Historical Demography in Ukraine: From “Political Arithmetic” to Non-Political History Demografia historyczna w Ukrainie. Od „arytmetyki politycznej” do historii niepolitycznej

The article is an introduction to the state of development of historical demographic studies in Ukrainian historiography. The authors try to explain why, at a time when historical demography was the mainstream in world historiography, it made practically no progress in Soviet Ukraine, and its achievements were left unused in historians’ research. The reasons for interest in historical demography today, and its influence on the development of historical anthropological research, are also analyzed. The authors describe the main research Abstrakt Artykuł stanowi wprowadzenie do stanu rozwoju historycznych badań demograficznych w historiografii ukraińskiej. Autorzy próbują wyjaśnić, dlaczego w czasach, gdy demografia historyczna była głównym nurtem historiografii światowej, nie odnotowała ona praktycznie żadnego postępu w sowieckiej Ukrainie, a jej osiągnięcia nie zostały wykorzystane w badaniach historyków. Przeanalizowano również przyczyny zainteresowania dzisiejszą demografią historyczną i jej wpływ na rozwój historycznych badań S T U D I A I M A T E R I A Ł Y


Introduction
Ukraine is not represented in any way in the great collective history of world historical demography. 1 This, however, does not imply discrimination against Ukrainian researchers. Today, it would be impossible to write the same lamentable history of the development of historical demography in Ukraine, with distinct stages, or to put it into international context. The classical progressive development of this scientific discipline simply did not happen here, for various reasons. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, historical and demographic studies based on Ukrainian materials appeared sporadically and were separate initiatives by individual academics. The general reason for this was the country's membership of the Soviet academic environment, where social and human sciences were organic components of the totalitarian system and served to propagate Soviet values. At the same time, historians who were chronologically distant from the twentieth century nevertheless had opportunities for qualitative research that, despite "technical" flattery towards the classics of Marxism-Leninism, were equal to world practices. This way some sections of archeology, medievalism and early modern history functioned, where true scholars could feel relatively safe. However, historical demography, with its focus on non-political issues (births, deaths, family history, etc.,) and focusing on pre-modern society, was not considered safe, and therefore was not in demand. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that it began to make its mark in Ukraine. Therefore, in this article, in addition to the traditional historiographic review, we will also try to answer the interrelated questions: what was the cause for the unpopularity of historical demography in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine, and how does "Soviet heritage" affect historical and demographic research nowadays? What are the prospects for Ukrainian demographers today? Such questions may, in the future, broaden the conclusions of the book A Global History of Historical Demography. In criticizing it, Tim Riswick stressed the need for reflection on why the achievements of historical demography were more widely used in some countries than in others. 2 We will look at this problem from the opposite side -why was historical demography less necessary in one particular country than in others?

"Political Arithmetic" Instead of Historical Demography
Firstly, we must note that there are no extensive historiographical reflections on the past and present of historical demography in Ukraine. The Ukrainian-language reader is able to find brief single texts with short historical excursions, but all of them, using the term "historical demography," mostly provide statistics, or attempts to establish the ethnic composition of the population of a particular region that are not based on demographic methods. For example, the relevant entry in the academic publication Encyclopedia of Ukrainian History, states the following about Ukrainian historical demography: The vast majority of research on historical demography issues in Ukraine have been carried out within the disciplinary boundaries of history (O. Kyslyi, S. Kopchak, V. Kubiiovych, S. Kulchytskyi, V. Naulko, V. Ohonovskyi, A. Perkovskyi, Yu. Rymarenko, V. Romantsov, O. Rudnytskyi, P. Tolochko). The principal feature of these works is that their authors are not limited to searching for and analyzing one or the other types of demographic information, and use the results obtained in the relevant research to meet the needs of historical knowledge, to characterize the population as "matter," the movement of which is a non-essential substance of history. 3 In addition to the Soviet-sounding last sentence, our attention in this quote is drawn to the list of academics. Except for Arnold Perkovskyi (more of him later), none were actually involved with historical demography. Among them are specialists in archeology, ethnography, the history of economics and geography, and historians of totalitarianism. Obviously, at the time the encyclopedia entry was written (2004), its author, without historian-demographers in mind, artificially included several of his well-known colleagues who were studying completely different problems and chronological periods, but who had popular appeal. This can be confirmed by the fact that the none of the researchers apart from Arnold Perkovskyi appears in the historiographic article The Historical Demography of Ukraine of the 16th-17th Century: the State and Problems, by Irina Voronchuk. In her essay, Voronchuk refers to the "demography of pre-statistic time." Significantly, at the beginning of the article, she points out the wide range of issues that historical demography studies: the nature of the family, its type and structure, mass demographic behavior, birth and death, the relationship of brothers and sisters, parents and children, the concept of the family, marriage etc. But the historiographical essay itself is limited to the description of works where the issue primarily concerned the population in a given region of modern Ukraine. According to this approach, Aleksander Walerian Jabłonowski and Mikhail Vladimirsky-Budanov, researchers from the late nineteenth century who tried to establish the population of Bratslav Regiment, Kyiv region and Podillia, the Ukrainian regions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, were named among the first historian-demographers of Ukraine. 4 However, in our opinion, in their works, and in the work of their successors, only the object of research was "demographic," while the methods for working with the source had nothing to do with classical historical demographics. These researchers used fiscal documentation, which accounted for the tax unit -the household, or house. The number of dwellers in such a household was established hypothetically or based on local data. At the same time, these "imaginary coefficients" were further extended to large regions and numerous communities.
