Soviets Hid Size of Prison Population by Changing Ages of Prisoners in Census and Counting Them as Children

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 19 – News reports about the current census have not only revealed the many reasons why the numbers this time around won’t be entirely accurate – widespread resistance during the pandemic, for example – but also ways in which census takers in the past have manipulated data.

            One of the most intriguing given the distortions it introduced came during the 1989 census when Soviet officials, despite Gorbachev’s glasnost, decided they had to find a way to hide just how many Soviet citizens were behind bars. According to Samara sociologist Vladimir Zvonovsky, they came up with a simple means to do so.

            He says that the Soviet census takers decided to reduce the ages of prisoners to that of children and then include them in the local population (idelreal.org/a/31499672.html). Because prisons and camps were not equally distributed across the country, that distortion made it appear that some areas were seeing a baby boom when in fact they were not.

            That distortion, of course, was compounded when researchers and officials used the official data in comparison with earlier and later censuses where this means of hiding the prison population was not employed, leading some areas to appear to be in deeper demographic decline than they in fact were.

            While this may appear a small problem, it is in fact a large one, an indication that the way in which officials try to hide unpleasant realities that a census should show is not difficult for them to undertake and can have serious consequences not only for analysts but also for political decision makers and others who are certain to draw false conclusions from falsified data.