Boris N. Mironov
Institute of Russian History (St.-Petersburg Branch),
Russian Academy of Sciences

Family Structure in Russia during 17^th through Early 20^th Centuries: State of Research

The available literature on the historical demography can be divided into four large groups depending on the focus of the research: historical, ethnographic, historical-demographic and interdisciplinary. In historical works the family is studies in connection with some other problems – the position and emancipation of women, the position and formation of the working class, agrarian history, the participation of women in the revolutionary movement etc. The issues of the marriage pattern and family forms, as a rule, are not touched upon there.[1] In ethnographic works the emphasis is made on the study of the family forms, intra-family relations, the position of men, women, children and elderly people, the division of labor by sex and age, wedding ceremonies and family rites, kindred relations. Ethnographers comparatively seldom use statistical data and census evidence and obtain the main information in the course of their own or previously performed field explorations.[2] In historical-demographic works intention is focuses on demographic processes in connection with which nuptiality, conjugal behavior and the family are studied. The sources for such studies are national census, parish register and landlord records.[3] Finally, in interdisciplinary works the family is an important but not central object of research and is studied to solve some other general problems – the family as an agent of servile relations, the family as the basis of public order in the countryside.[4] I attempted to summarize the information on the historical demography available in the Russian and foreign literature[5] and to supplement it by my own findings in my recently published book  “The Social History of Imperial Russia.”[6] The obtained results pertaining to the Orthodox population of Russia can be summarizes in the following way.

During the 18^th through early 20^th centuries the traditional type of population reproduction dominated among the orthodox population. This type of reproduction was characterized by high level of nuptiality (practically only handicapped people were unmarried – nearly three percent of men and women of marriageable age), fertility and mortality and by a high quota of children and young people among the population. Since the mid-19^th century some indications of the transition to the modern pattern of reproduction began to show: birth control, raising of the marriageable age, decrease in mortality etc. Changes in the family structure of the Orthodox population were not by a linear but of a cyclic character. From the early 18^th to the mid-19^th centuries complex families prevailed and it was observed that their role was rising. Them the family structure began to change in the direction of establishing nuclear and superseding complex families. Single persons and group of relatives always existed and their share amounted to 5-11 percent of all families. From 7.5 to 10 percent of households had workers, servants and other people who were not related to the family head. Among the peasantry (from 80 to 92 percent of the country’s population in various periods) land was considered the property of the commune and movable property – the property of the family. As a ripe, after marriage the family head’s sons brought their wives to the house but daughters – went to the house of their husbands. It was in rare cases that after the wedding a man went to the house of his wife. In such cases he was called “primak”, or “vlazen” and in most localities was considered an adopted son of his wife’s father. In most cases brides were younger than their bridegrooms by 2 or 3 years. Only among nobles the difference in the age of spouses was significant. However, in localities short of working hands they married girls to younger boys. Childless people adopted children. Patrilinear kinship and patriarchal authority of the head of the households (as a rule, the eldest man in the family) were the norms of the family life, according to the law and in practice. Man’s and woman’s work were strictly distinguished, even living quarters of the house were divided into woman’s and man’s parts.

            Other features of the East-European marriage pattern established by Hajnal were characteristic for Russia also with some restrictions. In due course the modal age of marriage was rising both according to the law and in practice (from 1780 to 1850 from 15-16 to 18-20 years for women and from 16-18 to 20-22 years for men). In 1867 in the countryside the average age (with second marriages) of bridegrooms was 24.3 years and that of brides – 21.3, in town – 29.2 and 23.6 years respectively; in 1910 in the countryside – 24.8 years and 21.6 in town – 27.4 and 23.7 years, rather greatly differing also by estates. Natural children were rather frequent occurrence. In some places their share among new-born children was from 2 to 7 percent. Divorces, especially actual, not authorized by the church, were not rare events. An unmarried woman never became the head of a family except in the cases when the family consisted of her alone. The influence of the Orthodox church on nuptial behavior was considerable and in the 16^th through 19^th centuries grew as the entire sphere of nuptial and family relations was in the hands of the church. Inside Russia great regional differences were observed and the closer to the Western frontier a given locality was, the greater differences from the East-European marriage pattern were observed. The marriage pattern spread in the Baltic region can be called intermediate because it resembled the West-European pattern in some features.

            In this lecture I would like to discuss the results I obtained pertaining to the evolution of the family forms of urban and rural population for the 18^th trough early 20^th centuries which I regard as hypothetical. Into the analysis, I would like to draw the latest research works which appeared after the book had been published. The choice of the subject is motivated by the fact that the family structure is, in my view, the central and the same time the least studied and the most disputable problem in historiography.

The Peasant Household: Structure and Life Cycle

In the peasant world from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, the Russian words for “family” (sem'ia) and “household” (dvor) were used interchangeably, both words expressing the idea of close relatives living and working together as a unit under the leadership of the household head. The household could consist either of a married couple and their unmarried children or of two or more couples related by kin, such as married children living with their parents, married brothers living with their spouses and children, and so on. In households with several married pairs, household property was held in common and managed by the household head, who was generally in charge of all household matters. Members of the family not only lived under the same roof but also collectively owned the household’s property and were engaged in a single household economy—generally an economy based on agriculture. This is why the Russian words for “farm” (khoziaistvo), “household,” and “family” were synonymous.

