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Victory statistics: Losses, heroes and fates

Credit: Nikolay Khizhnyak | RIAN

The Federal Statistics Services has released a collection of unique data about the Great Patriotic War, to mark the 75th anniversary of Victory.

During an online conference, head of the agency Pavel Malkov presented Great Patriotic War: Anniversary Statistics Collection, published in time for the anniversary, and the Figures of Victory multimedia project.

One would think who cares about statistics with its boring figures? But behind these figures there are human lives. For example, did you know that during the war, every month around 600,000 people on average were sent to the frontline? Or that 40% of killed soldiers were below the age of 25? More than 70,000 villages and 40,000 hospitals were destroyed during the war; some 407 museums were looted; 25 million people lost their homes and the birth rate dropped by 66%.

The ‘boring’ figures are truthful, impartial and sometimes more telling than verbose descriptions of wartime hardship and horrors. The arms and consumer goods prices say a lot about the state of the Soviet economy in 1941–1945. The production of machine guns, automatic rifles and other weapons was constantly growing thus pushing the prices down. Meanwhile, the productivity of the light industry decreased about six times which resulted in clothing and shoe prices tripling.

The Federal Statistics Service book includes such data as wartime prices on bread and milk, the number of ration coupons issued and the number of state decorations awarded, as well as the level of economic losses and the level of income for blue-collar and white-collar workers in the Soviet Union.

More information about our country’s life during the hardest years of war and the post-war period is available in the Figures of Victory multimedia project via which the statistics collection is free to download.

The multimedia project also offers accounts of frontline and labor feats by statistics workers as more than 3,700 employees of state statistics agencies were involved in military action or performed their duty at the home front conducting urgent population census and keeping records for every industry.

Interestingly, if before the war statistics staff was 60% men, currently, the majority of statistics workers are women (92%). The figures are telling and can’t be argued with.

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