Compiling Long-term Economic Statistical Data for the Russian Far East: Working in a Difficult Environment

Kiichi Mochizuki


As a participant in the Asian Historical Statistics Project being conducted by the Institute of Economic Research of Hitotsubashi University, I was able to visit three Russian cities in February and in May in my capacity as a member of the Russian Far East research team. The cities were Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Khabarovsk, and Vladivostok, where I searched for statistical data on the pre-World War II era. During my visits, I worked out new approaches for searching out long-term data for the Statistics Project.

1. Striking Out in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk

The only time that I could go to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk was during Japan's "Golden Week" vacation time, which essentially meant that the time that I could really conduct research was limited to a single day as there were consecutive days off in Russia for May Day, the weekend, an extra weekday holiday, and Victory Over Germany Memorial Day. As most of the materials I wanted to use were at the Historical Documents Institute (Arkhiv), the Provincial Library, and at the State Statistics Committee (Goskomstat), work came to a complete stop on holidays.

Russia is presently in the midst of a complicated economic crisis in which protracted negative growth is accompanied by high inflation and unemployment. If you take disease as a metaphor, it might be as if doctors in a university hospital were treating a patient with a rare illness, only instead of doctors writing prescriptions economists are engaged in a heated scholarly debate over the best course of action to take. To cope with such economic conditions, it has become a standard activity for all but the very wealthiest people all across the country to go every Saturday, Sunday, and holiday to country homes to raise food. As the June presidential elections drew near, it was hardly surprising that Boris Yeltsin, with his talent for sniffing out ways to boost his standing among the people, proclaimed a number of extended holidays. Whether in Kholmsk, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, or Korsakov, few people were to be seen in the streets, and any attempt to discuss the subject of work would have been regarded as the exemplification of bad manners.

I had entrusted the task of arranging appointments to the head of the Sakhalinskaya Office of the Hokkaido Society for the Promotion of Trade, who claimed that the sudden decision to arrange a trip during an extended holiday caught him short as well. He may have been persuaded by the head of the Sakhalinskaya Goskomstat, who seemed to be a remnant of the Soviet-era bureaucracy, that I should be satisfied with a quick and simple visit. Even though I had earlier informed him of my plans, including the materials I wished to collect and my budgetary limitations, no preparations at all had been made, but he went on and on explaining to me about the role of the Sakhalinskaya Goskomstat, relations with Moscow, and data to be gathered, as well as matters with regards to which the Khabarovsk Goskomstat had already informed me. I was unable to get in a word. The upshot of the matter was that the bureaucrat, as he showed me the materials that I wanted to use, informed me that they were for official use only and that I therefore could not use them. Moreover it turned out that I could not use other statistical materials whose use I had prearranged because it was a holiday, so there was no one to bring them to me. To communicate my plans in detail, then travel so far, only to produce zero results, was a first for me.

2. My Personal Experiences in Khabarovsk and Vladivostok

My visit to Khabarovsk took place from February 12th to 19th this year. I visited six sites. These were the Institute of Economic Research (of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Far Eastern Division), the Regional Historical Documents Institute, the regional branch of Goskomstat, the Khabarovsk Employment Center, the Khabarovsk Labor Commission, and the Khabarovsk Provincial Documents Institute.

At the offices of Goskomstat, I received the following information and instruction regarding the gathering of statistical materials.

(1) The statistical materials gathered by the local offices of Goskomstat from all the Far Eastern oblastjs are not compiled in the oblastjs themselves but are sent directly to the central office in Moscow, which is supposed to assemble them into a comprehensive statistical network. However, a Far Eastern and Siberian Statistical Council was recently established in Vladivostok, and it has set up a system for independently gathering and arranging statistical materials within its own territory.

(2) The local Goskomstat offices store statistical data for periods of ten years, then transfer it to the corresponding regional Historical Documents Institute for permanent storage.

(3) State-designated statistics are gathered by local offices of Goskomstat directly from enterprises, arranged, and sent to the central office of Goskomstat.