Western historians of the family have grouped households into five types: (1) single persons; (2) a kin or non-kin group that does not constitute a family but acts as a single economic unit; (3) the simple, nuclear family consisting of a married pair living alone or with their unmarried children; (4) the extended family, which consists of a married couple, their children, and unmarried relatives; and (5) the multiple-family, composed of two or more married couples, and as a rule, including their children. This last category also includes the so-called multigenerational paternal or fraternal (joint) family, which consists of three to five married couples and a total of ten, twenty, or more family members.

Historians are still divided as to what family type was most common among the Russian peasantry. In recent decades, Russian historians have argued that the nuclear family predominated from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries, albeit with some variations. These historians, however, tend to conflate multiple families and to categorize some of them (such as parents living with married children who do not have children of their own, or parents living with a married son and his children) as nuclear. This approach both exaggerates the number of nuclear family units and removes the extended family from consideration altogether by conflating it with the multiple family. In contrast to their Russian colleagues, American specialists working in this area have suggested that the complex family was more common among the Russian peasantry. Which side is right?

Let’s start by determining the size of the average peasant household (see Table 1).

        Table 1. The average size of the household in Russia, 1710-1910, by regions (persons)

* In 1678

Source: Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Vol. 1, p. 125.

            Although the totals in Table 1 are not entirely internally consistent insofar as they were collected through different methods at different times, most researchers would agree that they accurately represent the overall trends in household evolution. In the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, the average size of the household in the non-black-earth and industrial zones (the north, northwest, and the central non-black-earth regions) decreased, whereas it increased in largely agricultural areas. This suggests that the nature of the household economy was an important determinant of household size: Agricultural work influenced the maintenance of multiple families; work in commerce and industry in its various forms encouraged the growth of smaller family units. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, however, family size was on the wane in all of Russia’s regions, most notably in agricultural areas. This led to a reduction in the disparities in family size between households specializing in farming and those engaging in nonagricultural work.

Due to high mortality rates and short life expectancy, the peasant household was never oversized. The limited size of the household is not a sufficient basis, however, for concluding that the family was the dominant family type among Russian peasants. After all, a family of four members could represent two whole families that is, two married couples), six members might represent three nuclear families, and so on. We can attempt to address this question of family type by analyzing new evidence that has yet to be studied by family historians.

As far as household size and structure are concerned, the most complete data in existence are those for Yaroslavl province. The average village household in Yaroslavl province numbered 1.95 families and 6.49 persons (3.01 men and 3.48 women), of whom 3.45 were adults and 3.04 children.  For three other provinces—Perm, Nizhegorod, and Kiev—where we have data only on household size, we see 7.06 persons (3.33 men and 4.73 women); 6.89 persons (3.30 men and 3.59 women); and 7.32 persons (3.64 men and 3.68 women) per household, respectively. In order to determine the type of families that dominated in these households, we must first establish the average size of nuclear, extended, and multiple families. We can draw a correlation between household size and family type by examining the typical family life cycle, which in the mid-nineteenth century was as shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Family Life Cycle in European Russia, ca. 1850s

Source: Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Vol. 1, p. 127.

If a peasant woman remained married for her whole reproductive period and enjoyed good health, she could expect to give birth ten to eleven times. As a rule, however—due to general factors such as late marrying age, widowhood, spinsterhood, infertility, poor health, or induced miscarriage—peasant women generally had six to seven children. Of these children, one out of three died in the first year, only one out of two reached the age of twenty, and one out of every three male children could expect to be drafted for lifetime military service. Given these trends, the average nuclear family reached a maximum size of five to six members when the parents were between forty-five and fifty years of age. After this point, the family’s oldest children, who would be roughly twenty years old, would begin to leave the home, and family size would gradually decrease.

We can confirm this projection by looking to the life cycle that prevailed among families of village priests, where birth and mortality rates were similar to those of the peasantry (see  Table 3).

Table 3. Size of Village Priests’ Families, Vologda province, 1859

The figures represent the number of families having the given number of children.

Source: Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Vol. 1, p. 128.

he priest’s family reached its greatest size (6.24 members) when the parents were between forty and forty-four years of age. After this point, family size began to decrease. This stems from the fact that only one of the family’s sons could inherit and follow his father into the priesthood. The remaining sons were forced to look for other sources of livelihood, and daughters were expected to marry and move out of the home. As a rule, by the time the parents reached the age of sixty, only the one male heir and the youngest daughter who had not yet reached marrying age remained in the household. Once this daughter married and left the home, the parents lived out the rest of their days with only the one son. The life cycle of the average priest’s family gives us a glimpse of the history of the perennial nuclear family.

Like the daughters of priests, peasants’ daughters were expected to leave the home after their marriage. But in peasant and not priestly) families, one son out of every three, upon reaching the age of twenty-one, was liable to be drafted for what amounted to lifetime service (twenty or more years) in the army. This recruitment obligation, combined with the fact that peasant families generally had fewer children than village priests, explains why the average number of children was lower in peasant families than in the families of priests (peasants had between 3 and 4 children, compared to 4.24 for priests). In contrast to priestly families, and with the exception of draftees, peasant sons generally remained in their parents’ household, bringing in their wives and then having children of their own. This prompted a new increase in family size that generally lasted twenty years, until the father’s death. Over the course of these twenty years, the household’s size would increase considerably, with the two or three daughters-in-law giving birth to several children over this period. It was not uncommon for fathers to live thirty or forty years after their sons were married, and brothers often remained together in one household even following their father’s death. Such paternal or fraternal families sometimes reached enormous dimensions. In Yaroslavl province, for example, the largest household numbered 72; in Nizhegorod province, 46; and in Perm province, 44 members.

