The working population is built up from numbers employed in the public-sector and artisan industry, collective farms, NKVD establishments, and armed forces personnel.

Table I.1 shows official figures for public-sector employment by branch in each year of the war. The public sector is defined narrowly on the pre-1960 concept, excluding artisan industry. Thus, to find total civil employment, a number of excluded categories must be added. To industrial employment must be added numbers in artisan industry (table G.3). Public-sector agricultural employment was limited to state farms (sovkhozy) and establishments supplying machinery services (MTS), so to agricultural employment must be added collective farmers (table I.2). In addition, missing from all the public-sector employment figures are forced labourers in NKVD establishments (tables 1.3 to I.7).

The population of forced labourers available to the NKVD may be thought of as originating in two categories, prisoners held in camps and colonies, and ‘labour-settlers’ (these groups were discussed in more detail in chapter 5). From the point of view of labour utilisation, this population was again divided into two parts. One part, sometimes referred to as the NKVD ‘special contingent’ (spetskontingent NKVD) was subcontracted to civilian agencies, and is already counted within the public-sector workforce totals shown in table I.1. The second part was retained to work within NKVD establishments ranging from state farms in agriculture and factories, mines, and timber camps in basic industry, to construction sites and transport operations including canals and railways (table I.3); these must be estimated from basic data by a complicated process (tables I.4 to I.7, which are built upon each other in reverse order).