(4) Regional offices of Goskomstat sometimes gather statistics independently or gather them in response to particular requests.

This meant that none of the prewar materials I wanted were at the Khabarovsk Goskomstat, although it was a treasure house of contemporary materials. Further, I had not expected to find out that there was no single public institution which compiled a unified collection of materials for the Far East. To compile a unified set of materials, the Economic Research Institute or other institutions gather materials from various regions and process them.

This being understood, I paid a visit to the Historical Documents Institute, the most important site for my investigation. The basic system for using the library was like everywhere else in Russia. There was a reading room and a catalog for visitors, who would search for the desired materials in the catalog cards and have them brought from some annex. As I had received an introduction from the director of the Institute of Economic Research, I was treated with the utmost cordiality.

Although I ordered the materials I wanted, there was no way on my initial visit that I could know in what form they would arrive. It was like entering a massive forest and losing your compass. I had no idea where to go.

As an experiment, I asked for some materials that would arrive in a condition which could, I figured, be more or less anticipated. What I got were A3 size papers, badly colored with age, with the figures handwritten in poor quality ink. It was rather as if I could sense the presence of the persons who had created the document. I worried that touching the paper would crumble it, but decided that the risk of handling it had to be taken. As the materials were covered with dust, I realized that anyone working with it was bound to get dirty. Another problem was that the institute was open for only short periods, so there was no question of working until late at night. The figures were scattered throughout the columns, and every page was full of blank spaces. In the columns were written detailed figures broken down for era, enterprise, and region, and from these I applied myself to extract the information. To get all the figures for a given industrial product for a certain fiscal year in a particular governmental unit, I had to go through a depressingly large amount of materials, copying out their numbers.

As it was not possible to go directly to the shelves for the necessary documents, I had to rely on the staff to bring them, one at a time. Further, it was necessary to reserve a space large enough to go through the pages of the assembled documents and compile the necessary statistics. The reading room was not designed for that type of work. Thus, I first had to accumulate a mountain of material and reserve the necessary desk space, then start to work. It was not a task for some one working alone. The regular desks were too small to do that sort of work, not to mention the fact that it disturbed the other person.

3. Linking the Materials For Each Administrative Unit

Demarcating the fiscal years, figuring out how to structure the administrative units, and then how to assemble results for the highest administrative unit -- a chart must be created in which the different areas can be filled in with the results as they are completed. When this job is finished for each region, then the results have to be compiled for the Russian Far East as a whole.

I was informed in Vladivostok's Historical Documents Institute that the process of transferring documents for the Far East from Chitinskaya oblastj to Vladivostok had not yet been completed. Also, each oblastj was supposed to store its own old documents. For example, it might be necessary to go all the way to Kamchatskaya oblastj's capital, Petropavrovsk-Kamchatskij or to Magadanskaya oblastj's capital, Magadan (both of which must have old document centers). That is the sort of thing that one might naturally foresee, but the administrative districts in the Russian Far East have not been fixed, rather have often changed throughout the course of history. The Sakha Republic was until recently called the Autonomous Republic of Jakutija but in the past it was not included in the Far Eastern administrative district. We have to adjust for these sorts of changes and produce figures which can be compared by means of time series charts.

In addition, since the purpose of the research is to gather long-term statistics on Asia, it may be necessary to cover, not just the present Far Eastern district, but as far as the region to the east of Lake Bajkal. This is a natural course considered from the perspectives of both the "Far Eastern Republic" territory created after the revolution and the recently formulated "Far East-TransBajkal Long-term Economic Development Plan, 1996-2005." Far Eastern statistics can be compiled without use of primary documents for the period from 1957 by using the Russia Statistical Annual. It remains to be seen whether data collected from this source can adequately cover the whole of the unified Far Eastern territory.

Moreover, there are problems related to the handling of time series for Kuril'skie ostrova (one of the disputed "Northern Territories" lying off the coast of Hokkaido) and the island of Sakhalin. If data is not gathered for both areas together, it will be necessary to make corrections from the beginning for missing portions. Those portions alone might create particularities in the aggregate data values for different years. It is apparent that random gathering of materials will not produce scientifically reliable data.

