Svetlana Filimontchik (Petrozavodsk State University, Petrozavodsk, Karelia, Russia)

"Mortality of city dwellers during Northern Russian industrialization".

I intend to characterize the dynamics of mortality in 1920-1930 in Karelia using records of the civil status acts and other statistical information. An analysis of the structure of those died and the causes of death showed that during several post-war years, it became possible to relieve the epidemiological strain. In the mid-1920s the death-rate in towns due to typhus declined. A particularly drastic decrease was observed in the number of sick people with spotted fever. Tuberculosis became the first in the list of causes of death. Infant mortality kept extremely high. I pay attention to changes in the financing of the town medicine, development of sanitary service, healthy life and physical training. In the first half of the 1920s, the situation with the proportion of mortality between urban and rural population was as usual: the death-rate was higher in towns than in rural localities, the decrease of the death-rate in the latter being more steady. The death-rate in towns in 1921 was twice as high as in rural districts of Karelia. Beginning from 1926, statistical data revealed continuous decrease of the mortality rate in towns against the background of some rise in the death-rate for the rural population of the republic. In 1927 and 1928, the townspeople's mortality rate was for the first time lower than that for the rural citizens of Karelia. After a grave demographic crisis due to the revolution, the World and Civil Wars it was possible in the 1920s to achieve demographic stability rather quickly. The government's well thought-out policy played a crucial role in that. Stalin's leadership voluntarism during the industrialization and forced collectivization, creation of a system of GULAG camps in the north of Russia resulted in higher mortality in the early 1930s. In the 1929-1931 cheap dark bread was the only product supplied to townspeople by the government rather regularly. Because of malnutrition he number of cases of scurvy sharply increased. In 1931, there was a ten-fold increase in the sickness rate compared with other years. At some plants, about 90% of workers were ill. The living conditions in the north were the most difficult to bear for dekulakized people and special migrants. The overall mortality rate in the republic decreased by nearly one-third in 1934. Gulling characterized as a major achievement the decrease in infant mortality from 30 to 20 per mille, in some Karelian districts - to 13 per mille. It is hard to speak of the net result the number of people repressed in karelia in 1937-1938, they are to be refined. According to I.Takala, no fewer than 11,341 people were arrested and convicted in the republic. Forty per cent of all those repressed were Finns.