Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 5 – Russia’s
regional development ministry says the 2010 census counted as ethnic Russians
those who declared themselves to be Siberians, even though the enumeration is
supposed to record declarations rather than official nationalities, presumably
to keep that identity from strengthening and to boost the numbers of the
declining Russian nation.
That admission confirms what Siberian
activists have long suspected and is another way in which the number of the
ethnic Russians was falsified to suggest that that community forms a larger
share of the population than it does. (Other studies have found that local
Russian officials boosted the Russian figure in 2010 by at least two million to
get more aid from Moscow.)
And while the ministry statement
does not address any other community, it is likely that Moscow also grouped as
ethnic Russians those who now identify as Cossacks, Ingermanlanders, or other
groups of that kind, a practice that could also have helped to push up the
Russian numbers.
At one level of course, what the
ministry has said reflects international practice: Almost all census operations
have rules that specify how various declarations about identity or other things
are to be grouped under a single rubric. But at another, in the Russian case, it
is a deeply political one because it is being used to boost only one approved
identification.
On Tuesday, the Globalsib.com news agency
reported that Yevgeny Mitrofanov, a longtime Siberian activist who has promoted
the “Sibiryak” identity, received a letter from the Ministry of Regional Development
of the Russian Federation concerning how declarations of “Sibiryak” identity
were treated in the census (globalsib.com/18313/).
During the enumeration, the regional
news agency says, “thousands of Siberyaks” declared that to be their national
identity, only to learn that the census takers and then the census processors
counted them as ethnic Russians. They protested at the time, but Rosstat’s
director Aleksandr Surinov refused to answer their questions.
Now, the Russian Ministry for
Regional Affairs has. In a letter to Mitrofanov, the ministry reported that his
letter had been “reviewed and a query sent to the Institute of Anthropology and
Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences” for evaluation and comment.
The institute said, the ministry
recounted, that “the data of the All-Russian census (which allowed thousands of
Siberians to identify themselves as such) is not an official determination of
the legal status of ethnic communities.”
Such declarations, it continued, “only reflect the distribution of
responses of the population to the corresponding uestions and give an idea
aobut the variety of such answers.”
“Various combinations and groupings
of such answers and their interpretation and analysis is the task of experts,”
the institute added, saying that the latter “carefully consider each particular
case.”
For its part, Globalsib.com
reported, the ministry “acknowledged that in the publication of results of the
census, the Sibiryaks were grouped with other responses into the common
category ‘Russians.’” That was done, the ministry said, because longtime ethnic
Russian residents of Siberia call themselves “Sibiryaki” but “retain a north
Russian culture.”
This answer will not satisfy many
Siberian activists who now are likely to use it to suggest that the community
they speak for is in fact larger than a honest handling of census declarations
would have shown and to press Moscow to treat their group differently when the
Russian authorities conduct the next census.
And perhaps even more important, the
ministry’s statement about the ways in which Moscow unilaterally and behind the
cover of expertise groups declarations about national identification is certain
to provoke questions among other groups about just how the central government
has counted and possibly manipulated figures about them.
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