In Ukrainian historiography, there were several attempts at the "historical and demographic" analysis of old chronicles and the like. However, this was the wrong track. In the Ukrainian version, these narrative sources were partly literary. They mainly reflected their authors' views on some kind of "reality," rather than representing it. In the absence of other sources, Ukrainian historians, on the basis of these texts, tried to establish the loss of Ukraine's population from the Tatar incursions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite not knowing not only the size of the yesir 5 for sure, but also the number of the population as a whole. Again, in such studies on demography there is only a population in research optics, but Ukrainian historiography stubbornly calls them "historical-demographic." 6 The same tendency is observed in modern research and educational practices, in particular, in the programs of educational disciplines and the only present-day basic manual for students of higher educational institutions, Historical Demography of Ukraine from the 18th to the Beginning of the 21st Century (2010). In the manual, written by Volodymyr Romantsov, methods of historical and demographic studies, peculiarities of sources, and basic demographic indicators are not mentioned at all. As is stated in the introduction, this course serves to answer the question: "Why do we want an independent Ukraine?" 7 Accordingly, the chapters themselves (lectures) have rather pronounced titles: "Ukrainians on the World Map," "Ukrainians under the Authority of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires," "Ukrainian Ethnicity in the Lands of the Former USSR," "Women in the Population," "The Population of Ukraine and its Mother Tongue in the Days of Soviet Power and Independence." That is, statistics are provided, mainly on the resettlement of Ukrainians and the ethnic and linguistic composition of the population of Ukraine, under the cover of historical demography. Moreover, this statistic is treated romantically and ethnocentrically, with generalized inferences bearing no relation to historical demography (especially with reference to the eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries): Scientists have not agreed on where and when the monkey turned into a human being, that is, became homo sapiens, or if it happened at all. It is believed that it happened about 50,000 years ago, and by 35,000 years ago people were already inhabiting almost all the globe. Other views are shared by the representatives of the major religions: Christians, Muslims, Buddhists,etc. 8 From these examples, we would like to say that Ukrainian historiography has a body of historical texts which are somehow related to the population and are characterized as historical demographic, but they are not. At one time, Cezary Kuklo called such studies "precursors" to historical demographic studies and described them as "political arithmetic." 9 In our opinion, this characteristic also corresponds to Ukrainian realities with the fact that they appear to this day, functioning in parallel with historical demography. Their authors considered and consider the population mainly tangent to political or economic history using a simplistic logic: if the economy is growing, the population increases, and hence the "correct" state policy is implemented (and vice versa), whereas if military conflicts are taking place, the population decreases. The interpretation of such texts as historical demographic generates an interesting phenomenon: Ukrainian academic historiography speaks of a long history of historical demography in Ukraine, its continuity, diversity, interdisciplinarity and high achievements, and yet there are no words about its marginalization. It speaks of a certain self-deception, non-reflexivity, which is particularly felt against a background of self-reflection in the modern world of historical demography. Its brighter representatives discuss their impressions of the marginalization of the discipline, which, however, stem from maturity, and are a sign of such maturation. 10

Schrödinger's Cat: Ukrainian Historical Demography in the Soviet Era
For some time, Ukraine had encouraging preconditions for the development of historical demography, which could well have evolved from existing studies of population history and historical statistics. It is significant that the most successful authors of such "historic and statistical" research were not historians, but statisticians and demographers. Hence, the most famous book of this genre, written in the 1940s (before Henri and Laslett), was Essays on the History of Statistics of the 16th-18th Centuries (1945), a compendium of research by Mykhailo Ptukha. 