The average peasant family thus numbered 6 and more members and was, as a rule, either of the extended (one family and its relatives) or the multiple-family type. Of course, there were exceptions; but a number of local studies confirm our general findings that nuclear families usually contained up to five members; extended or multiple families from six to ten members; and joint families, more than ten. For Tobolsk province, for example, we have data that indicate the number of children per married couple for 3,045 peasant couples counted in 1897. The average couple, if we include childless pairs, had 2.3 children (if we measure only couples with children, the figure rises to 2.8). Hence, the average married unit numbered from 4.3 to 4.8 persons. These findings allow us to determine family size and family type according to the following chart (see Table 4).

Table 4. Family/Household Type in Four Russian Provinces of Imperial Russia, ca. 1850

            (a) Percentage of all households represented by given type

(b) Percentage of population living in given family/household type

* Includes figures for “group of relative”

Source: Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Vol. 1, p. 130.

 Peasants in Yaroslavl, Nizhegorod, and Perm were engaged in local economies that involved agricultural production as well as active work in cottage industries, migrant labor, and commerce. (This was especially true for Yaroslavl peasants but less so for their counterparts from Perm.) Despite the mixed economies in these areas, however, the multiple family numerically dominated, and together with the extended family, actually constituted the absolute majority of families in all three provinces, as well as in the largely agricultural province of Kiev. What proportion of the population lived in these different types of families? Seventy percent lived in multiple families, 20 percent in nuclear families, and 10 percent in extended family units. In exclusively agricultural provinces, both the relative number of multiple families and the total number of people living in them were greater. We can make this determination based on the fact that average family size in these provinces was between 30 and 50 percent larger than in provinces with industrial economies (see Table 1). In 1857, for example, 9.6 people made up the average family in Voronezh province, 9.7 in Vyatka, 9.1 in Kursk, 8.4 in Saratov, and 9.0 in Tambov province. In European Russia as a whole in the 1850s, the average household contained 8.4 members (in our three provinces, the average minimal size was 6.8). These figures clearly demonstrate that the multiple family held sway in the Russian village at least through the 1850s and that the great majority of peasants spent their lives in this type of family. The relative share of multiple families by the 1850s was small, though in terms of the percentage of population that lived in them, multiple families did exceed nuclear ones in all four provinces. None of these statistics suggest that the nuclear family had become the dominant family type among the peasantry prior to the mid-nineteenth century.

The average size of extended and multiple families began to decrease during the last third of the nineteenth century. For an illustration, see Tables 1, 4, and  5

Table 5. Family/Household Type in Four Russian Provinces of Imperial Russia, 1897

(a) Percentage of all households represented by given type

(b) Percentage of population living in given family/household type

* Includes figures for “group of relative”

** Includes figures for extended family type

Source: Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Vol. 1, p. 131.

              The data in Tables 4, 5 reflect totals for the entire rural population, not just the peasantry. As a rule, members of other social estates residing in the village (urban estate, clergy, and so on) tended to have nuclear rather than multiple or extended families. The average peasant family was 5 percent larger (see Table 1); and thus roughly 5 percent more of peasant families than of nonpeasant families living in the village were of extended and multiple structures. However, this fact had little influence on the big picture, as the peasantry represented more than 90 percent of the rural population.

Based on the statistics offered here, we can see that by the turn of the twentieth century, at any given moment, the nuclear family dominated in all regions except the central black-earth region and Byelorussia«». The reduction in family size was more marked in urbanized or industrial areas than it was in predominantly agricultural provinces. The multiple family continued to dominate in the central black-earth region and in Byelorussia, two overwhelmingly agricultural regions, but even in these areas it had certainly ceded ground since the 1850s. Taking European Russia as a whole, we can see that nuclear families had a slight edge over other family types within the peasant population by the turn of the century (see Table 6).

Table 6. Family/Household Type in Rural Russia, 1897, by Region

 (a) Percentage of all households represented by given type

(b) Percentage of population living in given family/household type

            * Includes figures for extended family type

            ** This is a subset of multiple family type

Source: Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Vol. 1, p. 132.

  As far as the total number of peasants actually living in a particular type of family, however, the extended family was still more numerous at any given moment in all areas except the Baltic provinces, assuming that extended families accounted for approximately 10 percent of the population at this time, as they had in the 1850s.

The data we have reviewed offer a static image of the peasant family based on how it looked at the time when the data were collected. But every family was dynamic, experiencing both growth and decline over the course of a normal life cycle. Under normal conditions, the various family types (nuclear, multiple, and extended) merely represent different stages in this cycle, insofar as nuclear families grew into multiple and often joint families, and these, following the division of the household, often reverted to a nuclear structure. Dynamic household censuses from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, which tracked the evolution of individual peasant families over the course of 4 to 20 years, offer a clear record of these cyclical shifts. At any one time, 70 percent of the households were developing normally, 20 percent were subdividing, and the remaining 10 percent were either emigrating from the village, migrating to the village, uniting with other families, or collapsing. Under serfdom, the peasant family tended to reach the end of its growth cycle as a joint family; after the Emancipation, growth usually ended when the family was in the multiple stage.

