Ethnic Identity Issues

in the Russian Population Census of 2002

by Sergei V. Sokolovski

Introduction
Ethnic identity politics remain one of the central facets of political life in
Russia and an important instrument of political legitimization, as well as a
resource much exploited in political mobilization campaigns. As is well known,
Russia, being a federal republic, maintains a complex system of territorial
autonomies based on ethnicity (called “nationality,” in the Russian/Soviet
context). The “title” ethnic groups,1 often being less than half of the
population of the respective administrative units, base their effective majority
status on special treaties with the center, their own constitutions, and local
legislation favoring title group cultures, languages and political representation.
Besides the title peoples of republics, there are many other legal categories
based on ethnicity (such as indigenous peoples and national minorities 2), whose
members claim and attain a special status and associated rights and privileges.
Thus, being an officially recognized ethnic group in Russia entails a political
visibility and more often than not a special status with an associated set of
legal and administrative provisions. This system of population division into
ethnic categories has a long history in Russian domestic policy, and its
beginnings might be traced to the very first Russian census of 1897, though it
relied on language and religion as the most pertinent personal identity
manifestations. The establishment of the new census category nationality
(natsional’nost’, narodnost’) marked a critical conceptual break with the
tsarist classifications and underlined the new policy worked out by Bolsheviks
in their attempts to mobilize support from the non-Russian periphery.
In the following, I will first give the background to pre-census
deliberations on ethnic and linguistic issues relevant to the census, then switch
to the analysis of the factors that influenced decision-making in the
construction of the list of nationalities to be used for coding answers on ethnic
and linguistic identities (Russian population census-taking traditions, academic
theories of ethnicity etc.), and finally will analyze and comment on the actual
decisions that had been taken during the elaboration of the various census


Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences
(Moscow), editor-in-chief of the Russian academic journal “Etnograficheskoe obozrenie”
[Ethnhographic Review].
1
‘Title’ in Soviet and post-Soviet context means the ethnic group that gives its name to ethno-
political and administrative unit, such as Bashkirs for Bashkortostan, Tatars for Tatarstan, etc.
2
There is a number of laws, presidential decrees and government resolutions, as well as
several articles in the federal constitution (Art.68, 69, 72) that make use of the categories of
indigenous peoples and national minorities and stipulate special rights (on the subject of
Russian legislation on indigenous peoples, see Chapter 4, this volume).
instruments for presenting the country population’s ethnic and linguistic
composition. Special attention will be given to politically salient cases.

The 2002 Census as an ethno-political event

The first post-Soviet population census in Russia took place in October
2002, three years after the date it had been initially planned, as the default of
the national currency of August 1998 left the government without adequate
resources to conduct large-scale population survey, demanding billions of
roubles. Only in 1999 the census preparation had been resumed. On September
22, 1999, the Russian government issued a decree No. 1064 “On the All-Russian
Population Census of 2002,” according to which the census was to take place
within the period from October 9 to October 16, 2002, and the population
count time was scheduled on 0 hours, October 9, 2002. The law itself was a
significant achievement of the State Statistical Committee (Goskomstat),
whose lawyers had drafted it. Although it has its drawbacks and witnesses,
reflecting the prevalent public mood and expert considerations of the time,
historically it was the first legal instrument in the Russian history to provide
legitimate basis for conducting a population census. Two norms of the law
(art.6 and 8), those pertaining to confidentiality and obligatory vs. voluntary
participation, draw public attention and influenced both the census
preparation and its subsequent conduct and results. The concern of the private
business over possible misuse of personal economic information (substantiated
by the previous arrests of high officials from the Goskomstat computer centre,
who were trading with economic information) made the Russian government
aware of the problem of confidentiality and of the legal guarantees of personal
information protection. Prior to the adoption of the census law the former
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov suggested that the census forms will be
anonymous. The unfortunate conflation of anonymity with confidentiality,
exacerbated by the census presumably voluntary nature raised the experts’
concern over possible number of non-response cases and an unacceptable bias
in responses, as well as over possible harm to post-census verification (e.g., in
post-enumeration surveys) and to the essential matching of individual forms for
people who are "temporarily absent" or "temporarily resident" and thus not
staying at their permanent place of residence at the time of the census. This
danger was a factor Goskomstat eventual decision to use surnames on the
forms3, but make a special focus in the media campaign preceding the census
on confidentiality guarantees.
The first post-Soviet Russian census was to happen in a new atmosphere of
democratic discussions, and it was preceded by a public debate, whether a
special question on ethnic identity is needed. Vladimir Sokolin, recently
appointed head of the State Statistical Committee (since 2005 the Federal
Statistical Service), has voiced a concern that the inclusion of the question in
the first post-Soviet census might be viewed as a violation of the right of a
person to abstain from one's own ethnic identity proclamation (Art. 26.1 of the
3
Form C1, enumerating people, living in one household, included the list of their first names
and surnames.

2
Constitution of the Russian Federation). His legal advisers, however, indicated
that there is a constitutional right of persons to proclaim their own ethnic
identity or abstain from such a proclamation, and that the census-taking would
not violate such a right, as a person may or may not give the answer to the
question on her/his ethnic affiliation. As the question on ethnic identity has
been on the census questionnaires since the first Soviet census of 1920 (thus
facilitating demographic comparisons), and as many practical matters such as
education in minority languages planning could be impaired without the
information provided by the answers to such a question, it was preserved on
the census forms. High degree of acceptance of the questions on ethnic and
linguistic affiliation on the side of various ethnic movements and leaders was
also a factor for such decision. Most public mistrust was associated not with the
issues of ethnic identity, but with the economic block of the census
questionnaire, as a sizable proportion of the country’s population was involved
in ‘grey’ economic sector activities and people were afraid of disclosing their
sources of income.