11 The author of the book was Director at the Kyiv branch of Soviet demographics in the 1920s and 1930s, the Demographic Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (from 1934, the Institute of Demography and Sanitary Statistics). This academic institution was founded in 1919 and had every chance to become a powerful center for demographic research due to its composition and research nature, including a historical focus. However, from the 1930s, demographers became the subject of repression and total ideological control. Officials demanded they supply "correct" data and conclusions, including targeted falsifications confirming the effectiveness of the Soviet plan. The year 1937 was a terrible one for scientists: a population census was conducted, the results of which were acknowledged as "malicious," and an attempt to defame Soviet reality. After that, some scientists from the Kyiv Institute were shot, and others were sentenced to prison and labor camps. The Institute of Demography itself was founded in 1938. Thus, even those who were able to survive repression and leave the Gulag alive (as did Mykhailo Ptukha), were forced to serve the regime and supply "convenient data." Their works were the result of rigorous censorship and self-censorship; the works were minimally based on foreign methodological models, otherwise their authors again would have been accused of having bourgeois sympathies, working on foreign intelligence, or doing ideological harm. 12 Unlike their Polish counterparts, Ukrainian researchers back then could not join the founding and work of specialized international institutions such as the International Commission for Historical Demography. 13 This aspect is very important in understanding why the ideas of Henri, Laslett and other "Western" researchers were not in demand in the USSR (and, in particular, the Ukrainian SSR). Even if one of the Soviet academics had managed to overcome the language and ideological frontiers, and become acquainted with the work of the European demographic historians of the 1950s and 1960s, it would have been highly problematic to use this work in their own materials.
However, there were precedents. Significantly, they took place on the "outskirts" of the USSR, obviously, where there was at least some indirect contact with historians behind the "Iron Curtain." An example in this context is the "Baltic" center of historical demography, a prominent representative of which was the Estonian researcher Heldur Palli. During the 1950s and 1980s, it was the most powerful Soviet center for historical demography. Obviously, there was a major regional factor -before the Second World War, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were not part of the USSR, and therefore the Great Terror passed them by; the researchers were not yet intimidated, were familiar with the work of their colleagues, and they spoke European languages.
As for Soviet Ukraine, there was no such environment. It is possible to mention only individual figures. It is significant that the first researcher to include historical demographic methods for the analysis of Ukrainian material, Mykola Krykun, was a representative of the Ukrainian region that was part of the 2nd Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1950s and 60s he studied for a doctorate at Lviv University and trained in Poland. In 1965, Mykola Krykun wrote his Ph.D. thesis, Population of the Palatinate of Podolia in the 17th-18th Centuries. There, he stated the urgent need for historical demographic research, and the fact that his Polish colleagues had "somewhat" greater achievements in this field. His main focus was the analysis of sources for the fiscal accounting of the population which were necessary for studying the density of residents in separate regions of Podillia, and for migration processes, etc. Here, Mykola Krykun was a pioneer not only in calculations, but also in establishing the population density of households (yards). Its significance, at a level of 6 people for the 17th century, is used by the Ukrainian historians of Podillia to this day. 14 At the same time, Mykola Krykun decided not to touch on certain aspects in his thesis, including fertility, mortality or natural increase, since he did not have the necessary data at that time. He did not research these issues in the future either, moving away from historical demographic studies into other fields. And only at the beginning of the 21 st century was his article on households in the Zhytomyr district of the Kyiv voivodship (which discussed structure, population ratios, etc.,) published. 15 More consistent in his historical demographic studies was another Ukrainian academic of the Soviet era, Arnold Perkovskyi. In the 1960s he did postgraduate research in the Institute of History at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, and in 1968 he wrote his Ph.D. thesis, The Population of 18th-century Ukraine. In this work, he comprehensively studied the demographic history of Ukraine, the population dynamics, the evolution of demographic processes and the structure of the population. 