Moscow’s Plan for 2030 Census Likely to Produce Even Less Accurate Data on Nationalities and Languages than Earlier Enumerations

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 23 – The Russian government is planning to carry out the 2030 census entirely in a digital format, to prefill in census blanks using tax data, and reduce the number of census takers by 60 percent, all moves that will result in even less accurate data on the ethnic composition of and the languages used by the population.

            The Russian government took these actions at a meeting last week, actions that reflect both financial stringency and Moscow’s focus on economic data rather than on ethnic and linguistic data for which the census had been a primary source (government.ru/news/52721/ and rbc.ru/economics/23/09/2024/66ef04409a79473e7331b674).

            Some 25 million Russians used electronic means to fill in their census forms in 2020/2021, and the Russian government has concluded that their success in doing so will allow Moscow to require that all Russians do so in 2030. That will likely result in many people not filing, especially in the poorest cohorts, and require officials to come up with data on their own.

            The government’s decision to cut the number of census takers will only exacerbate that problem, but perhaps the most worrying aspect of this decision are Russian government plans to prefill census forms using data from the Federal Taxation Service, an arrangement that will further depress participation by causing many residents not to answer other questions at all.

            And all these things will inevitably mean that the 2030 census if the Russian government doesn’t change direction before then will provide less data on ethnic composition and language use than any previous census and mean that what data it does release will be less accurate and reliable.

            That will be a disaster for researchers who have relied on Russian censuses for information on these issues because other branches of the Russian government and many regional officials do not collect such data at all. But it will be an even greater disaster for the non-Russians who are being shown just how low their standing has sunk in Putin’s Russia.