ETHNIC RELATIONS
10. ETHNIC CATEGORIES IN THE 2002 CENSUS
SOURCE. Talk by Valery Tishkov (head of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences) at Brown University on March 18, 2002
Russia's first post-Soviet population census will finally be conducted by the State Statistics Committee [Goskomstat], three years late, in October 2002. (Postwar practice has been to conduct the census at ten-yearly intervals; the last one was in 1989.) The publicity bills the census as "the main event of the year."
One of the most controversial questions on the census form asks: "To which nationality or ethnic group do you regard yourself as belonging?" To make it even clearer to the enumerator that what is wanted is subjective ethnic identity, which may not coincide with what is indicated on the person's internal passport, an explanation is added in brackets: "according to the self-definition of the respondent."
Thus anything that the respondent wishes can be entered in the box provided for the answer. But how are answers to be coded for subsequent aggregation? It is impracticable to give every possible answer its own code. Only those ethnonyms (ethnic labels) included in a special list get separate codes, while other answers are lumped together under the residual category of "other nationalities."
The list used in the 1989 census contained 128 ethnonyms. The list that we [at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology] are recommending for use this year -- it has not yet been finally approved -- contains about 150 ethnonyms. We are proposing that about 30 ethnonyms on the 1989 list be removed, and that about 50 new ones added.
Such an expansion of the list of ethnonyms would be a return to the practice of the last tsarist census of 1896 and the first Soviet census of 1926, which aimed to distinguish all ethnic identities claimed by a substantial number of people, on the basis of the judgment of professional ethnologists. The censuses of the Stalinist and late Soviet periods (from 1937 to 1989) denied recognition to many less numerous ethnic groups on the dubious grounds that they were in the process of being assimilated into the larger groups. In this way it was hoped gradually to reduce ethnic heterogeneity and eventually to form a unified "Soviet people." The policy was strongly backed by the leaders of those union and autonomous republics the demographic -- and therefore also political -- weight of whose titular groups was artificially bolstered by the fiction of the assimilation of small groups.
The leaders of some of the ethnic republics of the Russian Federation are exerting pressure to thwart our proposal to expand the list of recognized ethnonyms. The two most important instances are Tatarstan and Dagestan.
We propose to recognize as distinct several groups previously subsumed under "Tatars" -- Kryashens (Tatars whose ancestors were converted to Christianity) and such local subgroups as Mishars, Nagaibaks, Astrakhan Tatars, Crimean Tatars, and Siberian Tatars. Many Kryashens in particular, especially those living outside Tatarstan, do not regard themselves as Tatars at all. The leaders of the Republic of Tatarstan regard this proposal as part of a plot to break up the Tatars (as well as other non-Russian ethnic groups) into numerous tiny subgroups which can more easily be assimilated into the Russian ethnic group. Tatarstan president Mintimer Shaimiev has appealed directly to Putin to preserve "Tatar" as an undivided category.
Dagestan has a complex system of power-sharing among the leaders of ethnic communities. However, only the 14 largest groups take part in this system. The regional authorities still maintain the fiction that the smaller groups do not need to be represented because they are rapidly being assimilated into two of the largest groups -- most into the Avars, some into the Dargins. We propose to give separate codes to 15 smaller groups which were not counted in 1989. The Russian government recently took a decision to grant the request of the Dagestani authorities that only the 14 officially recognized groups be counted. This may lead to a very serious situation on the ground in Dagestan.
The Cossacks present a special problem. Ethnologists do not regard them as a separate ethnic group, but that is how many of them regard themselves. If 100,000 people identify themselves as Cossacks in the census, can we simply reclassify them as Russians? Some Cossacks have threatened to boycott the census if their identity is not recognized, and Goskomstat is afraid that the whole census will be ruined if a boycott movement starts to spread. So Cossacks will be counted, but as a subgroup within the Russian and Ukrainian ethnic groups.
In some other cases too dual ethnic identities will be taken into account. For example, the Komi will be subdivided into Komi-Permyak and Komi-Zirian (although there are Komi who do not assign themselves to either subgroup, and there are Zirians who deny being Komi at all). However, dual identities in which neither component is subordinate to the other -- for instance, semi-assimilated people and children of mixed marriages who regard themselves equally as (say) Russians and Jews -- are not (yet) recognized. And there is no provision for people who wish to claim no ethnic affiliation and say only that they are citizens of Russia [rossiyane], in the way that Yugoslav censuses allowed people to identify themselves simply as "Yugoslavs."
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