16 Characteristically, Perkovskyi's academic supervisor was Fedir Shevchenko, a well-known historian of Early Modernism, who at that time was deputy director of the institute. Obviously, Shevchenko's academic reputation and administrative influence made possible both the choice of topic and the earning of a doctorate at the capital city's academic institute. However, in 1972, a "massacre" of the Ukrainian intelligentsia took place in Ukraine, in the context of which historians were also persecuted. Thus, a number of well-known scientists (Fedir Shevchenko, Olena Apanovych, Olena Kompan, Yaroslav Dzyra and others) were dismissed. 17 This is one of the reasons why historical demographic research did not develop further. It was associated with a politically unreliable historical period and researchers were prevented from having an academic career, so such departments were isolated. Arnold Perkovskyi, a research fellow at the Institute of Economics of the National Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR in the 1970s and 1980s, published a number of small articles on the elderly, 18 the size and structure of the family, 19 the evolution of households, 20 and the reproduction of the population in Ukraine in the eighteenth century. 21 These studies were pioneering for Ukrainian historical science with their research questions and the involvement of new sources: church registers and data from the General Description of the Left Bank of Ukraine in 1765-1769. It is noteworthy that most of them were published in digests published in Moscow or Tallinn or in Ukrainian editions, but were not of a historical, demographic or economic nature. For contemporary Ukrainian history, Perkovskyi, with his historical demography, was marginalized and the exception.

The Rise of Ukrainian Historical Demographics
In general, the normal development of historical demography in the 1970s and 1980s was impossible. The documentation suitable for historical and demographic research does not go further back than the second half of the seventeenth century and but began to be (more or less) systematically introduced in the eighteenth century. Thus, researchers of earlier periods simply did not have sources. Most professional historians who studied the 17 th and 18 th centuries were purged, and those who remained avoided new methods and problematic issues that could be interpreted as going beyond official Soviet ideology. Similarly, they could not apply the historical and demographic approach to materials from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the data would contradict official Soviet myths on the family, birth rate, mortality, and reproduction of the population in the "pre-Soviet" and "Soviet" times. In addition, there was a danger that historians would thus be able to question Ukrainian population losses as a result of the famine and repression that were provoked by the Soviet authorities. "The 1972 pogrom" extended the stagnation of Ukrainian historiography until the end of the 1980s. In the 1990s, after Ukraine became independent, the situation seemed to change. However, Ukrainian historical science at the time was more concerned with rethinking Soviet concepts than developing new research areas. The opportunity to study previously forbidden topics initially prompted the study of the most painful, socially significant problems. Immediately after the fall of the UkrSSR in 1990, Arnold Perkovskyi wrote a number of articles on Ukraine's population loss in the 1930s and 1940s. 22 The development of historical demographics in Ukraine in the 1990s was hampered by another component of the Soviet legacy -despite setting a course "away from Russia," Ukrainian historians at that time learned about the achievements of world historiography through Russian mediation. Ukrainian historians in general had a poor knowledge of European languages and in the absence of translations of methodological works, the idea of historical demography remained at early -twentieth-century levels. This is clearly seen in the understanding of what modern historical demography was back in those days. Ukrainian historians, as well as those in Russia, attributed to it all attempts to determine the population in the past. This is clearly visible in Perkovskyi's texts as well as in the article of the Russian demographer Anatoliy Vishnevskiy, The Difficult Revival of Demography. 23 Instead, only a year later, in a preface to the Russian translation of the book by Louis Henry and Alain Blum Techniques d'analyse en démographie historique, the editor of the publication Steven Hoch said: Except for the Baltic region, where serious research was carried out in the field of historical demography, a number of historians of the Soviet period were engaged in "political arithmetic," trying to distinguish different categories of the population for their belonging to the geographical region, skills and production activities, official and ethnic status. Often, these studies did not go beyond the reprinting of official data of the population statistics of the tsarist time (with minor edits) and discussion of the dynamics of change. In other words, Soviet-era researchers used the analytical-discriminatory method of analysis [...]. They did not apply mathematical methods and demographic theory.