Preparation of the Census of 2002

In summer 2000, the Russian State Statistical Committee announced an
open competition for preparation of the dictionaries of nationalities and
languages to be used for coding the respective answers in the future census
questionnaires. As a result of the competition, the Institute of Ethnology and
Anthropology (IEA RAS) signed on August 28, 2000 a state contract to prepare
four dictionaries (a list of nationalities, alphabetic lists of nationalities and
languages, a comprehensive dictionary of nationalities and explanatory notes)
that were to be used in coding procedures of the census questionnaires. The
Academic Council of the Institute appointed three members to its census
commission, with the institute's director Valery Tishkov at its head 4.
Much of the new census methodology was perceived as continuing the
tradition of former Soviet censuses, and the motive of possible comparison with
the data of the previous census of 1989 was recurrent at many phases during
the elaboration of the census instruments. The questions on ethnic and
linguistic identities were part of the tradition that goes back to early years of
“the Soviet affirmative action empire” 5. The slogan for national self-
determination, designed by Bolsheviks to recruit ethnic support for the
revolution, was instrumental in creating numerous ethno-nationalist
movements throughout the Russian empire, and made the new rulers
deliberate on nationalities policy and possible ways of governing a multiethnic

4
The commission included Pavel Puchkov, a specialist on ethnic demography and cartography,
who took part in similar projects for the Soviet censuses of 1970, 1979, and 1989; Zoya
Sokolova, a specialist on Siberian and northern peoples who was also an expert of the State
Duma and had been involved in the preparation of several laws on the peoples of the North,
Siberia and the Far East; and the author of this paper, who had edited an article collection
with critical analysis of ethnic categorization of the previous 1989 census (Sokolovski, 1994).
5
For a detailed analysis of the early Soviet nationalities policy, see Martin 2001, Hirsch 2005.

3
state.6 As a result they initiated the transformation of the territories of the
former empire into national units with dominant or ‘title’ nationalities, a
process that required detailed and nuanced knowledge of ethnic composition
and territorial distribution of ethnic groups. The creation of numerous
territories of ethnic groups’ self-government, from the smallest ‘national
Soviets’ to union republics in mid-1920s had greatly contributed to the
institutionalization of ethnicity and linked it to territory and privileges based
on ethnic affiliation. Since that time the question on ethnic identity had
become a standard part of census questionnaires. Moreover, ethnic identity
due to these reforms had been so effectively institutionalized and entrenched
that it turned into a valuable form of social capital. By the end of 1932, when
internal passports were introduced in large cities, there was no debate on the
necessity of registering ethnic affiliation (national’nost’) as a passport entry.7
The presence of the questions of ethnic and linguistic affiliation on the
census forms necessitates the need in the coding and classification of the
diversity of answers, which entails the working out of lists of ethnic categories
or ‘nationalities’ and languages. Before the IEA RAS commission stood a
formidable task of reviewing the state of the art in ethnic groups research
among two hundred peoples and more than 170 linguistic communities within a
year, providing details on existing ethnic self-designations, their geographical
spread, settlement patterns of various groups, ethnic processes they were
involved in, current demands on separate group status etc. In what follows I
will try to outline the main principles of the elaboration of the new lists of
nationalities and languages from an “insider’s perspective,” as during all the
phases of the project I had been responsible for drafting the lists. One of the
members of the commission worked mostly on geographic issues, providing lists
of territories of residence for each category, another dealt exclusively with the
issues concerning the so-called “numerically small peoples of the North”
(malochislennye narody Severa), and the Institute’s director contributed to the
elaboration of the general principles of the lists compilation and to the final
editing.8 It should be kept in mind that the census of 2002 was the first census
of the emergent democracy. It took place at the time when social sciences in
Russia undergone important shifts in ideology and research methodology. In
order to understand these shifts, particularly in the case of ethnicity research,
a sketch of the Russian tradition of this research becomes necessary.
6
For a good background discussion and analysis of the logic of the early years of that policy,
see Smith 1999:7-28; Martin 2001:2-9.
7
For details, see Moine 1997. For a general overview of the Soviet pasportnyi rezhim (passport
regulations) see Garcelon 2001.
8
Though the contracts with the Department of the Population Census and Demographical
Statistics were terminated in due time and all the dictionaries forwarded to Goskomstat by the
dates set in the contracts, the lists were later revised several times, and certain categories
were added even after the census had taken place. The correspondence with Goskomstat
during the work was becoming progressively more and more active, as the public discussion of
the lists had mobilized regional ethnic elites, whose representatives were sending numerous
appeals to the Russian government, the President, Goskomstat officials and the Institute of
Ethnology.

