ИСТИНА

The paper deals with problems of the Russian Empire classification of exports and imports throughout all the period of foreign trade official statistics yearbooks publication, 1802–1915. Basically, the main division of exports, used by the publishers themselves, followed three main categories: "Food supplies", "Raw and semi-processed materials", "Finished goods"; the classification of imports was similar but not exactly the same. However the formal content of these categories has sometimes changed over the century. Some periods yearbooks contain the foreign trade statistical tables published separately, depending on the direction of trade, so the total trade values for individual goods as well as the generalized groups were not published at all. It is possible to recalculate it but nobody did that before, and it is incorrect to use the original values constructing the century dynamics series. The paper considers the principles of calculations used by the foreign trade yearbooks of different periods, recalculates the data, and builds comparable dynamic series of the Russian total export and import structure.