Historical Demographic Studies of the Hetmanate
The Russian translation of Henry and Blum's book had a decisive influence on the further development of Ukrainian historical demography. Their work became a methodical guide, defining the question, the selection of sources and the nature of research on Ukrainian material in the 2000s. The pioneer in this area was Yuriy Voloshyn, who examined the historical demographic characteristics of the Old Believers community in the Hetmanate of the eighteenth century. Following Henry and Blum's book, Voloshyn applied the "one census schedule" method to analyze the data of the General Description of 1765-1769, the most complete source for the fiscal numeration of the population of 18 th century Left Bank Ukraine. This was the first comprehensive Ukrainian historical-demographic survey of the local community to consider such aspects as the gender and age structure of the population, family structure and households, fertility, mortality, marriage, and a number of other demographic parameters. 25 This work was a precedent, and yet also a doctoral dissertation. As of 1990-2000, Ukrainian historical science had inherited the notion of "appropriate and inappropriate subjects for doctoral theses" from the Soviet period. It was believed that the historian of early modern times should explore first the struggle for national liberation, the army, the economy and the elite. Instead, the history of the family, everyday life, and historical demography itself, were seen as something extravagant and non-academic, outside the officially-established thematic framework. Later, the situation changed, which was a consequence of the activities of the Poltava center for historical demographic studies. 26 During 2010-2014, graduate students of Yuriy Voloshyn defended a number of theses based on historical demographic methods. These works were linked by a common methodological approach, and the chronological and territorial boundaries -in the 18th century, the Hetmanate was a self-governing, compact region within the Russian Empire, which had legal autonomy, and an ethnically and denominationally homogeneous population. This region is an essential component of the Ukrainian national historical myth. Therefore, its history was studied mainly in the context of the political history of the Cossacks, the incorporation into the Russian Empire, the Cossack elders, and the redistribution of land ownership. Instead, the historical demographic approach has allowed academics to pose new research questions, and to gain answers that have formed the basis for understanding the Hetmanate as a phenomenon.
Thus, based on the General Description, Igor Serdiuk researched the main demographic characteristics of the Hetmanate cities: gender and age structure, fertility, and marriage. The research was defended in 2010 and published as a separate book in 2011. His conclusions became important for discussions on the nature of the city within the region. Economic historians had argued that these settlements, because of their agrarian nature, were cities in name only, but in reality were large villages. Instead, it turned out that the urban population was significantly different than that of rural areas by gender and marital age. This meant the presence of a specific urban lifestyle. 27 Later, Yuriy Voloshyn came to similar conclusions by way of a detailed study on the demographic characteristics of the population of one of the Hetmanate's largest cities, Poltava. In his book Poltava Community of the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century, he also discovered that in this large regimental city, nuclear families were most common. He also highlighted other important features of the typology of urban families and households. 28 This last aspect has been studied most productively by the example of the Hetmanate population. Thus, in 2011, Olexander Sakalo defended his thesis on rural Hetmanate families. He applied Peter Laslett's classification to church records of the population. His calculations made it possible to ascertain the dominance of complex families (complex and multifocal) in the rural population of the region, which accounted for 72.6% of all families, while nuclear families accounted for 27.3%. Olexander Sakalo also calculated the rural household occupancy rate at 10.4. 29 The structure and typology of the families of the North Hetmanate were studied by Olexander Yakymenko .30 Svitlana Dudka researches the population of households and families, the generational composition and structure of family formations within various groups of rural communities in the parishes of the Pyriatyn Protopresbyterate. 31 The typology and structure of the Cossack families in Poltava have been researched by Yuriy Voloshyn. 32 Another area of research for the Poltava School of History and Demography is the study of the features of individual communities distinguished by professional, family and age characteristics. Thus, in 2011, Vitaliy Dmytrenko, a graduate student of Yuriy Voloshyn, defended his dissertation on the subject Materials of Church Records of the Population of the Kyiv and Pereiaslav-Boryspil Diocese as a Source of Social History in the 18th-Century Hetmanate. It was later published as a separate book. One of the chapters examines the main demographic characteristics of the families of rural clergy: fertility, mortality, marriage and family typology. 