Nuptiality in Early 20th Century Yekaterinburg: Quantitative Analysis

Abstract

This article analyses one of the main characteristics of the demographic behaviour of Russian citizens, i.e. their age at first marriage and its dynamics in the early twentieth century. The authors examine the situation in Yekaterinburg, a compact but an intensively developing industrial city. Together with aggregated census data, the authors refer to microdata extracted from several city parish registers (metricheskie knigi), which they transcribed into the Ural Population Project database. As a result of the analysis of nominative data of parish registers, the authors establish the age of first marriages including both averages in the city as a whole and per parish which enables them to conclude about the citizens’ demographic behaviour conditioned by their ethnic or religious affiliation, social status and migration patterns, and other personal characteristics. The analysis demonstrates that Yekaterinburg seems to be closer to the “European” marriage pattern, at least in terms of mean age at first marriage in men which grew with the beginning of the war. However, according to the 1926 Census and the age of first marriage and that of never married significantly decreased as compared to the imperial period. The results of the analysis of aggregated and nominative data for Yekaterinburg enable the authors to put forward an idea that following the revolution and the establishment of a new political regime, migration from western provinces stopped while migration from rural areas increased. Rural migrants brought their own marital patterns to the city which implied mandatory marriage. Living in an increasingly stressful environment as a result of World War I, the revolution and the civil war, migrants were trying to get married earlier than on average to secure family support for themselves.

Keywords

• брачность
• возраст вступления в первый брак
• городское население
• Урал
• метрические книги
• переписи
• базы данных.