Ideas and Ideals

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.