STATISTICS OF THE INITIAL PERIOD OF THE DEPORTATION OF THE PEASANTRY IN THE 1930–1931 YEARS: THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS FOR HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION
Krasilnikov SergeyAt the end of the 1980s in the context of the policy of «opening of the archives»” historians got an access to government statistics on repressions of the Soviet era. With the obvious advantages of a centralized accounting of repressions significant gaps in the accounting and dynamics control of deported to special settlements peasantry in the 1930 1931 years were revealed. Deportation and the creation from the very beginning of special settlements could not but cause disruption and misrepresentation of statistical reporting, such a kind of information is called «gray hole». Social chaos generated chaos in statistics. Both institutional factors (interdepartmental contradictions and uncoordinated actions of secret police, a huge turnover of staff of the commandant’s offices, etc.) and behavioral factors (active and passive forms of peasant resistance) influenced the accounting of exiled farmers. As a result the statistically recorded special settlements population loss in the period amounted to half a million people, or a quarter of the number of deportees, but accurate data on the mechanisms and relationships of various forms of such catastrophic deportation statistics were not fixed. This publication analyzes the causes of the information «failure» of corporate statistics.