Ideas and Ideals

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 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.

By the mid of 2014 the population of the globe reached 7,2 billion people, with nearly 6 billion living in the developing countries (83 % of the world population), 1,2 billion – in the developed countries (17% of the population of the Earth). If not to take into account the economic aspect, the “developed countries” group is the countries with mainly white, Caucasian population acknowledging Christianity. There is a global modern world trend, which attracts attention – the decrease in the share of the white population from 34 % in 1900 to 17 % in 2014. All changes occurring now are the result of the actions of the certain system laws. Distribution of population of people on a terrestrial surface depends on a set of factors, including the history of development of the specific territory. The population of Africa, mainly adherents of local traditional beliefs and Islam, grew more than 10 times for the last hundred years, and the population of Asia – almost 5 times.

В статье рассматриваются вопросы взаимосвязи социологии и статистики как отраслей научного знания. Обосновывается необходимость использования статистических методов в социологических исследованиях. Показывается, что массовые наблюдения, характерные для статистики, дают возможность измерять социальные явления методом обобщающих показателей. Статистика, выявляя типичные явления, «помогает» социологии увидеть на их фоне качественные образование и процессы. Результатом таких взаимодополняющих исследований выступает конструирование моделей социального развития, которые являются исходным звеном с точки зрения управления социальным объектом.

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.

The article considers the technique and practice of use of quantitative methods at the development of the standard of the state services in the sphere of culture and monitoring of its implementation. The standard of the state service is a basis of interaction of the supplier and consumer of services, assessment and quality control of services by the state and necessary element of the control system and budgeting by the results. The technique of standardization of the state services, according to which the standard of services of theatrical entertainment organizations and system of monitoring of their rendering was created, is suggested. This technique considers process of standardization and assessment of quality as a sequence of certain stages: development of the standard, monitoring of quality of the actually provided services, estimates of the degree of compliance of quality of the actually provided state services to the quality standards of these services, integrated assessment of quality of the provided state services, corrections of standard values of indicators or other elements of the quality standard of the state service. The possibilities and limitations of application of quantitative methods at each of these stages in relation to the sphere of culture, in particular for the assessment of activity of the atrical entertainment organizations are shown.

The problems of environmental safety measurement of territorial entities in the Russian Federation are presented and discussed in the article. The overview of relevant investigations in the environmental safety field is given. The system of initial statistical indicators on a real group (municipal districts of Novosibirsk Region) is formed and tested. The author presents a generalized index of environmental safety based on three indicators: the level of social and economic development, the level of ecological conditions and the level of human resources of the region. The research includes the classification of the Novosibirsk region municipalities on the basis of the environmental safety level. The method of typological grouping (the variety was divided into three groups with equal intervals) and the cluster analysis method (the method of "nearest-neighbor" was applied), and the portfolio analysis matrix were used. The three-dimensional matrix of portfolio analysis is proposed and tested on the actual data during the investigation. The matrix has three coordinate axes that correspond to environmental safety indicators: the level of social and economic development, the level of ecological conditions, and the level of human resources. The convergence of the results of different partitioning algorithm was estimated. This technique adequately estimates the environmental safety for all management levels: municipal, regional and federal. The main advantage of this approach is the opportunity of a territory analysis as well as a dynamic one. The investigation results broaden instrumental and informational opportunities in developing adequate strategies of ecological safety management both for a separate territorial unit and for homogeneous groups. Official data of the Federal State Statistics Service were used for the calculation of indicators.

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.

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.

A Round table on regional and international studies was held as a part of the annual scientific session of the Novosibirsk State Technical University (NSTU) on 5 March 2015. The Round table brought together the lecturers engaged in the research of Russian society and the regional problems in the field of international relations. The Round table was attended by the lecturers of the Departments of International Relations and Regional Studies, Sociology, Social Work and Social Anthropology. The purpose of the Round table was to discuss the problems of regional studies in the field of theoretical research and applied research. The following issues and topics were discussed: the complexity and interdisciplinarity of regional research, strategies for construction of the Regional Studies subject, the specificity of regional studies and teaching of regional disciplines. In addition to the development of regional studies focused on international relations, comprehensive studies of Russia's regions that meet the needs of a specific region in the new regional modeling systems, implementation of innovative technologies, the examination of the activities of the various organizations, programmes and projects are becoming more noticeable. A number of Roundtable participants clearly showed that the driver of the emergence and development of scientific projects are the needs of the region addressed to "its" University. It was noted that the development of applied research, social forecasting and social diagnosis for the local community at the University is yet another challenge for University regional segment research.