4
 The Russian Academic Tradition in Ethnicity Studies
The basic approaches to interpreting ethnic phenomena are usually
grouped into three main groups, which are often called primordialist
(objectivist, positivist or naturalist), instrumentalist and constructivist
(subjectivist, or relativist). The first of these scholarly traditions is usually
traced to the ideas of the 19th century German romanticism, motivated
nowadays by positivistic attempts of some social scientists to emulate the
objectivity of natural sciences. Its adherents view ethnicity as an objective
given, a sort of primordial characteristic of humanity. For primordialists there
exist objective ethnic entities with inherent characteristics such as common
language and mentality, recognizable membership and joint territory,
‘belonging’ to the group under consideration. In its extreme form this approach
views ethnicity as a “comprehensive form of natural selection and kinship
connections,” as a primordial instinctive impulse (Van den Berghe 1981). Some
primordialists even claim that group affiliation is genetically encoded and this
code is the product of early human evolution, when the ability to recognize the
members of one's family group was essential for survival. The naturalizing
paradigm in the treatment of ethnicity remains a feature of the intellectual
landscape in all post-Soviet states and in many Eastern and Central European
academic communities.
Contemporary political discourse on ethnicity and nationalism in Russia
conceptually belongs to this primodialist thinking and is influenced to a
substantial degree by anthropological theories, which had been prevalent in
the history of Russian anthropology9 since its formation up to late 1980s.
Explicit primordialism had been entertained both in Russian and in Soviet
anthropology. Taking its origin in the Herder's neo-romantic concept of Volk as
a unity of blood and soil, it had been worked out into positivistic program for
ethnographic research in the work of Sergei M. Shirokogorov (1923: 122), who
had defined an ethnos as
A group of people, speaking one and the same language and admitting
common origin, characterized by a set of customs and a life style, which are
preserved and sanctified by tradition, which distinguishes it from others of
the same kind.

9
The conceptualization and discipline’s subject construction of Russian national school of
anthropology differed in a number of important aspects from American cultural anthropology,
British social anthropology, French ethnology and German Volks- and Völkerkunde. The
predominant focus of Russian anthropology (which was called etnografia) had been since its
beginning on the study of various non-Russian ethnic groups. In Soviet times this focus became
even more rigid, and ethnicity and historical ethnic change were the predominant research
issues to the exclusion of many important dimensions of contemporary social and cultural life
of the groups under study. The term antropologia was used exclusively to denote bio-
anthropology. Only since mid-1990-s with the establishment of socio-cultural anthropology as a
separate academic discipline the terminology was changed to reflect international usage.
Accordingly, I am using the term anthropology to refer to the discipline in general (combining
socio-cultural and bio-anthropology), and restrict the usage of the term ethnography for the
method of field research and its products.

5
 This approach had been later developed in the works of Julian V. Bromlei,
a former director of the Institute of Ethnography (USSR Academy of Sciences) 10,
who provided a very similar definition of ‘ethnos’. Bromley and most Soviet
social scientists were proponents of a historical version of the primordialist
treatment of ethnicity, where an ‘ethnos’ is viewed as an objective lingua-
cultural entity, an ‘ethno-social organism,’ and a basic object of ethnological
research (Bromley 1981, Bromley and Kozlov 1989).
The natural-historical explanations of ethnicity and nationalism in Russia
are still deeply entrenched and institutionalized in scholarly thought, education
and, most importantly, in public opinion and in the administrative-political
structure of the Russian Federation. This is also true for all post-Soviet states.
The reasons for this institutionalization are various. Among the most important
are the disciplinary tradition of Russian etnografia, a close political control and
censure of academic research during the Soviet period, the popularization of
primordialist discourse through education system and media, and, to a lesser
extent, the integration of political and academic elites in post-Soviet times.
One more important reason, which needs to be mentioned, is a basic similarity
and convergence between popular views on ethnic phenomena and naturalist
treatments of ethnic reality. The convergence can at times be so striking that
one may speak not only of mutual reinforcement of lay and scholarly opinions
in this respect, but claim that nationalist ideas have preceeded the formation
of primordialist ideas in the academy. Here the German romantic treatment of
ethnic phenomena should be mentioned again, as Russian ethnography
inherited many of its ideological biases. Even the interdisciplinary boundaries
and understanding of the discipline's subject had been modeled similar to the
divide between Volkskunde and Völkerkunde of the German academic
tradition11.
Political liberalization since the late 1980s and the rise of ethno-
nationalism and ethnic conflicts have brought radical changes for Russian
etnografia. Already at the end of the 1970s there appeared several other
approaches, which could be viewed as various forms of instrumentalism. 12
While the instrumentalist treatment of ethnic phenomena had been formed by
the end of the 1970s, the constructivist approach remained alien to domestic

10
Renamed to the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, in
September 1990.
11
In Russia the place of the German Volkskunde (the ethnographic study of Germans) has been
taken by folklore studies of Russian culture, and Russian etnografia had been conceptualized
similar to Völkerkunde (the study of non-German ethnic groups in the case of Germany, and
non-Russians, in the case of Russia).
12
Some authors, influenced by theories of systems and information were trying to use the
concept of information in ethnic phenomena analysis, others were experimenting with
informational patterns or "models" of particular "ethnoses" or suggesting that ethnic
differentiation could be adequately described as an information process. Though
instrumentalist approaches to ethnicity were considered fresh and exerted certain influence,
they were a sort of a side show in Soviet anthropology at the time they appeared, and were not
considered much deviant from the predominant naturalistic treatments, as their authors were
using the same terminology and shared much of presuppositions of the "naturalistic school".