33 The demographic characteristics of the professional community of artisans are explored by Oksana Kovalenko. 34 In 2014, Olena Borodenko defended her thesis on the microgroup of widows and other single women in the Hetmanate. Her research is primarily dedicated to the sex and age ratios of widows and widowers, marriage practices, the structure and typology of households headed by widows. 35 The demographic characteristics of the microgroups of Poltava widows and widowers in the 18th centuries and the community of hired laborers have been researched by Yuriy Voloshyn. 36 The historical demographic approach has become an important component of Igor Serdiuk's study of childhood in the Hetmanate in the context of fertility, fertility, infant mortality, the determination of child indices, and the gender and age structure of the child cohort. 37 In the broader context, Anastasia Momot studies the gender and age structure of the rural population of Cossack Ukraine. 38 The thesis by Olena Zamura dedicated to the study of mortality in the Hetmanate, which was also published as a separate book, became an important academic precedent. She determined a number of mortality rates, considered their seasonality and annual fluctuations, and established the average lifespan and life expectancy of the Hetmanate. Her work also describes the features of population reproduction, the impact of natural conditions on demographic crises, among other issues. Demographic calculations have become the basis for conclusions on the attitude of society to the deaths of people in different age groups. These are combined with anthropological studies of ideas on the vision of the nature of death and the posthumous fate of the human soul. 39 Outside the Poltava center, the historical demography of the Hetmanate was studied by Chernihiv researcher Dmytro Kazimirov. He wrote a thesis with one chapter entirely dedicated to the study of the demographic characteristics of the Menska Sotnya of the Chernihiv Regiment. 40 Similarly, in Chernihiv, an employee at the local folklore museum, Ihor Sytyi, wrote a study on the metric book of the village Redkyvka of the same Chernihiv regiment as a source for the history of the population of the Hetmanate. 41 Natalia Sayenko 42 and Kateryna Soldatova 43 study the historical demographic characteristics of the Nizhyn regiment.

Historical Demography of Other Territories and Periods
For other periods, the first research that should be noted is the book of the Kyiv researcher Iryna Voronchuk, Population of Volhynia in the 16th and First Half of the 17th Centuries: Family, Household, and Demographic Factors. The weak development of demographic issues during this period should, obviously, be related to the poor availability of source material. There were no regular censuses, as there were in the second half of the 18th century, and those that were carried out had their own specifics, which currently do not permit the full use of demographic methods. Despite this, Iryna Voronchuk was able to find sources to study the demographic behavior of the Volhynia gentry by studying mortality rates, birth rates and the functioning of the institution of marriage. She was also able to determine the population of households, as well as analyzing the structure and typology of gentry and bourgeois households. She investigated the impact of natural, military and political cataclysms on the structure of the Ukrainian family and population numbers of the region. She found that during the 1569-1648, Volhynia documented 28 years with difficult weather conditions and 18 years of hunger, and also discovered 12 major epidemics that took place in Volhynia during this period. Another factor was the constant Tatar attacks, which resulted in a population outflow, and had a negative impact on the demographic situation.
Scientists use historical demographic methods mainly for the study of Southern Ukraine through nineteenth-century sources. Here, the researchers are mainly focused on the study of religious and ethnic minorities that appeared in the region as a result of its colonization. These were compact, homogeneous communities, well documented, and the best suited for such research. Thus, Professor of Odessa University, Olexander Prigarin, called one of the sections of his monograph on Russian Old Believers in the Danube, The Number and Demographic Characteristics of the Old Believers of Budjak. He investigated their size, gender and age structure, natural population movement and migration processes. 44 His graduate student Marina Filippova wrote a thesis, The Bulgarian Population of Southern Bessarabia in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: the Historical and Demographic Aspect, in which she examined the sex and age structure of the population of the Bulgarian colonies, their natural and mechanical movement, the family status of the colonists, the typology and structure of households. 45 A similar thesis appeared outside Ukraine, dedicated exclusively to the Lutheran colonies of Southern Ukraine, and was defended at the Dnipropetrovsk National University (2017)  type among colonists. In addition, he researched the natural movement of the population in this community.
