Ideas and Ideals

The territorial statistics as the system of collection of information about a condition of social and economic processes became an example of complex study of the situation in the agrarian sector of the Russian society of the second half of the 19th century. It was perceived as an illustration of additional opportunities of local governments in the post-reform period. Considerable volumes of the obtained statistical data served both as the basis for definition of territorial tax levies and the empirical base of notice able theoretical research. The programs of territorial observations included several methods of data collection. The sample budget survey of farm households became one of the directions of research in the district councils. Innovations of the territorial statistics also concerned the ways of tabular processing of obtained in formation. Programs of research, methods of data collection and ways of its processing make it possible to consider practice of territorial statistical descriptions as an important prerequisite of the development of empirical sociology and practice of sociological research in our country.

At 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.

Agricultural statistics data are analyzed through supplementary types of sources, which provide a critical look at the key statistical sources – agricultural census in 1916, 1917 and 1920. The cross-sectional analysis of statistics, record keeping and narrative material have enabled the author to conclude that the growth of agricultural production in Siberia during the World War I, as it is drawn from well-known statistical sources, can hardly be considered reliable, with the production growth still rising according to some indicators even during the Civil War.

The article presents the results of studying the role of statistics in jurisprudence research, methodo-logical aspects of correlation and interaction of statistics and jurisprudence as independent sciences. Most closely, this interaction is manifested in legal statistics now. It is concluded that the legal phenomena as the elements of the legal system of the society are the subject of legal statistics. The official legal practice and public awareness are its main components. The task of legal statistics can be considered resolved upon receipt of the results of quantitative measurements of the data arrays of legal phenomena and the establishment of stable correlations be-tween them. However, such results are not enough for the jurisprudence. Legal studies are designed to reveal the inner, first of all, the causal regularities of emergence, de-velopment and functioning of state and law, the most effective methods and mechanisms of legal regulation of social relations. For this, the results and techniques of statistical observations are being currently actively used, which allows us to distinguish a statistical law, a relatively independent complex sphere of scientific research. It is characterized by the use of statistical methods for legal tasks solution, such as the establishment of the causes and elaboration of measures on prevention of delicts. The article presents the statistical jurisprudence main research areas and current problems.

The problem of the reliable statistics on the USSR repression in 1918–1956 remains an urgent scientific challenge. It is particularly difficult to carry out calculations of the Civil War terror victims, as well as those who were killed in political, ethnic and peasant exile in the 1920–1950-ies. Inaccessible documents from Russian FSB, MIA, AP and a number of other important sources hamper a thorough study of the statistics. Nevertheless, the study of the material from the central and regional archives undertaken by the author enabled him to get valuable statistical information and convincingly challenge the accuracy of the figures usually given, especially for the period of the Civil War and the beginning of the 1930s. The documents from the FSB central archive provided the evidence of mass executions based on the extrajudicial procedure in 1933, the number of which turned out to be much higher than announced in the early 1990s. The statistical tricks used to drastically underestimate the mortality level in the Gulag camps were also refuted. Thus, the new data require clarification of the repressive statistics that will inevitably increase the number of victims of the state punitive actions.

The authors argue the need to develop a strategy for the country’s socio-economic break through, the formation of a new type of economic system - a knowledge-based economy. A qualitative characteristic of this type of economy in the form of a conceptual model is given in the article, and they also consider approaches to quantify the knowledge economy.

In this article the problem of reflecting historical dynamics of a society in modern humanitarian knowledge is discussed. The author shows, that in the modern humanitarian knowledge the tendencies to imitation the cognitive activities are widely presented that is reflected in the reduction of real conceptual and logical complexity of theoretical descriptions of social phenomena. This reduction is generated, among other things, by actual ignoring the principle of historicism in characterizing the studied objects. First of all, with such an approach the qualitative variability of social phenomena is ignored. To reveal the qualitative variability of social phenomena is possible on the basis of special reflection of their historical dynamics. The paper proposes a method to overcome such imitative trends in the consistent implementation of sociocultural cognition on the basis of the principle of historicism. According to this principle any phenomenon should be described theoretically in the whole process of its own internal development. Any social object at every moment of its existence is the result of its own genesis. That is why the consistent categorical description of dynamics of its development as a quality formation through internally irreducible to one another stages would really implement the cognitive principles, declared in the sociocultural approach. The proposed solution is constructed on the basis of socio-philosophical reflection of the historical cognition characteristics of a society as a dynamic system.

The article explains that the relevance of the topic is related to the need of developing youth entrepreneurship. Problems of development of entrepreneurship among young people are related to a number of reasons, including target settings, business motivation, support for authorities at all levels from the state to local governments, legal support, the attitude to entrepreneurship on the part of society, the attitude to the female and male entrepreneurship . Development of youth entrepreneurship can be analyzed from the perspective of endogenous and exogenous factors. Exogenous factors include government and legal support of business, the use of the financial system, the image of the entrepreneur in the mass consciousness. Endogenous factors include business-motivation and personal characteristics of young entrepreneurs. These factors have received empirical testing in the study of youth attitudes to business conducted on the total sample of Tomsk and Novosibirsk. Relevant for entrepreneurs is to obtain services from the state to realize their business project, as well as an information environment conducive to learning and sharing experiences in the field of entrepreneurship. The main problems of the youth of the Russian business are under-utilization of resources offered by the state, public attitudes towards entrepreneurs. Gender aspects are manifested in relation to the female and male entrepreneurship.

The socio-economic information published by the statistical and other authorities is a basic source of information available for a quantitative analysis and forecasting. To use this information correctly it is necessary to know the methodology, techniques applied to calculating indicators and data aggregation, as well as the methods for checking the results obtained. The paper discusses various methods allowing better assessments and more reliable conclusions such as: the verification of hypothesis on the other statistics, the use of alternative models for the same data set, the combination of different data analysis, including historical methods, artificial index computation etc. An important task in analytics and forecasting is to assess accuracy of the initial information, accumulation of errors occurred in data processing, and, therefore, accuracy of assessments obtained. The paper also discusses the issues of application of expert evaluation methods and qualitative characteristics processing techniques.