Monitoring the Census: Moscow to Marii-El
By Peter Rutland, a professor of government at Wesleyan University in
Connecticut.

Last month's census, the preliminary results of which were presented on
Friday, was billed by President Vladimir Putin as the most important
political event of the year. That claim, alas, has been overshadowed by the
terrible "Nord Ost" hostage-taking.

The hope was that the census would signal the stabilization of Russia. The
drama of transition could give way to the sober accounting of the nation's
human resources. Russians were told that it was their patriotic duty to
take part in the census, to seize the opportunity to "write themselves into
history." In a country that was sorely lacking a national idea, a unifying
goal, some in the Kremlin apparently viewed the census as not just a
routine administrative exercise, but as a chance to rally public loyalty
behind the new state.

Also, in more practical terms, a census was urgently needed. Russia has
seen tremendous disruption of its social and economic fabric over the past
decade: rising mortality rates, plunging living standards and shifts in
family structure. According to Nationalities Minister Vladimir Zorin,
one-quarter of the population have changed their place of residence since
1989, when the last census was conducted. During that time Russia has
absorbed some 7 million immigrants from other countries of the former
Soviet Union. In order to target public spending on health and education to
meet the requirements of this rapidly changing society, the government
urgently needs an accurate picture of social conditions.

Will the census satisfy these pressing political and social demands?
Unfortunately, there are grounds for doubting the reliability and utility
of the census. Certain media outlets, for some reason, harshly and at times
hysterically criticized the census from the outset.

A more sober assessment by a team of specialists assembled by academician
Valery Tishkov, head of the Institute of Ethnology, did reveal some grave
concerns. Under Tishkov's direction, 25 "correspondents" monitored the
census in regions across Russia, especially those with large populations of
non-Russians and/or migrants. I was one of a dozen French and American
scholars who joined these correspondents and was sent to the republic of
Marii-El for monitoring duties. We all met in Moscow on completion of the
census to review our findings.

The decision to make the census anonymous, and voluntary, for respondents
flies in the face of standard international practice, and fundamentally
erodes the reliability of the results. Many people were double-counted
because of vagueness about what should count as one's permanent place of
residence, while probably an even larger number were not counted at all. In
most of the North Caucasus republics, including Chechnya and Dagestan,
correspondents reported a strong desire by indigenous peoples to boost
their numbers in the census by fair means or foul, to increase their
political visibility in Moscow -- with a view to boosting the future flow
of federal subsidies. In these regions, the census was treated as a
political event akin to an election.

Still, the regional monitors generally found that there was less anxiety
surrounding the census in the provinces than in Moscow. People were more
willing to open their doors to census takers, and there seemed to be fewer
refusals than in the capital (where some 10 percent of respondents seem to
have declined to participate). A surprisingly high proportion of forms were
competed by census takers over the phone -- another departure from
international practice. Part of the problem was that census officials were
told to compensate for the missed people by working from Interior Ministry
registration records. Some even completed census forms for missing families
by gathering information from their neighbors.

There was much political controversy around the sections of the
questionnaire devoted to ethnicity. One welcome move was that people were
allowed to make a free choice of their ethnic identity, rather than pick
from a fixed list. State Statistics Committee chairman Vladimir Sokolin
said people could list themselves as "Martians" if they wanted to, a
comment that seemed to trivialize the issue. However, people were asked to
record their "national belonging," a cumbersome formulation that had not
been used before. People were not asked their religious identity. Instead
of being asked for their "native language," as in previous censuses, people
were asked first if they spoke Russian (a somewhat redundant question) and
second what other languages they could speak. Confusingly, enumerators were
anyway instructed to ask people the "native language" question, and to
check a discrete "reserve" box at the bottom of the form. Given that the
question was not printed out on the form, it seems that in practice many
enumerators were not told to ask the question, or simply did not bother.

Russia desperately needs to know exactly how many unregistered refugees and
migrants there are in the country, but census takers were given little
incentive or encouragement to go out of their way to count this population.

Compromises in the construction of the form and its administration reflect
political pressures in the run-up to the census. The State Statistics
Committee seems to have bent over backward in a bid to avoid controversy,
and in the process tied itself in knots. Religious leaders successfully
urged that no question be asked about religious affiliation, so an
important chance to map the scope of the various denominations was lost. In
Tatarstan, as is well-known, there was a vigorous campaign by the
republic's authorities to count as many Tatars as possible, and to resist
the listing of separate subgroups within the Tatar community (such as
Christian or Siberian Tatars).

In the south, Cossack groups mounted a campaign to persuade Cossacks to
list themselves as a separate nationality (in part because they expected
state funding to follow). In an address to Tishkov's team, Zorin stressed
that respondents were free to choose their own nationality, but went on to
say that he considered the Cossacks to be a Russian "ethno-cultural" group,
and not an "independent nationality" in its own right, seemingly
contradicting the idea of free choice.

The specialist demographers from France and the United States in Tishkov's
team seemed to think that the census was flawed, but usable. After all,
other nations' censuses suffer from similar problems, to a greater or
lesser extent. Reliable estimates of the actual demographic composition of
Russia will be derived not from the census alone, but through triangulation
with other data sources, such as birth records and -- better still --
school enrollments. In the meantime, one can expect the political hot air
swirling around the census to resume with the return to politics as usual.
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