If the peasant family cycle remained largely the same from the 1700s until the twentieth century, and the peasant population as a whole showed a marked natural increase in the last third of the 1800s, then why did the average size of the peasant family decline and why did the number of nuclear families relative to other family types increase? There are four factors that explain this paradoxical situation. First of all, the relative share of joint families was declining because multiple families were no longer expanding into joint ones. Even in agricultural provinces, the joint family was showing signs of extinction. Of the fifty provinces of European Russia, the black-earth province of Voronezh had the greatest proportion of joint families. There the joint family accounted for 15 percent of all families and was home to 31 percent of the province’s peasant population. But even in Voronezh the data suggest that the joint patriarchal family had outlived its day. Between 1858 and 1897, the average size of peasant families in the province decreased from 9.4 to 6.6 members. Joint families were tightly controlled households where sons remained under their father’s roof because they feared losing their property rights if the household were divided; however, the younger generation preferred nuclear families. Secondly, practically all multiple families tended to divide either after reaching a certain stage in their development or upon the death of the household head. Under serfdom, in contrast, more than 10 percent of households never divided at all. We can see this in the fact that more than 10 percent of all male serfs never became household heads. In other words, they spent their whole lives in either multiple or extended families. Thirdly, the family came to be composed more and more of immediate relatives, which contributed to a reduction in family size. Finally, the old custom against household division during the patriarch’s lifetime was breaking down. The increase in household divisions not only contributed to the dismantlement of the multigenerational patriarchal family; it also meant that the average peasant household spent less of its life cycle in the multiple stage.

Data reflecting the status of the family at a particular point also have created the illusion that nuclear families were edging out multiple ones. In actuality, as we have seen, the multiple family remained the dominant form of family organization for Russian peasants up to the turn of the twentieth century. Why did multiple families, even if as a stage in the evolution of nuclear family, persist as long as they did? There are a number of possible explanations. Customary law, for one, prohibited household division against the father’s will during his lifetime. The maintenance of the multigenerational multiple family, especially under serfdom, was actively supported by the commune, the landlord, and the state’s administration, which often simply prohibited the division of multiple households. The multiple family, which operated according to a strict gender- and age-based division of labor within the household, was economically more efficient than smaller family units. In multiple families, children over five years of age and the elderly took care of infants and tended to work in the home while adult men and women engaged in their own gender-specific forms of agricultural work.

Multiple families guaranteed the stability of the household economy. From the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, the family’s multigenerational structure was a crucial factor in determining the economic well-being of individual peasant households. In nuclear families, the sickness or death of the family’s one (and often only) adult male worker could spell economic ruin. In multiple families, by contrast, the loss of one worker generally did not threaten the household economy. Remarkable statistics from Perm province in 1850 reveal the correlation between family size and the number of workers and non-workers in the peasant household. Here workers is taken to include men between the ages of 16 and 60 and women between 15 and 60.

From these figures we can see that the ratio of working to non-working members fluctuated less in larger families than in smaller ones, which in turn suggests that the relative stability of the working unit within the family was an essential component of the peasant household’s overall economic prosperity. The relative number of non-workers was at its lowest point when the family had 10 or 11 members. It then increased slightly; and after the family grew to include 18 or more individuals, it leveled off. It was precisely when the family numbered between 10 and 11 members that household division was most common. Apparently this size represented something of an economic optimum, after which the household’s economic interests no longer compensated for the growth of interpersonal conflict within the family. The multiple patriarchal household would then break up into several independent households based on nuclear families. Statistical data clearly indicate that growth in household size was the single most important factor leading to household division.

Division was a normal development that occurred sooner or later with all households, most often following the death of the family head, which generally occurred when the father reached sixty-five or seventy years of age and his sons were between forty and forty-five. Overly large households ran into the economic equivalent of a dead-end: When households became too big, production costs rose, productivity dropped, and serious psychological pressures grew within the family. By contrast, the nuclear family that emerged from the division of the large patriarchal household stood at the beginning of a new cycle. It would experience a period of growth lasting between 20 to 25 years, during which time it would reach the multiple stage, and then it would ultimately divide. In most cases, division meant a temporary decline in economic standards for the newly divided household. But the new household’s economic health would gradually increase, reaching its peak at the time of the subsequent division. Just as the growth of the family under normal conditions went hand in hand with a growth in its economic well-being, there was usually a direct link between the age and the status of the family head.

In addition to ensuring high productivity, the multiple family also provided the best means for socializing the village’s younger generation. In multiple families, children were better insulated from the brief average life span of their parents (orphans, who accounted for up to 13 percent of all children before the age of 15, were cared for by relatives); parents were better insulated from the high mortality of children; childless adults were protected in their old age; and the family could better provide for its sick and elderly. In a demographic system that supported early marriage and young parental age at birth, the multiple family also allowed for the direct contact between adults and children so essential for the reproduction of peasant culture—which like all oral cultures, was based on the direct oral transmission of experience from one generation to the next. Most importantly, the multiple family established and reinforced the patriarchal system. Children growing up in big families learned to obey their grandparents, the head of the family (bol'shak), and his wife (bol'shukha) even more than their own parents.

