Source study analysis of the annual reports of collective farms in 1934–1940 (based on the materials from the forest zone of the Bashkir ASSR)

The article examines the possibility, relevance and the complexity of processing annual reports of collective farms. The geography of the study covers the northern regions of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which belong to the forest zone. The article contains the maps and diagrams of the distribution of Bashkiria’s territory by soil zones. The article raises the issue of the information potential of collective farms’ annual reports. The main areas of the statistics reflected in the reports, including the data on the household plots, are shown. The problem of the extreme breadth of explicit information in the annual reports is indicated. The high density in the chronological distribution of the annual reports and their value for building informative dynamic series are revealed. The representativeness of the preserved annual reports of the collective farms was assessed using a selective method and a study of the inventories of the collective farms of the BASSR. On the basis of the materials from the collective farms of the Mechetlinsky district, the paper discusses the issue relating to the representativeness of the collective farm sample with preserved reports. Difficulties in unifying the information of the annual reports of different years have been revealed, in particular, the complications in data transformation, in combining the indicators into a single whole and splitting one indicator into several others. At the conceptual level, the ways to optimize the transfer of data into a machine-readable form are proposed. The annual reports with a regional formulary have been introduced into scientific circulation, and the formulary’s methodological and statistical shortcomings have been noted. It was concluded that the preserved archival material is sufficient to create a database. This research can be applied to the quantitative study of agriculture in the USSR and the BASSR in the 1930s.

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