leningrad State University, Pushkin, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Demographic History of Russia during the Great Patriotic War: New Tasks − New Sources
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2025-2-1
The current stage of development of historical demography in Russia is characterized by significant achievements in the study of population dynamics during the Great Patriotic War. At present, historical demography is one of the rapidly developing sections of the humanities. Positive shifts in the study of just recently little-known trends in demographic dynamics during the war are very significant. To date, significant steps have been made to eliminate numerous “blank spots” and much of what was previously hidden has become known. Thus, it became possible to summarize the first results of the contradictory development of research on the demographic history of Russia, in particular those aspects that reflect the problems of the war period. At the same time, the article highlights the problems of forming a corpus of sources underlying the study of the demographic history of the Great Patriotic War. The slowdown in the development of historical demography characteristic of the Soviet period is explained not only by ideological prohibitions, but to no lesser extent by the inaccessibility of sources, their unreliability and, accordingly, large errors contained in statistical documents. Nevertheless, the first specific studies using the statistical base revealed a clear exaggeration of the role and significance of the myth about the unreliability of Soviet statistics, which turned out to be significantly more accurate than expected. Based on this, the objectives of the article include the characteristics of the main trends in the development of historiography devoted to the demographic problems of the Great Patriotic War over a long period from 1946 to the present and, at the same time, the analysis of the source base. An equally important task is to link the development of historical demography as a science with the formation of a corpus of sources and, thus, to identify the main trend in the creation of a corpus of sources. The development of historiography and the source study aspects of the problem in the article are rather conditionally, but quite logically, divided into three large periods.
Publishing: 28/04/2025
The article has been received by the editor on 09/02/2025
How to cite: Isupov V.A. Demographic History of Russia during the Great Patriotic War: New Tasks − New Sources // Historical Courier, 2025, No. 2 (40), pp. 11–28. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2025/ISTKURIER-2025-2-01.pdf]
Links: Issue 2 2025
Keywords: historical demography; population size; population composition; reproduction; migration; historiography; statistical sources