GIS Map of the Russian Empire in 1858

We have created an original GIS map of the Russian Empire with the province and district borders corresponding to 1858, one of the two years covered by the Tenth Revision (tax census).25 _{To the best} of our knowledge, this is the first GIS map of Russia whose administrative units are consistent with the years of the Tenth Revision. Additionally, the map covers the regions in which the Tenth Revision was not conducted, namely the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland. Correctly defining the administrative borders is particularly important because the phenomenon we study—urbanization—is

25_{Most of the primary information for the revision was collected by the end of 1859, except for the Far East, where the}

an outcome of a spatial optimization problem, and most of the data on rural population we use is from the Tenth Revision.

The first­level administrative unit in the Empire, comparable to a U.S. state, was a province (gu­ berniia, oblast’). Provinces tended to be too large and heterogeneous to be used as primary “building

blocks” in construction of the database. Instead, we measure our non­city­level variables at a lower level of aggregation, which we refer to as a district (roughly equivalent to a U.S. county).26 _Uyezd served as such a unit in most of Russia proper, except the South, Caucasus, and Siberia, where some provinces were divided into severalokrugs. In the Baltic, uyezd (kreis in German) was a third­level

unit, while in most cases statistical information was reported at theokrug level, which we define as a

district for our purposes. The term powiat, used for describing second­level subdivisions within the

Kingdom of Poland, was typically translated as “uyezd” in official publications in Russian. Although

historicallypowiats and uyezds were not equivalent, we use powiats as districts because their degree

of granularity was comparable. In the Grand Duchy of Finland, the system ofuyezds was rarely used

by the local administration, despite being adopted by the central government in St. Petersburg. Instead, Finnish officials and statistical agencies reported information separately for cities and rural communes, as during Swedish rule. Rural communes were represented by parishes (församling), which sometimes

were further divided into chapels (kapell).27 _{Parishes and chapels were relatively small and numerous} (almost 470 in total in 1860). We aggregate them at the district, i.e.,uyezd, level, as defined by the

central government, by matching the boundaries as depicted on the base map. We also use several statistical publications in Russian that provide (incomplete) correspondence between parishes, chapels, anduyezds.28 _{In almost all cases, we are able to perfectly match these different subdivisions, except} for several parishes.29 The resulting number of districts in the territory of the Empire we study is 589.

The main base map we use isKarta Evropeiskoi Rossii i Kavkazskogo kraia [A map of European

26_{To be more precise, we measure those variable at districts’ centroids.}

27_{We use the terms in Swedish because it was the only official language of the Duchy until 1863. In some Russian}

sources, the German termkirchspiel is also used when referring to parishes.

28_{Those are the same publications that we use as the population data sources. See the complete list in Appendix.} 29_{Given that the remaining ambiguities only concern parishes and chapels that share a common border, and that their}

Russia and the Caucasus], created by the Imperial Russian Geographic Society between 1857 and

1860 and published in 1862.30_{The district borders on this map mostly correspond to the 1858 borders,} except for the mountainous part of the North Caucasus (not in the sample) and several other districts. For Western Siberia, we use General’naia karta Zapadnoi Sibiri s Kirgizskoi Step’iu [A general map of Western Siberia with the Kirghiz Steppe], with the border corrections as of 1855. Due to the

vast territory of the Empire, both base maps were printed on separate pages, which we stack together after georeferencing. Though we believe that the overall quality of georeferencing is high, the resulting vector images of certain provinces are distorted because pieces of their raster counterparts are scattered across several images. To correct for these distortions, and, where necessary, to make the district borders consistent with those existing in 1858, we additionally use raster maps of individual provinces created by the Ministry of the Interior, military agencies, and third parties.

Because the reliability of our empirical results to a large extent depends on how accurately the GIS map reflects the proportions of the historical districts,31_{we perform the following quality check. We} compare the areas (in square kilometers) of the 1858 districts, as calculated by contemporary statisti­ cians, and the areas of the same districts calculated using the GIS software. We are able to do such comparison for 540 out of 590 districts; for the remaining districts, we lack the historical data. Fig­ ure 3.3 plots the areas of the districts from our GIS map against the areas measured by contemporaries (in log terms). Reassuringly, the deviations from the 45­degree line do not seem systematic in either direction across the spectrum. Also, the deviations are small in magnitude.32