Quality of Current Russian Census So Low that It May have to Be Redone, Raksha Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 24 – The 2020 Russian census has already been postponed three times because of the pandemic, but it should have been postponed yet again not only because of the impact of the coronavirus but because of the incompetent way it is being carried out and the massive resistance of Russians to it, especially in big cities, Aleksey Raksha says.

            The independent Russian demographer says that school teachers and university students have been forced to work as census takers but are resisting because while they are supplied with masks, most of the people they contact who do open their doors to them aren’t wearing any and thus they may contract the virus (severreal.org/a/perepis-epohi-pandemii/31526172.html).

            That is leading to resistance especially among university students, on the one hand, and to a repetition of shortcomings in early post-Soviet censuses where census takers simply filled in answers without in fact making contact with those they are supposed to survey. Raksha suggests they feel justified in doing so because so many Russians won’t talk to them.

            Russians don’t trust the state and don’t trust those who ask questions and so feel free to not answer the door when the census takers appear. But all this means that the current census will be worse than in 2002 and 2010 and much worse than those carried out in Soviet times, the demographer says.

            Rosstat officials know all this, he continues; but they aren’t the ones making the decisions. The demographers there have been reduced to technicians, and their advice on the census is limited to such questions. Choices about when to have a census and whom to use to carry it out are made much further up the political pyramid.

            According to Raksha, the powers that be in the government and the Kremlin do not recognize the importance of having good information and thus are not that alarmed at the prospect that for the next ten years of more, they will be forced to operate without the kind of information that only a census can provide.

            But that will lead to mistakes and to efforts to get better data by smaller surveys. But what should happen, Raksha concludes, is that the entire census should be cancelled and repeated once the demographic and political conditions permit. When those things will be true, however, is anything but clear.