Data reconstruction in historical statistics: commercial banks' branches of the Russian empire in 1897

The paper revises traditional regional division of the commercial banks of the Russian Empire to the banks of St. Petersburg, Moscow and the rest of Russia. The research analyzes the allocation of assets, loans and deposits in re­gions and reveals the areas of maximal growth of branch networks, capital inflow and outflow by 1 January 1898. There is a main obstacle to the studies of regional Russian banking: a third of commercial banks published statistics separately on their head office's operations and on regional offices in sum. Those missing regional data have been reconstructed in the study and a new data collection is available online. The data set includes all 42 commercial banks, operated in 1897, and their 279 units in Russia and abroad. Regional statistics of the Russian commercial banks primarily concerned financial centres rather than regions. With the predicted dominance of St. Petersburg and Moscow, the leading ten centres by total assets in descending order were Kiev, Riga, Warsaw, Odessa, Lodz, Taganrog, Rostov-on-Don, Kharkov, Yekaterinburg and Tiflis. The largest number of banking units developed in Central and Southern provinces of European Russia, close to the area of farm-market agriculture and principal rail- and wa­terways: grain-producing provinces of Central European Russia, or Central Black Earth Economic Region (42 units), provinces of the northern coast of the Black Sea, or South Steppe Region (33 unit), and the Middle Volga Region (21 unit). Most of Russian regions, including St. Petersburg and Moscow, were the subjects of capital inflow, i.e. their local loans exceeded local deposits; it especially concerned to western regions. The loans and deposits were relatively balanced in Central and Southern European Russia. Deposits exceeded loans only in the Caucasus and in northern regions of European Russia.