The Categorisation of Migrants from the Russian Empire in Argentine Immigration Statistics, 1880-1914

Between 1880 and 1914 the Argentine state registered immigrants by subjecthood rather than by language, religion or self-identification, and migrants from the Russian Empire were gathered for the most part under a single heading, "ruso". This study asks how that category was produced, who in fact stood behind it on a measurable date, and what analytical instrument can return the flow from the Russian Empire to the historiography as a single object.

The empirical cross-section is the second national census of 10 May 1895, the only date in the period for which the official results by country of birth and by religion can be set against an independent reconstruction from the original census schedules and against the community lists of the Jewish Colonization Association. The census counted 15,047 people born in the Russian Empire. Between 6,800 and 7,100 of them (45 to 47 per cent) were Jews; the remaining 7,900 to 8,300 were Volga Germans, Slavic peasants and other subjects of the empire. The official record of religion missed at least a quarter of the country's Jewish population, 6,085 against 8,265 in the census schedules, and left out almost every child born in Argentina. Of the 818 passengers of the steamer Weser, which opened Jewish colonisation in 1889, no more than 473 could be traced in the colonies six years later.

Four systematic biases of the category are examined, among them the recording of Galician Jews as "austriacos" and of Volga Germans as "alemanes"; three of them can be given a numerical estimate on this cross-section. The study also traces how the division of a single flow into unconnected Jewish, German and Ukrainian histories entered Argentine historiography, and proposes the analytical category "migration from the Russian Empire" with three operational criteria: departure (last place of residence within the borders of the empire, whatever the passport and the port), corroboration by at least two independent record sets, and description by language, religion and province of departure as independent axes. The recount is stated as an interval accompanied by a list of the sources of error rather than as a single figure.

The record contains the study in English, Spanish and Russian.