6
social science and had never been seriously tested until the start of the 1990s.
With post-Soviet ethnic revival and the growth of ethnic separatism, Russian
anthropologists started to pay more attention to the construction of ethnicity.
As a result, ethnicity started to be seen as a part of a repertoire that is
consciously “chosen” by an individual or a group to achieve certain interests
and goals, or as a representation, actively constructed by ethnic
entrepreneurs. Though social practice of the post-communist world contains a
plethora of examples of constructed and mobilized ethnicity, the
instrumentalist and constructivist treatments of ethnic phenomena generally
remain unknown beyond academia, and even there they are met with
skepticism and opposition. Due to inherent complexity and deviance from
popularized versions of ethnic reality representations they have managed to
achieve till now only a moderate level of popularity. For obvious reasons ethno-
nationalist leaders oppose them as well and support primordialist views on
ethnicity. However, by the end of the 1990s scholars engaged in ethno-
sociological and ethno-psychological studies of ethnic identity had made a
breakthrough in ethnic identity research, enabling researchers to construe it as
a complex and fluid process, with various dimensions, public, and private,
official and personal, institutionalized and circumstantial. Discursive,
cognitive, emotional and regulatory components of identity were integrated
into a general theory of social action, so the predominant approach became
both interactionist and processual. The simplistic view of a stable, fixed,
inheritable identity, prevalent in primordialist speculations on the nature of
‘ethnos’, was abandoned by many scholars, with the result that census ethnic
categories started to be viewed as constructed, and the responses of people
taken during a census survey as circumstantial.
Theoretical debates on the nature of ethnicity that lasted over a decade
in post-Soviet anthropology13 resulted in sharper contrast between
primordialists and constructivists. Primordialist approach has served as a basis
of census classifications of ethnic groups in all Soviet censuses and was a part
of ‘traditional’ census methodology. To establish a more liberal attitude
towards individual ethnic identity in accordance with the constitutional right to
“define and indicate one’s own ethnic affiliation” (Art.26.1), the experts
should have overcome their own primordialist biases 14, which was not an easy
thing to do, as many of these biases remained unintentional and unconscious.
They had to embrace constructivist vision of nationhood and ethnicity, based
on theoretical innovations of the new institutionalism, with its critique of
atomistic accounts of social action and focus on the processes that shape,
mediate, and channel the social choice (including ethnic identity choice) via
institutional arrangements, and its emphasis on the institutional constitution of
both social interests and social actors. It was this entirely new understanding
that the census as a part of institutional arrangement could not only support
13
For details, see Sokolovski 2003.
14
For persuasive criticisms of essentialist and primordialist accounts of nationhood and
nationality in the Soviet context, see Lapidus 1984:560; Laitin 1991:148-151; and Comaroff
1991:670ff.

7
various identities and reinforce certain strategies of identity politics, but
provided incentives for new strategies and was a factor in the creation of new
actors and new identities that spurred most heated debates both within and
outside academic community. The struggles of the republican national elites
over details of the census results representations (e.g. whether Tatars and
Avars would be reflected in the census results as a conglomerate of various
groups, or unified single categories; or whether Cossacks and Kriashens would
constitute separate census categories or be included into Russians and Tatars,
respectively) reflected this new awareness of a possibility of the emergence of
new ‘actors’ that would compete for resources and privileges with the already
well established groups.

Prior Categorizations of Population Ethnic Structure

The scholars of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology had been
involved in the elaboration of the nationalities dictionaries for several previous
censuses, and the accumulated experience was both an advantage (the
expertise on ethnic groups and ethnic terms, their subdivisions into self-
appellations, historical ethnonyms; places of residence of particular groups,
and areas where they form the predominant part of the population), and, to
some extent, an heritage to be overcome (reified representations of ethnicity,
rigid hierarchies of ethnic categories etc.).
The most inclusive and liberal approach to the ethnic categorization of
the country’s population was generally attributed (of all Soviet censuses) to the
census of 1926. Prior census of 1920 had taken place during the civil war, and
its list of nationalities included only 55 main groups. 15 Later censuses used
intentionally and centrally created groupings: different populations had been
grouped together under Stalin’s order in 1939 to demonstrate the ‘progress’ of
small nationalities and their presumably voluntary merging into larger socialist
nations. If in the census of 1926 the list of nationalities included 192 main
categories (and 637 ethnonyms)16, in 1939 the census materials listed only 62
‘native groups’ groups (plus 35 groups of the so called ‘foreigners’; and 759
ethnonyms and their variants)17. The census of 1937, the results of which had
not been accepted by the party leadership and were not published, listed 112
census categories (and 1111 ethnonyms and their variants).18

15
see: Programmy i posobia, 1927, VII:3 (Introduction by T. Semionov).
16
Calculations based on a census booklet Programmy i posobia, 1927. The results of the
census, however, were published only for 178 nationality categories (Bruk, Kozlov 1967:6).
17
Calculations based on a typewritten manuscript, copied at Goskomstat (Slovar’
natsinalnostei 1939). However, due to the Stalin’s remark, made when he commented on the
project of the new Constitution of 1936, that in the Soviet Union “there were about 60 nations,
national and ethnic groups”, the publication list of the census results listed only 57 of the more
numerous groups (in some tables only 49). For details, see Cadiot 2001.
18
Calculations based on Slovar’ natsinalnostei, 1937. Even without 22 groups that were were
using the same ethnonym but were divided according to language usage (e.g. Jews with
Georgian, Tadjik, Tatar, Tat, Uzbek and other languages) there remained 1089 ethnonyms and
variants.

