Russia prepares for first post-Soviet census

AFP

Everybody from cosmonauts to homeless people across Russia are being asked to fill out a detailed questionnaire in the country's first census since it transformed itself more than a decade ago.

Officially starting on Wednesday, the census will attempt to take the measure of a population that has been deeply marked by political, social and economic upheaval since the last such exercise in 1989.

The intervening events include an attempted coup, a parliamentary revolt put down by tanks, a financial crash and a slump in the population unprecedented in peacetime.

The count has already begun in some of Russia's remote regions, but the main body of work is to be carried out over a period of eight days by some 600,000 census officials backed up by 200,000 policemen supervising the operation and ensuring security. The questions Russians will be asked to
answer cover a wide range of issues including nationality and ethnicity but not religion following a decision taken with the agreement of leaders of the predominant faiths -- Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism.

Around 800 different ethnic groups live in Russia's vast, sprawling land-mass that stretches from the Baltic Sea to the Bering Straits, and census takers quoted by Russia Radio said they had already uncovered a new grouping, the Shalymtsy, comprising 130 souls in the northern Siberian
region of Taimyr.

The object of the census is to "draw the portrait of a new individual with a new mentality living in a new democratic society," said deputy director of the state statistics committee Goskomstat, Sergei Kolesniko.

It will also attempt -- allowing for a margin of error of up to three percent -- to take a fix on the size of the population.

The Russian population has been in decline for 1992 and is currently estimated at 143.6 million people. It is believed to be shrinking by as much as one million people a year.

President Vladimir Putin will be filling out his form, said Goskomstat director Vladimir Sokolin, as will the two Russian cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station, Valery Korzun and Serguei Treshchev, using a ball-point pen specially adapted to conditions of weighlessness.

The census takers will be asked to accept answers on trust. "If a man tells them he's a women, they're to write down that he's a woman," Sokolin said.
 

According to a recent poll, 27 percent of Russians have said they may play fast and loose with the facts, at least by omission, in answering questions, as 46 percent of them are convinced that the taxman will have access to their answers.

"These fears will evaporate when they see the questionnaires," Alexander Oslon, president of the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), said. "There's nothing about how much people earn, only about their sources of income."

The FOM poll indicated that 92 percent of Russians planned to take part in the census, while three percent said they would not, either out of fear of "fake census takers" or as a gesture of defiance to the central authorities.

Unlike censuses taken in Soviet times, this year's exercise is voluntary and there is no penalty for not joining in.

Among those likely to be most reluctant to answer questions are illegal immigrants, although census organisers are hoping to obtain data in precisely this area.

The porosity of borders and the population shifts that have taken place since the collapse of the Soviet Union have seen a sharp rise in the numbers of immigrants, although this has proved difficult to measure
precisely and a special questionnaire has been prepared to remedy this.

"Confidentiality is guaranteed," interior ministry official Nikolai Pershutkin said, insisting that census-takers would make no effort to pass on their findings on illegal immigrants to the police.

The information sought relates to such matters as type of housing, language, level of education, nationality and ethnic identity. On the last point, the definition of ethnicity is to be made by the respondents themselves rather than according to definitions imposed from on high, as in
the past.

In the war-torn Caucasus republic of Chechnya, where the ethnic issue is particularly sensitive, the operation will take place over two days, October 12 and 13, and include refugees living in tents in neighbouring Ingushetia.