Another similar study originated outside Ukraine, but it researched the communities of Southern Ukraine and was authored by the Ukrainian-born researcher, Dmytro Meshkov, a research fellow at the Institute for German History and Culture in North-Eastern Europe at the Hamburg University in Lüneburg (Nordost-Institut). In 2005, he defended his doctoral thesis The Black Sea Germans and Their Lives, 1781-1871. In 2017, this was published as a separate book in Ukraine. Its second chapter is entitled "Aspects of Demographic Development and Family History." It examines the demographic characteristics and behavior of the population of two colonies -the Catholic Kleinliebental and the Lutheran Aleksandergilf. Meshkov determined the number of the first settlers, examined their gender and age structure, the process of reproduction of the population, identified the causes of mortality and the types of diseases, while separately investigating infant mortality. The author analyzed marriage practices, and in particular determined the age difference between partners, the average age of marriage and the seasonality of marriages. The book also considers the typology of the colonist family. 47 In general, except for the Hetmanate, historical and demographic studies in Ukraine mainly focus on southern regions and are based on 19th-century materials. Their authors do not belong to any single unit or academic institution and use historical demography as one of the tools to better understand the history of ethnic and religious minorities in southern Ukraine. In these studies, demographic characteristics and demographic behavior serve as markers for wider generalizations on the various features of community functioning: inclusion in the local community, the impact of the living environment, the success of regulatory imperial policies, and more.

Conclusions. Problems and Prospects for Historical Demography in Ukraine
The development of historical demography in Ukraine has not previously been the subject of historiographical research. In existing single reflections there is a tendency to include the genres of "political arithmetic," the history of statistics, and economics in historical demographic studies. However, such works predominantly operate on the data from statistical or narrative sources, without the use of appropriate techniques. They mainly concentrate on counting the population of some Ukrainian regions in the past, or the number of individual ethnic, religious, or social groups. Similar studies, even those carried out at the turn of the twenty-first century, are no different from those carried out in the early twentieth century. The defeat of Kyiv's demographic unit, numerous members of which were repressed by the Soviet authorities after 1937, prevented the normal evolution of historical demography. In the USSR, demographic knowledge quickly began to serve the ideology of the totalitarian regime, which separated it from the world context and closed it to other ideologies. Works by "Western" colleagues were used mainly for the critique of "Malthusianism" and other non-Soviet theories of population functioning.
Later, even during the years of post-Stalinist liberalization, the development of historical demography in Ukraine did not take place. The repressions flushed out the best-trained academics, and those who remained preferred to serve the authorities and their ideology. They often had a poor knowledge of European languages, were marginalized and most often ignored Western achievements. At that time, historical demography in the Soviet Union could function normally only where there had been no repression in the 1930s and relative freedom prevailed, as in the Baltic republics. Unfortunately the Ukrainian SSR was not so lucky in this regard. Thus, in the 1950s and 1980s, only two academics were engaged in historical demography, but only occasionally, on the margins of official historical research. In addition to the restrictions on the borrowing of "Western" methodologies, historical demographic studies were hampered by a specific situation with sources. In the first half of the twentieth century, during the numerous anti-religious campaigns, vast numbers of sources of church origin, including those that counted believers (Status Animarum), were destroyed. Those that survived were stored in different archives without proper systematization and cataloging. It is clear that historians in the Soviet era avoided working with these documents, otherwise they would have been in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why the state of the source base was so terrible. Then, working with church records would conflict with the general attitude of distrust towards religious institutions. From the 1970s, the situation was exacerbated by the defeat of Ukrainian historians of the early modern period. Researchers of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries were accused of "bourgeois nationalism," because they were studying the time when the Cossack state functioned in the territory of Ukraine. Thus the 17th and 18th centuries, a very productive period for European historical demography, was marginalized in the Ukrainian historiography of the 1970s and 1980s.
Since the 1990s official ideological restrictions have been lifted, but post-Soviet inertia, in particular the tradition of adopting new methodologies through the mediation of Russian colleagues, has characterized the Ukrainian humanities. In this sense, the historic translation of Louis Henry and Alan Blum's book, Techniques d'analyse en démographie historique, made a decisive contribution to historical demography in Ukraine. The methodological monopoly of this book determined the specifics of the choice of sources and approaches to their analysis (most importantly, the "one census schedule" method) by Ukrainian historians of the early 2000s. Territorially and chronologically, these studies were concentrated primarily on the study of Hetmanate society in the eighteenth century by representatives of the Poltava historical demographic center. The study of other regions of Ukraine and chronological periods are single initiatives of individual researchers.
