Dmitrii Petrovich Zhuravskii

Born 1810; died Nov. 23, 1856. Russian statistician and democrat; author of several statistical studies showing the deep contradictions within serfdom.

Zhuravskii graduated from the St. Petersburg Cadet School in 1829. After serving in the military, he went into retirement. He worked with M. M. Speranskii in compiling the Code of Laws, edited a section in the Encyclopedic Lexicon of A. A. Pliushar, and served in the Ministry of State Domains. In 1841–42 he worked in the Commission of Finance in Warsaw, after which until 1845 he was the administrator of the Saratov estates of the Naryshkin family. In 1845 he began working as an official attached to the Kievan governor and was given special duties. During these years (1845–56) Zhuravskii occupied himself with statistics; he wrote his most important works and developed a system of indexes for the study of all sectors of the social life of Russia, as well as a program for research into the country’s productive forces. He was one of the first to recognize the great importance of the method of statistical groupings. Zhuravskii considered statistics the science of “categorical calculation.” He stressed that all branches of knowledge can and should have their own “numerical side, peculiar to the essence of each.” He examined social phenomena in the context of social classes. N. G. Chernyshevskii characterized his workA Statistical Description of Kiev Province (vols. 1–3, 1852) as being one of the most valuable advances in 19th-century Russian science.