The limited impact of the monetary economy on village life, the peasants’ lack of individualism, and the strong support that the multiple family received (prior to the Emancipation) from the serf owner or the state administration were also important factors that influenced the long life of the multiple family in the peasant world.

Despite its advantages, the joint family began to cede its leading position to the multiple family by the last third of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the average family life cycle was changing, with more families spending less time in the multiple stage and more in the nuclear stage of their cycles. This shift can be directly attributed to the increase in household divisions during this period. Most contemporary observers agreed that the increase was related to both economic and psychological causes. The expansion of nonagricultural work, which eventually affected approximately 23 percent of the adult population, left little economic incentive for family cooperation. Growing land shortages and overly burdensome taxes and redemption payments had a similar effect. Nuclear and even multiple families were more flexible and could adapt more readily to the demands of a volatile, market-oriented economy that was tied increasingly to nonagricultural labor.

Studies undertaken in Voronezh province in 1905 reveal that the multiple family held no advantage over nuclear families as far as the general education of its members or their adoption of new agricultural techniques were concerned. On the contrary, extended families tended to be more traditional and resistant to change. For example, the literacy level for the total peasant woman population in Voronezh was 5.6 percent, whereas the level for women from multiple families was just 1.9 percent. In multiple families, the patriarch, fearing a potential threat to his authority, routinely prohibited younger members from engaging in work in different occupations. There was greater equality in nuclear families, where women and children were not as subject to the strict and uncompromising power of the bol'shak as they were in extended households. The principle of family cooperation—the multiple household’s one main advantage over the nuclear family—did not significantly increase the economic well-being of the multiple family. The increased distribution of private ownership among family members; the general decline in parental authority; the breakdown of traditions against household division during the father’s lifetime; and an increase in individualist sentiment that led young peasants to throw off the power of their parents and live on their own all fueled family disputes, which ultimately resulted in household divisions. According to some peasants, “In a small family, each man keeps as much as he makes; in a large family, he winds up with nothing for himself.” The lure of private initiative and the opportunity to live independently, beyond the control of one’s elders, were strong motivations for household division.

Between 1861 and 1882, 108,000 household divisions occurred in forty-six provinces in European Russia; from 1883 to 1890, the figure surged to 150,000. In order to reduce the rate of household division, a law was adopted in 1886 that permitted division only in cases when it was approved by both the household head and two thirds of the village commune. The law, however, did not produce the desired effect: Divisions against the will of the household head did not decline; in fact, the total number of divisions continued to increase. In order to circumvent the law, peasants arranged unofficial divisions that were never recorded by the local authorities. In Chukhlom district, Kostroma province, for example, only seven divisions were officially recorded for the decade from 1888 to 1898, whereas the real figure was close to five hundred. The economic advantages of the extended family, where they existed, were overpowered by the urge to establish independent households. The potential loss of property was no deterrent: According to data from Yaroslavl province, 35 percent of families that broke away between 1873 and 1882 either received very little property or none at all.

The Urban Household

           According to most researchers, the nuclear family became the dominant family type in Russian towns perhaps as early as the sixteenth century. By the 1600s, according to the standard account, the urban family already looked much as it would throughout the modern period. To support this contention, researchers have marshaled data dating from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, on the size and generational composition of families. However, there are a number of problems with this thesis. First of all, different historians have come up with different sizes for the average urban family. For the year 1678, for example, calculations of family size appear to range from 5.6 to 7.4 persons per household. Interestingly enough, the average peasant household at this time numbered 7.4; by 1710, the average was 7.6 members. In other words, if we take the higher figure (7.4) to represent the urban household, we see that the average urban family did not differ much in size from the average peasant family at this time. Secondly, researchers have tended mistakenly to equate the multiple fraternal family with the nuclear family type. And thirdly, according to the first general census in 1897, the average urban family in European Russia was composed of 4.3 members, while the multiple family represented 17 percent of all families and no more than one-third of the total urban population. It is also worth noting that the size and structure of the urban family differed quite noticeably between industrial and agrarian provinces. This further suggests that the urban family, much like the peasant family, underwent an evolution from a more multiple to a more nuclear structure between the 1700s and the early 1900s.

In all likelihood, there was probably no one dominant family type among Russian urban dwellers during the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. The economies and class structures of Russian towns in this period were too diverse to allow one type to predominate. In the 1760s, 59 percent of all Russian towns were agrarian. By the 1790s this figure had dropped to 54 percent, and by the 1850s, to 22 percent. In the first half of the eighteenth century, agriculture represented the primary occupation of between 45 and 47 percent of urban dwellers; it lost its dominant position only toward the middle of the nineteenth century. The overwhelmingly agrarian nature of Russian towns was due, on the one hand, to the weak development of industry and commerce, and on the other, to the fact that most towns had their beginnings as villages, forts, or administrative centers. In the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, peasants accounted for roughly one third of the urban population. Furthermore, between 1775 and 1785, 216 villages were transformed with a stroke of the tsar’s pen) into towns—a figure representing approximately 40 percent of all Russian towns. Many Russian towns, in effect, differed little from villages, and urban dwellers, at least in terms of their way of life, differed little from peasants.

