The Russian Empire
Question & Answer

What Was the Russian Empire’s Population?

On 28 January 1897, the Russian Empire held its first and only empire-wide census. The enumerators counted 125,068,231 people. The 1897 census — the work of the statistician P. N. Savitskii and his staff — is the single firm anchor of any study of the imperial population, because pre-1897 estimates are reconstructions and post-1897 figures are extrapolations. By 1914 the imperial population was about 175 million, making Russia the third most populous state in the world after British India and Qing China, and the largest in Europe (see Mironov, A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917, 2000).

The growth of the population

From about 14 million in 1722 (the first known reasonable estimate) the imperial population grew to about 175 million in 1914 — more than a twelvefold increase over the imperial period, faster than the European average. The acceleration was particularly strong after 1860: from roughly 74 million in 1863 to 125 million in 1897 and 175 million in 1914, the population almost doubled in half a century. The Great Reforms and their aftermath brought improved rural sanitation, vaccination, and food supply, while the conquest of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East added millions of new subjects: Kazakhs and Uzbeks, Armenians and Georgians, Tungusic and Far Eastern peoples.

The ethnic composition

The 1897 census identified about 146 distinct languages; it counted only the most populous nationalities. Of the 1897 total:

  • Great Russians (Russians): about 44.3 per cent, concentrated in the central and northern provinces.
  • Ukrainians (Little Russians): about 17.8 per cent, in nine southwestern provinces.
  • Poles: about 6.3 per cent, concentrated in the Kingdom of Poland and the western provinces.
  • White Russians (Belarusians): about 4.1 per cent.
  • Tatars (Volga, Crimean, Kazan): about 2.6 per cent; with Bashkirs, about 3 per cent.
  • Jews: about 4.1 per cent, overwhelmingly in the Pale of Settlement.
  • Central Asians (Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmens, Kyrgyz): about 5.6 per cent in total.
  • Georgians, Armenians, and other Caucasian peoples: about 3.1 per cent in total.
  • Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Germans, and the rest of the imperial minorities made up the remainder.

The numbers meant that in 1914 no national group had an overall majority inside the empire, and the Russian state governed a roughly 30 per cent non-Russian population. The management of that population was the central political problem of the late imperial period (see Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, 2001).

The religious composition

The 1897 census asked about confession as well as language. The numbers were:

  • Russian Orthodox: about 69.9 per cent, including most Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Moldavans, and the Georgian Orthodox.
  • Catholic: about 9.1 per cent, mostly Poles, Lithuanians, and the Polish-settled western provinces.
  • Muslim: about 11.1 per cent, including the Volga and Crimean Tatars, most of the Central Asians, and the Turkic peoples of the Caucasus.
  • Jewish: about 4.1 per cent.
  • Lutheran and other Protestant: about 4.6 per cent, predominantly in the Baltic provinces, Finland, and the Volga German colonies.
  • Buddhist, shamanist, and other: about 1.2 per cent, including Buryats, Kalmyks, and most of the Siberian peoples.

The urban-rural distribution

The empire was overwhelmingly rural at the end of the imperial period. About 14.2 per cent of the population lived in towns in 1897 — a lower proportion than in Germany (54.6 per cent in the German Empire), France (40 per cent), or Britain (over 70 per cent). The share was rising fast, however, especially in the textile and metallurgical belt: St Petersburg (1.27 million in 1897), Moscow (1.04 million), Warsaw (614,000), Odessa (405,000), Lodz (314,000), Kiev (248,000), Kharkov (174,000), Riga (256,000), Baku (112,000), and Tiflis (160,000) were the largest cities, and their populations in 1914 were substantially larger than the 1897 figures. The St Petersburg census of 1910 counted 1.96 million; Moscow’s 1912 count was 1.62 million (Mironov, 2000).

The demographic record

The imperial censuses are unusually rich. The 1897 census was followed by a partial 1910 census (cancelled for financial reasons) and by the comprehensive municipal censuses of 1910-1912. Vital statistics were collected by the Orthodox Church from parish registers, by rabbis and mullahs for their communities, and by a growing network of medical and zemstvo statisticians. Russian demography of the imperial period is among the best-documented in pre-modern Europe.