Boris N. Mironov

Russian Living Standards under the Tsars: Anthropometric Evidence from the Volga

The trend in mean height in the Russian province of Saratov is estimated for birth cohorts from 1755 to 1892 on the basis of newly gathered archival data and published sources. Heights fell in the late eighteenth century due an increasing burden of taxes and feudal dues. Stature increased slowly throughout the nineteenth century, offering no support for the hypothesis of an agrarian crisis that provoked or followed from the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Improving living conditions can be attributed to economic development, rising productivity in agriculture, and diversification of peasant economic activity into other sectors.

Has Post-Modernism Come to Russia? Comments on the Anthology "American Russian Studies"

The compiler of this anthology, Michael David-Fox,1 has collected some outstanding work into two volumes.2 The essays are well translated into Russian, and David-Fox’s excellent introductions acquaint the reader with the authors, describe their work, and explain why these particular items have been chosen instead of other research. The introduction to the first volume, entitled “Fathers, Children, and Grandchildren in the American Historiography of Tsarist Russia,” is particularly interesting. David-Fox offers a periodization of postwar American Russian studies based on a generational principle: the fathers (late 1940s–mid1960s), children (late 1960s–late 1980s), and grandchildren (1990s). These dates apply not to the historians’ years of birth but to their active professional years. The classification criteria are very approximate, since many professional historians work for 30 or 40 years after their dissertation defense and, during their professional lives, they alter their intellectual orientation, if not their historical outlook. It would surely be more accurate to speak not of generations, but about stages in the development of Russian studies. These too are related to one another as fathers, children, and grandchildren are. For this reason, hereafter when I say “fathers,” I mean the years from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s; “children” refers to the period from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and “grandchildren” refers to the 1990s. Each chronological segment is at once a stage and a

The Paradigm Shift in Contemporary Russian Studies: Guest Editor's Introduction

English translation

Long-term Trends in the Development of the Family Structure in Christian Russia from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries An Analytical Overview of Historiography

Various forms of family organization among Russian peasants and urban dwellers coexisted from the sixteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The correlation of family types changed and was a function of circumstances and economic conditions. The available data indicate that from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, extended and multiple families predominated among peasants, though the relationship between single-family and multifamily households changed. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a steady process of nuclearization of family structure began, as a result of which the simple family gradually replaced multiple families at first in the cities later in the villages.

Anthropometric Measures of Birth and Stature: Perspectives on Russian Mothers and Newborns

Using data from St. Petersburg hospitals on the length and weight of 64,087 infants born between 1980 and 2005 and the physical stature and weight of 15,819 mothers born between 1929 and 1989, we find that women’s living standards, as measured by their height, improved steadily from the end of World War II up to 1990, which is when women born in 1972 reached adulthood. For mother cohorts born after 1972 and reaching adulthood in the early and mid-1990s, heights declined. Evidence on both the length and weight of babies corroborates this pattern as there is a noticeable connection between the height and weight of newborns and that of their mothers, on the one hand, and social and demographic indicators, on the other. In our data, we see their values trace a “U” shaped curve with troughs near the mid-1990s. Thus, the anthropometric evidence concerning newborns as well as mothers points to the impact of strains on living standards that were prevalent during the period of economic restructuring of the 1990s. This is a general result that confirms a recurring pattern: periods of economic transitions are almost always accompanied by biological stress. In the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, newborns in Moscow and St. Petersburg were definitely inferior to European and white American newborns in weight and, most likely, in stature as well, as there is a close relationship between stature and weight.

The Myth of a Systemic Crisis in Russia After the Great Reforms of the 1860s-1870s

36 English translation