This means that, at the very least, we must press forward with our work as we scrutinize every classification, fiscal year, and region for time series comparability. Given these conditions, it is necessary to formulate rules on using prices from the start, as the effect of price changes on aggregate values should be considered. For this reason, we need to create matrixes based on the three dimensions of classification, fiscal year, and region, and then to create sub-matrixes if necessary, and finally to fill in the matrixes using the figures we gather as sets are completed. In any case, and especially if there are Statistical Annuals for years prior to 1957, there should be investigations into time series adjustments for the above multiple dimensions.

It is essential to determine sufficiently clear objectives (what data to gather, what years and what territories to cover), assemble a staff of Russian specialists and assistants as well as a Japanese-Russian research team, and find worksites. In order to accomplish these tasks, it would be best to begin by arranging the contemporary unified data, which is relatively plentiful, and then extending the figures back into the past.

For this reason, though it may initially seem roundabout, we should start by investigating the standardized official statistics published in Russia Statistical Annual and Russian Trade Statistics so that we might use them as the bases for guidebooks or "primers" for the statistical databases. The guidebooks should include the following information for each table or chart of statistical data: data sources, explanations of statistical concept, cautionary notes on usage, basic analyses of statistical figures, graphing the data (if possible), changes in methods of compilation in state statistical institutes and current statistical institutes, notes on gathering of statistical data, notes on industrial classification, distribution diagrams of national economic circulation, methods of formulating estimates of national income, and notes on how to make it as mutually compatible and comparatively applicable as possible.

The primers would essentially be by-products of the process of carefully annotating basic information. Afterwards, the goal will be to gather and arrange long-term data so that it is as historically extensive and internationally comparable as possible. To achieve this objective, we need to do the following:

(1) Make adjustments for changes in statistical coverage of regions, and clarify what territory comprises the Far East and the internal territories of the Far East.

(2) Define statistical classifications and adjust content.

(3) Unify the statistical classification groupings. (The industrial statistics of the former Soviet Union/Russia differ from those of Western countries. Moreover, classifications for trade statistics and industrial statistics differ within the former Soviet Union/Russia. Even if we pinpoint the differences, we will need a lower rank of figures to newly arrange the data).

(4) Change statistical methods. (Up to now, industrial statistics, including those for manufacturing, mining, and agriculture, have been recorded not as value-added products but as gross products in gross national production statistics. Therefore, even a change in the way that production units are consolidated will result in a change in the figures.)

(5) Devise means of handling the appearance of new products and the disappearance of old products.

(6) Change methods of compiling price indicators.

(7) Introduce methods for conversion to a Dollar basis, when possible. (Changes in exchange markets, etc.)

4. A Proposal for Advancing the Next Stage of Research

Having broached the above issues, I would like to propose the following approach for conducting the research. First, we should gather and arrange the statistical information for the Far East since the time of the birth of new Russia and work out the necessary statistical time series. Then, while searching for appropriate materials to use in the time series, we can continue to procure materials for earlier periods.

Arranging materials by starting in the past and continuing to the present is irrational. This is because some past national income and other data does not exist, and even if we compile long-term and regional indicators of gross product, quite a lot of difficult work will be required to compensate for the large number of improvised or missing statistics.

To facilitate the investigations, we should help our Russian colleagues to understand our objectives by showing them the results (publications) from the Long-term Economic Statistics of Japan project, and by providing them with pamphlets and basic explanatory materials in English. We do not want them to suspect us of conducting espionage activities.

There are copiers available in many locations, but the procedures for using them are cumbersome, entailing considerable time and expense, so it would be far more efficient to use cameras to photograph written documents. Standard copying costs in regional libraries run 400 rubles (about 9 yen) a page, or 800 rubles for fast service, and copying pre-1930 materials can cost 1,000 or even 2,000 rubles. These were copying costs as of May 1996. Persistent high inflation means that they are likely to change.

Kiichi Mochizuki
Professor Emeritus, Hokkaido University