The Russian urban population was composed of a range of social groups including merchants, craftsmen, military personnel, clergymen, peasants, nobles, officials, and workers. Young noblemen, especially following the nobility’s emancipation from obligatory state service in 1762, were technically free to choose their occupation, regardless of their parents. However, for the so-called tax-paying classes—the peasants, merchants, and burghers—the situation was quite different. Children had to follow in the footsteps of their parents because they were “enserfed” to the state and to their corporations and because they were tied to their place of residence, their class, their family, and their professions. Until the end of the eighteenth century, according to law, the property of urban merchants and industrialists was considered family property and was thus placed at the complete disposal of the family head. Children were expected to submit to the authority of their father and could not request household division during his lifetime. All of this suggests that although the nuclear family may have predominated among noblemen and people who were in active state service, families belonging to the urban tax-paying estates, including peasants residing in towns, could not have differed significantly from peasant families.

The average size of the urban family supports this conclusion. Data for the town of Ustiuzhna, Novogorod province, indicate the following average family sizes for the different estates in 1713: 6.3 members for merchant/craftsmen’s families (posadskie), 4 members for workers, 3.4 for nobles, 8 for state officials (prikaznye), and 3.5 for clergymen. The nuclear family dominated among all groups except merchants, craftsmen, and state officials, where the multiple family was most common. We find the same breakdown in Vologda in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: There the average merchant or craftsman household was composed of 6.2 persons, whereas the households of other classes numbered between 4 and 5 persons. The average peasant household in the district included 7 members. Based on confessional registers from 1741, the average household in the eight towns of the archbishopric of Nizhegorod was made up of 6.2 persons—a figure that reflects a range between 5 and 8 members, according to the size and economic profile of the individual towns. Daniel Kaizer found that in 1710-1720 about 32% of all urban households in 10 towns were multiple-family, 12% extended, and 54% simple”, solitaries or non-kin households.[7]          

During the last quarter of the eighteenth and first half of the 19^th century, with the impact of new inheritance legislation and the growing commercial and industrial character of Russian towns, the proportion of urban multiple families gradually began to decrease. Data on family organization for the mid-nineteenth century support this conclusion (see Table 7).

Table 7. Family/Household Type Among Urban Estates 

(a) Percentage of all households represented by given type

(b) Percentage of population living in given family/household type

* A subset of multiple families.

Source: Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Vol. 1, p. 141; Daniel H Kaizer, “Urban Household Composition in Early Modern Russia,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 3, p. 65.

Despite gains for the nuclear family, however, the complex families remained the dominant form of family organization in Russian towns through the middle of the 1800s. This was the case both in largely agricultural provinces such as Kiev and in industrializing provinces like Yaroslavl. Here we can see also that the share of multiple households was three times greater in Kiev province than it was in Yaroslavl, and the overall share of the population living in them was 1.6 times greater. Based on these figures, there is little reason to believe that the relative proportion of multiple families could have been any less in the eighteenth century, when most Russian towns were primarily agrarian. In fact, the opposite was more likely true: In the eighteenth century, when Russian towns were even more agrarian in nature, there were more multiple households and fewer nuclear ones. As for the joint family, it had all but died out in towns of Yaroslavl province; and in Kiev province it remained common only among the Jewish population, which relied on the cooperative economy of the large household in order to contend with the restrictions placed on Jewish socioeconomic rights. Overall, the differences in family structure between Kiev and Yaroslavl suggest that industrialization did indeed have a profound impact on family structure, paving the way for the gradual dominance of the nuclear family.

he distribution in urban family types at mid-century greatly resembles the family landscape that we find among the peasants at the end of the 1800s. If we reduce family types to two -- nuclear and multiple -- and then combine the data for the provinces of Yaroslavl and Kiev, we see that nuclear families made up 63 percent of the urban population in Yaroslavl and 56 percent of the urban (Christian) population in Kiev in 1850. In 1897, among the village population in Yaroslavl and Kiev provinces, the proportion of nuclear families was 65 percent and 59 percent, respectively. It is clear that the urban population experienced an evolution in family structure largely similar to that undergone by peasant families, but considerably earlier. A glance at statistics for the late nineteenth century confirms this view (see Table 8).

Table 8. Family/Household Type in Urban Russia, 1897, by Region

(a) Percentage of all households represented by given type

(b) Percentage of population living in given family/household type

            * Includes figures for extended family type

            ** This is a subset of multiple family type

Source: Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Vol. 1, p. 143.

[1] See for example: B. E. Clements, B. A. Engel and Ch. D. Worobec (eds.), Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley, CA et al.: University of California Press, 1991); B. Iu. Krupianskaia and N. S. Polishchuk, Kul’tura I byt rabochikh gornozavodskogo Urala (konets XIX-nachalo XX v.). Moscow: Nauka, 1971.

[2] See for example: T. A. Zhdanko (ed.), Semeinyi byt narodov SSSR (Moscow: Nauka, 1990).

[3] See for example: A. G. Vishnevskii (ed.), Brachnost’, rozhdaemost’, smertnost’ v Rossii i v SSSR (Moscow: Statistika, 1977).

