JRL: Ethnic categories in 2002 Russian census
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Subject: JRL: Ethnic categories in 2002 Russian census
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JRL: Ethnic categories in 2002 Russian census
Johnson's Russia List
#6168
3 April 2002
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A CDI Project
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JRL RESEARCH AND ANALYTICAL SUPPLEMENT
Issue No. 6
April 2002
Editor: Stephen D. Shenfield
[email protected]
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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