Census workers admit mass forgeries

 
The regional departments of the State Statistics Committee report that almost 100 percent of the population has been surveyed in the course of the national census held throughout Russia earlier this month. Gazeta.Ru has learnt that in Moscow alone more than half of the questionnaires were filled in by the census-takers themselves on the basis of data supplied by city officials.

Long before the State Statistics Committee announced the official results of the nationwide headcount, some regions started reporting on the success of the census. On Sunday the deputy head of the Voronezh regional committee for state statistics Vladimir Dalechin said that 97.2 percent of the region’s residents had been surveyed. In Karelia census officials reported having questioned 98.1 percent of residents, and in Chelyabinsk, according to official reports, only 400 of the 1,050,000 population refused to take part in the census.

Similar reports are coming in from virtually every census station throughout Russia. In a conversation with Gazeta.Ru, representatives of the State Statistic Committee said, citing the head of that agency Vladimir Sokolin, that 100 per cent of the population had been surveyed.

However, Gazeta.Ru has learnt that many census stations forged questionnaires, filling them in themselves on behalf of those who refused to open their doors to the census-takers.

It all began when census officials were asked to register no less than 85 percent of the population, and those who managed to meet (and especially, to exceed) the target were promised a special award – a presidential medal 'For active participation in the census'.

On October 15, 2002 the chairman of the State Statistics Committee Vladimir Sokolin issued decree No. VS-0823/4744, whereby he ordered census-takers to use the records kept by district housing maintenance offices and other organizations rendering communal services, in case residents for some reason or another refuse to take part in the census. It is no secret that many Russians refused to open their doors to census-takers – some out of security concerns, others in protest at wage arrears and low living standards.

And on October 17 the chairman of the Moscow City Statistics Committee A. B. Akimov issued decree No. 5, instructing census officials to urgently register the residents of all houses that were not visited by census-takers in the period of October 9-16. The campaign was to end on October 16 but was extended in an attempt to verify reports and to count those who were unavailable earlier.

In his decree Akimov pointed out that if controllers find houses that had been entirely neglected, then the census officials in charge would be deprived of half of their pay and all bonuses.

As a result, in most city districts census officials began chasing awards. As an employee of a census station located in the southeast of Moscow told Gazeta.Ru, last Saturday the local district council supplied them with data on all the residents registered in ‘their’ houses (those under the jurisdiction of that census station) and ordered them to fill in blank questionnaires on behalf of those residents.

However, it transpired that there were not enough blank forms for everyone and the census workers were forced to fill in copies.

As a result of a computer failure at one of the stations in some houses of southwestern Moscow, all the male residents were registered as ‘female Tatars’, and all women as ‘Turks’. And in some families, census-takers came across ethnic Russians and Ukrainians living with members of ethnic groups thought to have died out way back in 1890.

As for the homeless and market vendors, the census-takers say they did not even approach them. ''They were surveyed by district council officials. And they filled in census questionnaires for them,'' one student worker said.

At another census station, in northwest Moscow, census-takers also received data on residents from the local district council. However, as one of the census-takers told Gazeta.Ru, those files proved incomplete and contained data on only 40 percent of the residents in the area, forcing the students to use their imagination and invent that missing 60 percent.

''In one of the apartments we had to have a gay couple. We did not register their marriage though, since the law prohibits it. And then we made an 80-year-old granny, Pamela Ivanovna, move in with them. In her questionnaire we wrote that her occupation was ‘rendering services of an intimate nature’. The chief looked at the questionnaire and nodded. He only asked that we make the granny 20 years younger, so that it sounded more credible.''

Employees of Moscow’s northwestern census-stations, nevertheless, had to work with the homeless. But those counting them had been warned: ''There are no homeless in our district.'' They registered the homeless respondents at random addresses.

''Some guys did the whole job in one day, and then merely sat, smoked and drank beer. When some resident willing to take part in the census came by, the data he provided was written down in pencil, and later was erased because they were all too lazy to check whether the flat of that respondent had already been registered,'' a student census-taker recounted. ''As for the phone, at first, we turned its volume down, and then switched it off altogether, so that it did not hinder us in our work.''

It appears that the only census results that may be considered credible are those pertaining to the number of inmates. According to the Deputy Justice Minister Yuri Kalinin, the census in Russian detention facilities has revealed that 919, 000 people in Russia are currently in custody.