[4] See for example: St. L. Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, A Village in Tambov (Chicago; London:  The University of Chicago Press, 1989); Ch. D. Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipated Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

[5] Although there were some gaps: V. A. Aleksandrov (ed.), Na putiakh iz zemli Permskoi v Sibir’: Ocherki etnografii severnoural’skogo krest’ianstva XVII-XX vv. (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), pp. 176-221; Iu. V. Argudiaeva, Ukraintsy. Krest’ianskaia sem’ia ukraintsev v Primor’e (80-e gg. XIX – nahalo XX vv.) (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 1993; Idem, Krest’ianskaia sem’ia u vostochnykh slavqn na Iuge Dal’nego Vostoka Rossii (50-e gody XIX veka – nachalo XX v.) (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 1997); N. M. Arsent’ev, M. Iu. Nechaev and A. S. Cherkasova, “Sem’ia rabochikh v pervoi polovine XIX v. po materialam zamoskovnykh i ural’skikh zavodov: (Tipologiia i sostav),” in A. S. Cherkasova (ed.)., Demograficheskie protsesy na Urale v epokhu feodalizma (Sverdlobsk: Ural’skoe otdelenie RAN, 1990); L. A. Dashkevich, “Sem’ia gosudarstvennykh krest’ian na Urale: (Po materialam podvornykh opisei Potshenskoi volosti 1805 g.),” in N. A. Minenko (ed.)., Gosudarstvennye krest’iane Urala epokhi feodalizma (Ekaterinburg: Ural’skoe otdelenie RAN, 1992), pp. 109-121; Daniel H.Kaizer, “Urban Household Composition in Early Modern Russia,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 3 (1992), p. 39–71; Ibid, The Seasonobility of Family Life in Early Modern History,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, vol. 46 (1992), pp. 21-50; Ibid, “The Poor and Disabled in Early Eighteenth-Century Russian Towns,” Journal of Social History, vol. 31 (1998), pp. 125-155; Vozrast pri brake I raznitsa v vozraste suprugov v gorodakh Rossii v nachale XVIII v.,” in Sosloviia i gosudarstvennaai vlast’ v Rossii XV-XIX vv. (Moscow, 1994), vol. 2, p. 225-237; O. B. Kokh, “Krest’ianskaia sem’ia v gosudarstvennoi derevne nachala XVIII v.,” in Issledovaniia po istorii krest’ianstva evropeiskogo Severa Rossii: Mezhvuzovskii sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Syktyvkar, 1980); N. V. Nikishina, “Chislennost’ i struktura semei masterovykh i rabotnykh liudei gornozavodskoi promyshlennosti Altaia vo vtoroi polovine XVIII v.,” in Demograficheskoe razvitie Sibiri perioda feodalizma (Novosibirsk: Institut istorii, filologii i filosofii Sibirskogo otdeleniia RAN, 1991), pp. 164-171; I. V. Poberezhnikov, “Perepisnye knigi kak istochnik po istorii naseleniia ural’skikh slobod nachala XVIII v.,” in Istochniki po sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi istorii Urala dooktiabr’skogo perioda (Ekaterinburg, 1992); I. V. Poberezhnikov and A. G. Tomilov, “Perepisnye knigi kak istochnik po istorii ural’skikh slobod nachala XVIII v.,” in I. V. Poberezhnikov (ed.), Istochniki po sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi istorii Urala dooktiabr’skogo perioda (Ekaterinburg: Institut istorii i arkheologii Ural’skogo otdeleniia RAN, 1992), pp. 36-48; I. V. Vlasova, Sel’skoe rasselenie v Ustiuzhskom krae v XVIII-pervoi chetverti XX ?. (Moscow: Nauka, 1976).

[6] B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.): Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva (St.-Petersburg: Dm. Bulanin, 1999). Vol. 1, 2. The book has been translated and published in the USA: Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Vol. 1, 2. See two chapters “Demographic Processes and Problems” and “The Family and Intra-Family Relations”

[7] Daniel H. Kaizer, “Urban Household Composition in Early Modern Russia,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 3, p. 65.

[8] In the 16^th century, in 1498-1585, in the North-West region the mean peasant household size reduced by 20-30 percent. This suggests that in the 16^th century there was a decrease in the scare of complex families and an increase in the share of nuclear families. A. L. Shapiro (ed.), Agrarnaia istoriia Severo-Zapada Rossii XVII veka (naselenie, zemlevladenie, zemlepol’zovanie) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1989), pp.111–112, 290–291; V. M. Vorob’ev, A. Ia. Degtiarev, “Osnovnye cherty sel’akogo rasseleniia na Severo-Zapade Rusi v XVI-XVII vv.,” Istoria SSSR, 1980, no. 5. Corresponding data on the other regions of Russia have not been found for the time being.

[9] Sem’ia v Rossii: Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1996), p. 29.

[10] A. Bushen (ed.), Statisticheskie tablitsy Rossiiskoi imperii (St.-Petersburg, 1863). Vol. 2, pp. 149-152; Idem, Ob ustroistve istochnikov statistiki naseleniia v Rossii (St.-Petersburg, 1864), pp. 78-81; I. Gorlov, Obozrenie ekonomicheskoi statistiki Rossii (St.-Petersburg, 1849), p. 48; D. P. Zhuravskii, Ob istochnikakh i upotreblenii statisticheskikh svedenii (Kiev, 1846), p. 81; V. M. Kabuzan, Narodonaselenie Rossii v XVIII-pervoi polovine XIX v. (po materialam revizii) (Moscow: Nauka, 1963), pp. 77-83; M. V. Ptukha, Ocherki po istorii statistiki SSSR (Moscow, 1955), vol. 1, pp. 366-369; A. Smanovskii, O smertnosti sel’skogo  naselenia Malorossii (St.-Petersburg, 1891), pp. 5-6; Statisticheskii vremennik Rossiiskoi imperii (St.-Petersburg, 1866), vol. 1, pp. xix-xxi.