8
 The first liberalization of census procedures under Khrushchev brought an
increase in the number of officially recognized ethnic categories (in comparison
with the figures of 1939): 126 in the 1959 census 19. After that, an ideological
doctrine, according to which different ethnic groups should be slowly
amalgamated into the new ethnic community of Soviet people, favored the
accentuation of ethnic assimilation and consolidation processes. The
nationalities lists of the 1970 census were reduced to 104 officially recognized
categories; the census instruments of 1979 mentioned 125 categories. This did
not mean that scholars were always ready to provide scientific arguments for
such reductions, but each case of a separate census category on the list
required, in addition to scientific arguments, political approval. For example,
in the preparation of the 1970 Soviet census the draft list of nationalities,
prepared by two well-known ethno-demographers, Solomon Bruk and
Viktor Kozlov, contained 141 nationalities and more than 800 ethnonyms, 20
whereas the census publication data, as mentioned above, indicated only 104
“main nationalities.” The new political atmosphere under perestroika put an
end to this tendency to demonstrate the pace of assimilation. The
“reawakening” of ethnic sentiments and a new round of politicization of
ethnicity brought an increase in the number of officially recognized
nationalities (130 categories and 823 ethnonyms 21). All these data were re-
evaluated and to a substantial degree used in drafting the new lists of
nationalities and languages. Among other Goskomstat materials, the 1989 and
1994 regional data on linguistic and ethnic composition were consulted as a
source of information on geographic distribution of various groups. 22
It is instructive to look closer at the principles that guided the
construction of the 1989 census list of nationalities in order to understand what
changes had taken place since that time. Its Perechen’ natsional’nostei (the
official list enumerating all officially recognized nationalities, that is the ethnic
categories that were coded and counted separately) was not based on the
alphabet, but arranged according to the principle of nested hierarchy, which
mirrored the structure of the Soviet Union. Several general groupings, both
named and unnamed, reflected the complex ethno-political organization of the
country. The two named groups in the 1989 census were “nationalities of the
USSR” and “nationalities residing predominantly outside of the borders of the
USSR” (Slovari natsional’nostei i yazykov 1988). Russians opened the list and
the fourteen so-called “title nations” of the former Soviet republics followed,
19
The census results were published for 109 categories (Bruk, Kozlov 1967:13). For detailed
analysis of the ethnic composition in Russian censuses from 1897 to 1970 see Lewis e.a. 1976
20
Bruk, Kozlov 1967:16-20.
21
Slovari natsional’nostei i yazykov 1988.
22
Other sources, which were drawn on during the work of the commission, included various
reference books: anthropological and linguistic encyclopedia and dictionaries, ethnographic
monographs, publications on the geographical distribution of ethnic groups and identity
changes in article collections and academic journals etc. It has been also a regular practice to
interview anthropologists, specializing in a particular region or ethnic group on its present
geographical distribution (regions and places of predominant residence) and terms employed
for ethnic self-designation.
not in alphabetical order, but in the same order as they were listed in the
Soviet constitution. The ordering principles within this small subgroup changed
several times. Initially the “nations” were listed in the order they had joined
the Soviet Union; at a later stage the criterion of the nation’s numerical size
was introduced. During the preparation of the 1989 census, it was pointed out
that Uzbeks became more numerous than Byelorussians, and a new principle of
listing in the same order as in the relevant article of the Constitution of 1978
was introduced to solve the problem of re-ordering in the case of other
possible changes in the numerical order.23
In the dictionary of nationalities, prepared for the 1989 census, the “title
nations” subgroup was followed by a subgroup of the main (title) nationalities
of autonomous republics, which had a lower administrative status than the
Soviet republics. The ethnic group terms within this subgroup were listed
alphabetically, but, again, with some inconsistencies, as there were more
“title groups” than republics (several autonomous republics were named after
two peoples, such as Kabardino-Balkaria). Others, such as Dagestan, had more
peoples which were considered ‘title’ and twice as many who were indigenous
to the region but counted as parts of larger groups. 24 Out of more than 30
ethnic groups from Dagestan only ten most numerous ethnic categories were
chosen to be named in the subgroup of the “autonomous republics” peoples. 25
With “title autonomous peoples” from other autonomies this subgroup
contained 29 categories. Another smaller subgroup has been formed from the
title peoples of autonomous regions (oblast and okrugs). It contained only
seven ethnic categories,26 since most of the indigenous peoples of the northern
autonomous territories (okrugs) were listed within the next subgroup, called
“nationalities of the North.” The latter well-known category comprised 26
peoples of the North (Slezkine 1994; Sokolovski 2001). The group was
subdivided into two parts. The first contained “northerners” that had their own
autonomous districts.27 The second comprised all the other small groups,
scattered over the vast territory of Siberia and the Far East. Then a residual
subgroup of “peoples without ‘their own’ ethnic territories” followed (16
ethnic categories). The list was concluded by the category colloquially known
as the ‘foreigners’ and two residual categories: “others,” and “nationality not
listed.”
Most of these elaborate 1989 census groupings had lost their legitimacy,
and the IEA RAS Commission members decided from the start that the status