Today, historical demography in Ukraine faces the problem of institutionalization: academic institutions are often remnants of the Soviet Academy (especially when it comes to the defense of theses). Their administrators cannot determine whether historical demography is a part of Ukrainian history, or special historical disciplines, or whether it is history at all. This, accordingly, creates some distrust of historical demography on the part of academics oriented towards official/traditional discourse. And although the field of demographic research in Ukrainian history is gradually expanding, this is a slow process. The greatest progress has been made in the study of demographic processes in separate historical regions, the study of sex and age structures, marriage and marital status of the population, family and household typology, etc. The perspective of the marriage market, family history, fertility, life expectancy, aging and mortality appear to be quite promising in the light of available sources. The first steps in using modern computer-based methods for creating large databases have been taken. 48 However, progress has been slowed by the lack of a specialized journal such as, for example, Przeszłość Demograficzna Polski, which would play a certain coordinating role. To date, there is only a periodically published specialized section in the journal Krayeznavstvo (Journal of Local History).
Another problem is the lack of translations of important works. Thus, Cezary Kuklo's Demografia Rzeczypospolitej przedrozbiorowej is known and accessible only to a limited number of Ukrainian scholars today. Given its distribution in Ukraine, it would serve as a methodological model, since it describes contexts like those in Ukraine. On the other hand, such a base would contribute to the inclusion of regional features of Ukraine into the wider European or world context. Currently, Ukrainian historians are becoming acquainted with the historical demographic research of their colleagues through sporadic participation in summer schools, internships, conferences in Poland, Romania, the Netherlands and Hungary. However, this is a rather small circle of people, and similar summer schools in Ukraine have not yet been held. Meanwhile, there have only been two conferences on historical demographic subjects, both of which took place in Poltava.
On the other hand, given the summer schools, conferences and publication of translated research, the prospects for historical demography in Ukraine are very good, providing there is some institutionalization. With the paradigm shift in contemporary Ukrainian historiography, its anthropologization, the demand for knowledge gained through historical demographic studies is increasing. This can be seen in the study of early modern history, which in modern Ukraine is most sensitive to methodological changes. The research area is wide, both for the thorough study of the other regions of Ukraine (apart from the Hetmanate), and for the wide coverage of the nineteenth century, with its relatively good source base.

Summary
This article discusses the peculiarities of the development of historical demography in Ukraine. The authors tried to find out why this branch of historical knowledge was unpopular in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine, describe its current state and the prospects open to Ukrainian researchers today.
In the first decades of the twentieth century in Ukraine, population research and historical statistics were well developed, which could have become a good precondition for the development of historical demography in the future. However, after the establishment of the Soviet totalitarian regime, demographers, in common with other social scientists and humanities academics, became subject to repression and total ideological control. Those who managed to avoid repression were forced to make "convenient" conclusions confirming the correctness of the Soviet plan. In their works, they implemented rigorous self-censorship, and gave foreign methodological patterns only a cursory glance, under the risk of being accused of bourgeois bias, working for foreign intelligence, or becoming ideologically victimized, and so on. Consequently, unlike their Polish colleagues, Ukrainian researchers could not join the founding and work of specialized international institutions on historical demography.
A revival in this direction, which should be associated with the so-called "Thaw" under Nikita Khrushchev, began in the 1960s, when historical demographic techniques were first used by researchers of Ukrainian early modern history, primarily by Mykola Krykun and Arnold Perkovskyi. However, this period lasted for a short time, and historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were declared "bourgeois nationalists." A number of prominent academics were dismissed, and were forced to change their academic area of interest. This is one of the reasons why historical demographic studies did not develop further.
The collapse of the USSR appeared to usher in favorable circumstances, but the opportunity to study previously prohibited topics primarily prompted the study of the most painful, socially significant problems, such as repression or Holodomor. Another important obstacle was the fact that contemporary Ukrainian historians learned the achievements of world historiography through Russian mediation. The vast majority had no knowledge of European languages; therefore, in the absence of a translation of methodological works, the idea of historical demography remained at the level of the first half of the twentieth century. Thus, demography was believed to be an attempt to determine the size of the population in the past.
The article also describes what caused an interest in historical and demographic methods in the early 2000s. The authors analyze the circumstances for the emergence and development of the Poltava academic center which studies the demographic processes in the territory of the Cossack Autonomous Region, the Hetmanate, in the 18th century. The authors consider the extension of historical demography to other historical regions and periods, and discuss the prospects and importance of its development for Ukrainian historiography.