Argument

While we know that Russian mathematicians contributed to the application of probability in the theory of statistics, Western literature on the history of statistics generally overlooks the role played by statisticians working in zemstva statistics departments. This paper argues that the quantity and the diversity of statistical data needed by zemstva administrators stimulated methodological innovations in the field and influenced the rise and development of sampling surveys in Russia between 1875 and 1930. The first surveys on parts of the whole were done by statisticians who were seeking solutions to practical administrative problems, and their sampling techniques evolved as Russian administrators put these statistical surveys to use. Finally, the paper argues that Kovalevskiy’s mathematical treatment of the theory of stratified sampling, published in 1924, ten years before Jerzy Neyman’s, is in fact a synthesis of the zemstva statisticians’ sampling practice and the Russian university statisticians’ theoretical works before 1917.