[11] B. Ts. Urlanic (ed.), Narodonaselenie stran mira. Spravochnik. 2^nd ed. (Moscow, 1978), p. 262.

[12] A. G. Vishnevskii, “Rannie etapy stanovleniia novogo tipa rozhdaemosti v Rossii, in A. G. Vishnevskii (ed.), Brachnost’, rozhdaemost’, smertnost’ v Rossii i v SSSR, pp. 113-115; B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii, vol. 1, pp. 181-190.

[13] A. G. Vishnevskii and A. G. Volkov, Vosproizvodstvo naseleniia SSSR (Moscow: Finansy I statistika, 1983), pp. 47-67; S. A. Novosel’skii, Smertnost’ i prodolzhitel’nost’ zhizni v Rossii (Petrograd, 1916), pp. 180-187.

[14] S. A. Novosel’skii, Smertnost’ i prodolzhitel’nost’ zhizni v, pp. 100-103.

[15] See in details: B. N. Mironov, “O dostovernosti metricheskikh vedomostei – vazhneishego istochnika po istoricheskoi demografii Rossii XVIII-nachala XX v.” in A. A. Fursenko (ed.). Rossiia v XIX-XX vv. (St.-Petersburg: Dm. Bulanin, 1998), pp. 41–47.

[16] Alain Blum, Irina Troitskaya and Alexander Avdeev, “Family, Marriage and Social Control in Russia – Three Villages in Moscow Region” in Muriel Neven and Catherrine Capron (eds.). Family Structures, Demography and Population. A Comparison of Societies in Asia and Europe (Lieège: Laboratoire de Démographie de l’Université de Liège, 2000), pp. 85–110. The authors do not indicate the names of the villages, their exact location and as to the sources, they confine themselves to a vague reference to the St.-Petersburg archives.

[17] Peter Czap, Jr., “The Perennial Multiple Family Household: Mishino, Russia, 1782-1858,”  Journal of Family History, vol. 7, no. 1 (Spring 1982), pp. 5-26. N. N. Chernenkov, K kharakteristike krest’ianskogo khoziaistva (Moscow: Liga agrarnykh reform 1918), vol. 1, pp. 42-67.

[18] M. S. Tol’ts, “Brachnost’ naseleniia Rossii v kontse XIX-nachale XX v.,” in A. G. Vishnevskii (ed.), Brachnost’, rozhdaemost’, smertnost’ v Rossii i v SSSR, p. 140.

[19] Obshchii svod dannykh perepisi 1897 g. (St.-Petersburg: N. L. Nyrkin, 1905), vol. 2, pp. 184–205.

[20] V. N. Vladimirov (ed.), Komp’iuter i istoricheskaia demografiia (Barnaul: Altaiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2000).

[21] The data of the 6^th revision were not included into calculations because of their incompleteness.

[22] At the beginning of the 17^th century in the North-Western region one-family households comprised 4.9 people, two-family household – 7.3 and household with three and more families– 11 people: A. L. Shapiro (ed.), Agrarnaia istoria Severo-Zapada Rossii (vtoraia polovina XV-nachalo XVI v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1971), pp.19–20. In Vologda province the nuclear family consisted of 4.7 people, extended – of 5.0, and multiple family – of 7.0 people: ?. N. Baklanova, Krest’ianskii dvor i obshchina na russkom Severe (Moscow, 1976), p. 38.

[23] Alain Blum, Irina Troitskaya and Alexander Avdeev, Family, Marriage and Social Control in Russia, pp. 90, 92.

[24] Heldur Palli, Estestvennoe dvizhenie sel’skogo naseleniia Estonii: 1650-1799 (Tallinn, 1980), vol. 1-3; idem, Eesti Rahvastiku ajalugu 1712-1799: Academia. 1997. No 6, 7 (Tallinn: Teaduste Akadeemia Kirjastus, 1997).

[25] Lui Anry and Alain Blum, Metodika analiza v istoricheskoi demografii (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnui universitet, 1997). Publication of a text-book on the methods of historical demography will undoubtedly facilitate the development of historical-demographic studies in Russia.

[26] See: B. N. Mironov, “Sotsial’naia mobil’nost’ i sotsial’noe rassloenie v russkoi derevne XIX-nachala XX v.,” in K. Siilivask (ed.), Problemy razvitiia feodalizma i kapitalizma v stranakh Baltiki: Doklady istoricheskoi konferentsii (14-17 marta 1972 g.) (Tartu: Tartuskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1972), pp. 156-183; L. A. Dashkevich, “Sem’ia gosudarstvennykh krest’ian na Urale, pp. 119-121.

[27] Doubts expressed by L. K. Berkner as regards the objectivity of the existence of various family types according to the data of household description in censuses have some grounds: L. K. Berkner, “The Use and Misuse of census data for the historical Analysis of Family Structure,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1975, vol. 4, pp. 721-738.