23
Author’s interview with Pavel Puchkov (March 03, 2001), who had taken part in the drafting
of census dictionaries for the 1970 population census.
24
A group of the so-called “Andi-Dido peoples” of 12 minority peoples counted previously as
Avars, and two additional minorities counted in 1989 and prior censuses as Dargins.
25
In alphabetical order: Agul, Avars (Maarulal), Dargins (Dargwa), Kumyk (Qumuq), Lak (Laq),
Nogai (Noghai), Lezgin, Rutul, Tabasaran, and Tsakhur (Tsakhighali) [Slovari natsional’nostei
1989].
26
Adygei (Adyge), Altai, Circassian (Cherkess, Adyge), Jews, Karachai (Qarachaili), Khakass
(Khaas), and Komi-Permiak.
27
Chukchi, Dolgan, Evenk, Khant, Koriak, Mansi, and Nenets.
subdivision of ethnic categories into more or less “indigenous,” or ‘superior’ and
‘inferior’ ‘title’ peoples were not to be maintained in the new census. We
decided to list all the major categories in alphabetical order, whereas
subcategories were to be listed immediately after the main category into which
they were included.28 The argument against the rank ordering used in the 1989
census was not of a purely political nature. The main point was that a rank
ordering connotes a hierarchy of peoples, which ought to be abolished in a
democracy. It was argued, as well, that the rank ordering was based on
erroneous data. For example, both Tajiks and Azeris, ‘title nations’ of their
respective Soviet republics, were more numerous (in census terms “resided
predominantly”) in neighboring Afghanistan and Iran, hence should have been
listed not in the first, but in the last cluster of nationalities. The same was true
of the Jews, Gypsies, Saami, Aleut and Yupik, each of them being more
numerous abroad, than within the borders of Soviet Union. 29 Thus, the
subdivision into ‘residents’ and ‘foreigners’ was the first object of criticism and
involved a series of further innovations. The division of census categories into
‘title’ and ‘non-title’ nationalities seemed irrelevant and incorrect both on
political and legal grounds and was abolished as well.
A separate listing of the so-called ‘northern peoples’ was also set aside,
but the reasoning in this case was different. Federal law “On the Guarantees of
the Rights of the Indigenous Numerically Small Peoples of the Russian
Federation” signed by President Yeltsin in April 1999, provided a special list
enumerating 45 “numerically small” peoples, thus creating an incentive to
preserve the group in census dictionaries as well. 30 This represented a significant
increase from the 26 peoples of the North previously recognized in census lists. 31
It has started a series of negotiations between leaders of various groups and the
government began, as many groups whose population numbers were below the
threshold of 50,000 claimed the privileges associated with the status of “a
numerically small people.” The Dagestan government expressed a special
opinion towards the law and provided a disputed official list of Dagestan small-
numbered groups.32 Precisely because the list of these “numerically small”

28
Both Commission members and other agents, such as ethnic leaders in the regions, interested
in the results of the census, debated the issue of subcategories. Its importance obliges me to
deal with this issue specifically (see section on subcategories below).
29
Siberian Yupik and related groups speaking the Eskimo languages are called in Russian
Eskimos.
30
The list was adopted by the government a year later, in March 2000. On indigenous peoples
category see more in the chapter on the Concept Of ‘Native Peoples’ (this volume).
31
The list was created in a 1925 government decree “On Tax Reduction for the Tribes, Residing
in Northern Outskirts of the USSR” (August 31, 1925). With slight changes it had been preserved
in later state laws until the beginning of 1990s.
32
Scholars of the Dagestan Institute for Language, Literature, and Arts wrote a letter to the
Dagestan parliament and government, on January 15, 2002, proposing their own draft of
“Dagestan nationalities” and criticizing the Goskomstat list as an “archaization of the ethno-
linguistic situation in Dagestan.” In their own version of the comprehensive dictionary of
nationalities, they listed 14 categories. The 12 Andi-Dido peoples were included into the
numerically dominant group of Avars.

11
peoples remains incomplete and contested, the Institute of Ethnology census
commission came to the decision not to use this cluster in census dictionaries of
nationalities and list all the categories in alphabetical order33.

Drafting the Nationalities List for the 2002 Census

The underlying reasons for the proliferation of ethnonyms, registered in
the alphabetical dictionary of nationalities and ethnic names, have been both
technical and political.34 On the one hand, the authors of the dictionary, which
was specially designed to aid the coding procedures of the census
questionnaires with respect to the questions on nationality and language,
intended to include all the ethnic terms and their variants, which were
expected to be given as self-designations by various groups of population during
the census. If the bulk of such terms does not to appear on the list, the
residual census category of “others” would be too large, and the inclusion of
the question of nationality into the questionnaire would be redundant.
On the other hand, the most important guiding principle that was
operative in many of the choices made during the preparation of the
dictionaries was the liberalization of the census procedures. In working terms,
this meant the protection of the right of persons to proclaim their own ethnic
identity (Art. 26.1 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation). Several
documents of international law, including the Council of Europe’s Framework
Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (ratified by the Russian
parliament in June 1998) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons
Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic Minorities (adopted in
1993) were also considered as relevant, particularly Art.1.1 of the latter, which
indicates that “States shall protect the existence and the national or ethnic,
cultural, religious and linguistic identity of minorities within their respective
territories and shall encourage conditions for the promotion of that identity
[emphasis mine —S.S.].
Hence, an ethnic term was to be included in the list on two grounds: 1) it
was expected that some person would give it as an answer during the census,
or 2) any self-appellation in response to the question on ethnic affiliation
should be considered legitimate on legal grounds (article 26.1 of the Russian
33
The census results for the northern peoples were published in a separate volume.
34
The dictionary was approved by Goskomstat on September 2, 2002 (decision 171) and
published shortly before the census (Alfavitnyi, 2002). The official title of its first table was
Alfavityi perechen’ natsionalnostei i etnicheskih naimenovanii [The alphabetical list of
nationalities and ethnic names]. When Goskomstat officials discussed with me, in a telephone
conversation on July 18, 2002, the exact formulation of the table title, I was arguing that the
correct title should be “A Dictionary of Ethnic Self-Designations.” The dictionary could not be
simply titled “Dictionary of Nationalities” precisely because it contained variants of ethnic
names applied to one and the same population category. Hence, the title could be misread as
the alphabetical list of groups, not of various names used by individuals to refer to group
affiliation. The Goskomstat Census Department official argued that the term “nationality” is a
traditional census term and could not be avoided in census publications. A compromise decision
was made to print on the booklet’s title page “Alphabetical Lists of Nationalities and
Languages,” but to preserve both “ethnic names” and “nationalities” in the titles of the tables
included into this publication.

