Russia Starts to Take Its Measure

First Post-Soviet Census Aims to Quantify Social Change

 
MOSCOW, Oct. 9 -- Svetlana Kochetkova and Dmitri Komarov are learning just what a country of extremes the new Russia has become.

At 4 p.m., they were ogling the flat-screen television and gallery-quality art in the ultra-hip apartment of one of Moscow's best-known public relations executives. A half an hour later and a few blocks away, they watched as a Russian housewife made cabbage-stuffed dumplings for dinner and explained that her communal apartment had no hot water.

So it went for the two university students, pressed into temporary government service as part of an army of more than 500,000 that fanned out across Russia today to begin the country's first census of the post-Soviet era.

For the next week, the world's largest country will take stock of the place it has become since 1989, assessing what more than a decade of economic and social upheaval has wrought in a nation of more than 800 ethnic groups sprawling across two continents from Vladivostok in the Far East to Kaliningradon the Baltic Sea.

Most important, the $180 million census, delayed three years because of Russia's economic crisis, will seek to find out how dramatically the country's population has dwindled in recent years. Current estimates put Russia's population at 143.4 million -- 4 million fewer than were in Russia at the time of the final Soviet census.

Russia is different in other ways as well, as Kochetkova and Komarov found today, poking around a squalid building filled with illegal Uzbek immigrants around the corner from a courtyard of parked Mercedeses. In 1989, the census offered a final snapshot of the Soviet empire on the eve of its collapse. This time, the young students are recording scenes from an unfinished Russian transition.

As they trekked through a cold rain, the two marveled over the city's sharp contrasts -- from wealthy New Russians without college degrees, to college professors in crumbling tenements. In one building, they found a room full of unemployed drunks on the first floor, and an apartment of well-heeled Australian diplomats several flights up. Equipped with plastic whistles for security, they encountered retirees eager to talk about their problems and saw "places where it is impossible to live but people are living in them anyway," as Komarov put it.

"The information we have from the last census in 1989 was from a completely different country, when completely different people, Soviet people, lived here," said pollster Alexander Oslon. "This census is a great thing -- we'll know better what kind of world we live in now."

But in many ways, the census also illuminates a lingering Soviet hangover. Questions that would have been prohibited in Soviet times about religion and household income were ruled out this time, too, deemed too controversial despite protests from social scientists that valuable information would be lost.

"We decided not to risk asking this kind of question," said Vladimir Sokolin, director of the State Statistics Committee, the government agency supervising the census. As for religion, which has undergone a major renaissance in Russia since the 1989 census, Sokolin said, "maybe this is a case where less information would be more useful for society."

In Soviet times, demographic information was often stamped top-secret because the authorities found it embarrassing. For example, the Soviet leadership classified data on life expectancy because it was not keeping up with the trend in Western Europe. Joseph Stalin suppressed the 1937 census and punished the census officials for producing a survey that showed how religious the officially atheist Soviet Union was.

The census was also easier to organize with a repressive state machine, which coerced people into participating. "Back then, if we had a problem, we just let certain branches of power know, and they were supposed to solve it, period," Sokolin said. "The authorities could solve all problems back then."

This time, the government has launched a Western-style, multimillion-dollar public-relations campaign to handle the persuading. Census ads are everywhere, many of them slick takeoffs on pop culture themes. One billboard carries the words from a popular Soviet song in the 1930s -- "How many pretty women are there in Russia?" -- with the contemporary promise: "This is the question the census will answer."

Recent polls suggest that only a small number of Russians will refuse to participate. In the latest survey by the Public Opinion Foundation, 92 percent said they would participate, while 7 percent flatly refused or expressed serious doubts.

But distrust of government lingers. "To convince people to participate is very difficult. There are many fears about the census," said Sergei Zverev, head of the ad agency hired to promote the census. Zverev said the biggest obstacle is also the most intangible: Russians' anger and resentment toward a government that has done little to ease the painful decade of transition from communism to capitalism.

"Unfortunately, right now, many people connect their dislike of the authorities to the census. People say, 'Until there's heat in our homes, we won't participate in the census.' Or they say, 'They won't build the bridge we need, so we won't participate in the census,' " Zverev said. "People reflect their protest against the government in the context of the census."

Many people have expressed concerns about allowing census takers into their homes, fearing thieves. Others say they don't believe the government will keep the information confidential.

Some social scientists have also complained, saying that the tally will fail to count people who have reasons for fearing the authorities, such as illegal immigrants, military deserters and hundreds of thousands who live in Moscow without the required residence permit.

As they worked Moscow's fast-changing Ostozhenka neighborhood, a historic haunt of the city's intelligentsia now filling up with newly rich Russians eager to live near the city center, Kochetkova and Komarov were mostly concerned with getting in the door. On the first day of the census, they quickly found out that the richer the person, the bigger the problem getting in would be.

"Not everybody's going to participate, that's for sure," Kochetkova said.

"The poorer the people, the kinder they are," Komarov observed.

Both are fourth-year students at a nearby university, and were told by school officials that service was voluntary in the sense that if they chose to participate, they wouldn't be expelled. For a month's work, each will earn 1,500 rubles, or less than $50.

At 3 Ostozhenka St., they got a glimpse of how the other half lives, but it wasn't easy. First, a private security guard refused to let them in, saying, "Go to hell with your census," Kochetkova related. A police officer later escorted them in. Once inside, they found most apartments empty.

Finally, a woman opened her door a crack, demanding official documents from the two students. After some negotiation, they went from the dingy hallway into an apartment straight out of Architectural Digest. Sitting at the smoked glass dining room table, Komarov learned he was in the home of famous spin-doctor turned Russian television executive Marat Gelman.

"I believe in the importance of the census for statistics and for running the country," said Gelman's wife, Yulia. "But, of course, I'm afraid of people who are not real people coming into our house, and I'm afraid the information will be sold all over Moscow, where everything is for sale."

A short walk away, Nadezhda Litvina was more welcoming. On the fourth floor of a collapsing tenement, she interrupted dinner preparations to describe 20 years of life in a communal apartment shared with two families and without a shower, bath, hot water or central heating. She said she understood why her better-heeled neighbors were reluctant to cooperate.

"After all, they have something to lose," she said. "We have nothing."