Census taken, but gaps remain

Russia: Census takers brave wary, sometimes aggressive citizens while trying to gather data for a statistical portrait of the nation since 1989.

 
MOSCOW - After weeks of hoopla, skepticism and suspense, Russia's first census of the post-Soviet era officially ended last week.  Over an eight-day period, an army of more than 400,000 canvassers armed with pens, census forms and plastic whistles rang doorbells from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Billboards urged Russians to "write yourself into history," newspapers lavished coverage on the effort and President Vladimir V. Putin's census interview was broadcast on television.

But it's too early to say how successful authorities were at counting Russia's estimated 143.5 million citizens because of reports that many wary Russians refused to be interviewed.

In Moscow alone, where almost 90 percent of the estimated 10 million residents have been canvassed, 600,000 people had declined to participate, census officials said.

Canvassers will soon be back on the streets, officials say, to fill in gaps and revisit the apartments of holdouts. The results aren't expected for several months.

But officials hope to gather enough data to draw a statistical portrait of Russia after its wrenching 11-year effort to build a modern capitalist state on the wreckage of the Soviet empire. "It will answer the question, are we degrading, or really developing?" says one Moscow census taker, Olga Okonoshenko, 20.

Life expectancy and the birth rate have plunged, while crime, poverty and alcoholism have soared, studies have shown. Experts expect the population to fall from 147 million in 1989, when the last Soviet census was conducted. The only question is by how much. The census is also expected to measure a huge shift from rural areas to cities, and from the north and east of Russia to the west and south.

Many Russians did not believe the promises from Goskomstat, the state agency running the census, that the information would remain confidential. Some, like Yelena Durogavtseva, suspected authorities would use the data to catch illegal immigrants, draft dodgers and tax evaders.

"When answering questions about my income, even if I had some side job, I wouldn't confess," the 25-year-old lawyer said. "I have no doubt that the confidentiality will not be preserved." She called the census "completely useless."

Yet when two canvassers - Okonoshenko and Sergei Sorokovoi, 22, both students at Moscow's Polytechnic Institute - arrived at her tiny 20th-floor apartment in northern Moscow on Tuesday, Durogavtseva agreed to participate. Why? She shrugged. "Because I don't feel comfortable if I say no," she said.

Census takers, paid $48 for a month's work, have braved snarling Rottweilers, aggressive alcoholics and embittered Communists. There were reports of several thefts and assaults - and one rape of a canvasser.

In Voronezh, about 500 miles south of Moscow, some people refused to answer questions until census takers hauled out the trash or cleaned stairwells. That, and low pay, led 173 to quit. A number of residents of Tula, about 120 miles south of Moscow, wouldn't open doors to canvassers while the municipally supplied heat remained shut off in their buildings.

A plumber in Tver, about 150 miles northwest of here, reportedly grabbed the form out of a census taker's hands and ate it, according to the Internet newspaper www.utro.ru. He explained later that he wanted to protest the Bush administration's threats of military action against Iraq.
 

Some Russians, meanwhile, were upset about questions they weren't asked. Many Muscovites, census takers say, asked to register their pets. Others were indignant that the forms didn't list their religious beliefs.

Sorokovoi says he often had to explain why residents should cooperate. "We tell them, 'Everything is done to improve your life,'" he said, by helping plan where to build schools, housing and transportation.

Many pensioners, who saw their life savings wiped out in the financial turmoil of the past decade, were a particularly hard sell. "Some old people say they will not tell the Russian census anything, because Russia has never done any good for them," Okonoshenko said.

In Soviet days, the census was seen as another instrument of propaganda. After the 1937 census revealed that the Soviet population had plunged - because of the forced collectivization of agriculture, political executions and expansion of prison camps - Stalin ordered the census organizers arrested. Several were executed. Two years later, the country conducted another census that painted a rosier picture.

Despite the doubts and fears, Sorokovoi said, many people were eager to participate. "Most people participated with pleasure," he said. "They want their country to know about them."

When he and Okonoshenko showed up at the door of 85-year-old Galina Kozlova on Tuesday afternoon, she welcomed them with a broad smile. "I was worried," she said. "We have been expecting you. But no one came."

She invited the visitors into her kitchen, and sat proudly as she and her grandson, Sergei Kozlov, 26, answered the questions. Kozlova was born in Moscow, a few months before the Bolshevik Revolution. They asked her what languages she spoke. Russian, of course. "I had another language, but I forgot it," she says. "It used to be French."

Her grandson wore a track suit and looked as though he had just rolled out of bed, although it was about 4 in the afternoon. "Jobless," he said.

"At the moment!" his grandmother added.

Standing in front of another apartment door, Sorokovoi flashed his identification card at the peephole and Okonoshenko waited patiently. A cigarette-raw voice barked from behind the door. "Do I need a gun?" a man asked wearily.

No firearms were needed, Sorokovoi assured him.

"Make it quick, because I am sick," said the voice.

"It will take five minutes," Okonoshenko said.

The voice turned out to belong to Victor Kochetkov, 57, who lives in a tiny apartment with his wife. Standing in his bathrobe, he said he was unemployed and had no special language skills. "I can swear a little in English," he said.

Sorokovoi and Okonoshenko worked in one of two northern Moscow districts supervised by Konstantin Mironov, 25, who normally works as a technician for the Russian Academy of Sciences. The biggest problem census takers faced, Mironov said, was persuading people they weren't con artists or thieves.

Canvassers were also reluctant to visit one condemned building filled with squatters, he said. So they had police escorts when they went to the apartment house, where 20 people were found living in a single apartment.

One nagging question about the census is how truthful people were with the canvassers. Okonoshenko and Sorokovoi said many people they spoke to claimed to be unemployed. But the young census takers don't necessarily believe that. "Many of them are just lying," Okonoshenko said, in order to hide income they haven't reported. But it wasn't their job to question what people told them.

One of the most sensitive questions for census takers regarded ethnic background. Russia officially recognizes 100 different nationalities, but according to the rules of the census, people could describe themselves any way they wished.

Some Tartars say the rules allow authorities to carve them up into a number of separate ethnic "nationalities" to dilute their influence in Tartarstan and other regions. According to NTV television's Web site, 15 new ethnic designations were recorded in Dagestan, a Caucasus republic on the Caspian Sea.

On a visit to one apartment, Okonoshenko asked Maya Zhadina, 29, about her nationality. One of her parents was a Russian, one a Kazakh. "I am not Russian, I am not Kazakh, but I consider myself a citizen of Russia," she said. So they wrote that she was Russian.

Her son, Amal Kobtun, 9, was even harder to classify, since his father is Ukrainian. They recorded him as Russian, too.

Asked if the boy spoke any foreign languages, she smiled and said no. "He takes after his father," she said. "Russian is difficult enough."