12
Constitution). These guiding principles, though largely borne in mind, were not
consistently applied, especially in their political aspect, as was the case with
the issue of subgroups or subcategories. In discussing the status of a particular
population category (whether it should be considered separately, or viewed as
a part of a larger entity), the presumption of individual political right to claim
one’s own identity has often been overruled by the presumption of a similar
collective right.
The latter could be illustrated by the cases of the Tatar-speaking
Kriashens and Mishars. The leaders of Kriashens, a Christian Orthodox Tatar-
speaking group, claimed a separate status in the census and put forward a
number of complaints and demands to the Tatarstan government and
president. The presence of separate status claims legitimated the decision of
the census commission to include Kriashens as a separate census category.
Conversely, the Mishars, also a Tatar-speaking group, who speak a distinct
dialect and who were registered in the 1926 census as a separate category,
have not voiced any concern of being counted as Tatars. One of the commission
members argued that in the absence of such claims it is inappropriate to
introduce a new coding category into the census dictionary for it provokes the
larger group’s unity proponents to speak of conscious ‘splintering’ of the
‘nation’ into ‘artificial entities’. For coders this means that if they meet the
ethnonym “Mishar” in one of the census forms, they will give this entry the
same code as for Tatars, as opposed to a separate and unique code. Such was
the standard practice of the 1970, 1979 and 1989 censuses, where the so-called
comprehensive dictionaries were used alongside alphabetical lists of
nationalities. A comprehensive dictionary contained official designation of an
ethnic group with its unique code, and all the alternative variants and names of
subgroups were associated with the official designations and had the same
codes. Thus, the existence of a group’s demands for separate status could have
potentially conflicted with the wish of an individual to be registered and
counted during the census according to one’s own self-designation. In the 2002
census, such a practice effectively meant that the constitutional right of
persons to proclaim their own ethnic identity was violated or was limited by
the presence of collective demands to be registered separately.
However, Goskomstat officers, following IEA RAS commission
recommendations, eventually adopted unique codes to each individual ethnic
designation (official or unofficial). The Goskomstat decision was announced in
March 2002 after a heated political discussion of the so-called “Tatar issue,”
initiated by Tatarstan deputies in the Russian parliament, who feared that the
recognition of Kriashens and Siberian Tatars as distinct ethnic groups (and
separate census categories) would diminish the numbers of Tatars, and more
significantly (in the Kriashen case) could reduce the Tatar power base within
the republic of Tatarstan.35 Instead of debating the status of various Tatar-
speaking groups, the Goskomstat census administration decided to assign

35
See, for example: Egorov 2002. For detailed analysis of the Tatar issue in the census see
Sokolovski 2004.

13
separate codes for each individual term listed in the alphabetical dictionary of
nationalities.36
It is worth mentioning that the assignment of separate codes for each
individual variant of ethnic self-designations did not entail an official
recognition of the resulting census category as a separate ethnic group as it
had been the case in previous censuses. The individual codes were expected to
be further grouped under generic categories for publication purposes. The
outline of the composition of such groups (and their relevant status as the main
categories and subcategories) was the task of a special governmental
commission which was appointed in September 2003, when the first results of
the nationalities count became available. The comprehensive dictionary,
prepared by the IEA RAS census commission, was used by the members of the
publication commission as the guiding document. In terms of census politics, it
also meant that a new round of political debates on the exact status of various
groups and subgroups was expected during the planning of census results
publications when the raw data were aggregated into broader and more
inclusive categories.
It is not entirely correct, as some authors presume, that in previous
census coding "‘smaller’ identities were aggregated into larger categories”
(Tishkov 1997: 15).37 This was certainly true in many cases, but the prevalent
practice, according to which several ethnonyms were grouped into one
category, was not that some local ethnic groups were considered parts of
larger entities, but that some of the ethnonyms were considered variants of
self-designation of one and the same group. This is a problem often met in
attempts to standardize the writing of ethnonyms (as well as proper names of
other types such as toponyms, anthroponyms etc.), derived from many
languages (in the case of the Russian census, of over 170 languages), into
standard officially recognized graphemes.
One of the most frequent cases in the draft list of nationalities was what
might be called dual ethnonyms, one being a groups’s name in a local/regional
language, the other—its Russian “translation,” or, rather, transliteration of the
local term with phonetic adaptation to Russian pronunciation norms (e.g.
Avaral—Avartsy; Agular—Aguly; Adyge—Adygeitsy etc.). Sometimes the
transliteration (or translation) occurs from a regional language to another
neighboring regional language, and, as the resulting forms were also used as
ethnic self-designations, they were included into the list of ethnonyms as
well.38 In the alphabetic list of ethnonyms of the 2002 census there were more
36
The decision was announced by Liudmila Yeroshina, Goskomstat representative, during IEA
RAS Academic Council meeting devoted to the discussion of the Tatar issue in the census on
March 14, 2002 (transcript of the meeting, author’s personal archive).
37
Tishkov 1997: 15.
38
E.g. Lak, or in Russian Laktsy, are called by Avars Tumal, and by Lezgins Yaholshu; both of
the latter terms are sometimes used by Laks themselves for self-designation, hence they were
included into the census dictionary of ethnic names. In some cases, ethnonyms given by
neighboring ethnic groups were borrowed into Russian and, being adopted for official
designation, gradually became to be used as self-designations (e.g. one of the small North
Caucasus peoples, the Tsez, are also called Tsuntins by Avars and Dido (Didoytsy) by Georgians;

14
than 130 such ethnonym pairs (of a self-designation in a native language and its
translation, or transliteration, into Russian and other languages).
Another small group of alternative self-designations belong to the so-
called historical ethnonyms, which are infrequently employed as self-
designations either by people of senior age, or by members of dispersed groups
outside the traditional area of settlement. Cheremis (as a historical correlate
of Mari, a large Finno-Ugric people residing on the Volga) is one example
among many.
Local variants of self-designations form another substantial portion of the
list. There are more than a hundred such variations local tradition or
peculiarrities of pronunciation. For instance, Afghans are also known as
Pathan, Pakhtun, or Pushtun, while there are eight variations of the ethnonym
Grek (Greek)39. In some cases, differences in the local pronunciation of singular
and plural forms of ethnonyms were also included into the list (e.g. Latvietis—
Latvieshi, for Latvians). Such and similar phonetic variants were included in the
list for the sole reason of simplifying the work of the census-takers and coders,
as the census-takers were expected to write down in the census questionnaire
any response to the question on nationality (in the phonetic variant given), and
the coders were not expected to figure out what official names stood behind
such a variant, but were to simply find the requested phonetic variant in the
alphabetic list of ethnonyms and fill in its unique three-digit code.
Personal pronunciation of the same term may differ not only across local
groups, but from a person to another person as well. Only the most widely
encountered phonetic variants were put on the list; they were drawn from the
experience of previous censuses and anthropological fieldwork data. Many of
the local languages, not to speak of the dialects, remain phonetically under-
researched, and any improvement will demand significant time and effort.
Russian transliterations and local phonetic variants of self-designations formed
more than a half of the approximately 900 ethnonyms of the list.

On Subcategories
Subcategories, that is local groups that were treated by others and were
self-categorized by their members as constituents of larger entities (or
peoples), formed the bulk of the remaining two hundred ethnic terms in the
alphabetical list of nationalities. Unlike the registration of phonetic variants of
self-designations, which together with historical ethnonyms, translations and
plural forms were nothing but alternative names of the same local and regional
identities (as a host of synonyms might identify a single reality), a subcategory
usually reflected the existence of something more than just another alternative
group self-designation. Precisely in this case theoretical expectations of
primordial approach to ethnicity clashed with its constructivist treatment, and
a long Soviet tradition of ethnicity reification conflicted with the portrayal of
shifting, fluid and politically charged identities.

both terms function as self-designations, or alternative ethnonyms.

39
Grekos, Ellinos, Pontios, Romei, Romeos, Romeus, Rum, Rumei.

15
 The resultant ethnic categorization of the country’s population, used in
the coding of census questionnaires, was to a large degree a compromise of
conflicting conceptualizations of ethnic groups. Views on what constitutes a
separate ethnic group differed not only among statisticians, politicians,
scholars, and ethnic activists, they differed as well within academia. Needless
to say, the issue of subcategories in the list of nationalities for the 2002
Russian census proved to be very sensitive and politically charged. As many
groups, that constitute what officially has been designated as “peoples,” are
characterized by marked differences in language and culture, and often claim
separate identity, a provision has been made to code such groups separately,
though in most cases their population counts would most probably be added to
larger entities when the census results are published. This regulation could be
assessed as a concession to the reified classifications with nested hierarchies,
commented above.
A short commentary on methodological, political and practical
considerations, regarding the inclusion of a subcategory concept into the
census instruments might be in order. To begin with, the members of the IEA
RAS commission working on the dictionaries of nationalities and languages were
not unanimous on the issue. 40 Gradually, over more than a year of close
cooperation with senior colleagues, a consensus was reached, ruling out the
usage of such concepts as “ethnos,” “sub-ethnos,” “nation,” or “people” in
census dictionaries. The main list received the title “A List of Nationalities”
(Perechen’ natsional’nostei), and nationalities were treated within the
framework of the census as census categories. The alphabetical list of
nationalities was called “The List of Ethnic Designations” (Spisok etnicheskikh
naimenovanii).41 It included 879 designations and self-designations of ethnic
groups that were expected to be encountered by coders in census
questionnaires. The alphabetical list then served as the main tool in census
coding procedures, and was used by coders for assigning unique codes to
various self-designations for the computer count (see attachment, Graph 1).
The subcategories were singled out in those cases when there was a
history of claims to separate identity, or institutionalized acknowledgement of
these claims (as reflected in prior census results publications, ethnographic
literature, or official recognition by the state in state laws etc.). Such

40
Pavel Puchkov and Zoia Sokolova employed the category of ‘subetnos,’ whereas the author
of this paper argued for the treatment of nationalities as classification constructs, or “census
categories” (kategorii perepisnogo ucheta).
41
The official title of this list changed when a decision was made to assign individual codes to
each ethnic self-designation registered in the alphabetical list (see footnote 31 above).
Previously, designation variants of the same census category were to receive the same digital
code according to the “Comprehensive Dictionary of Nationalities” (the dictionary consisted of
three columns: 1) generic or official name of the group; 2) list of designation variants and
subgroups, belonging to this census category; 3) list of regions where the individuals included
into this category were expected to be concentrated). The List of nationalities included only
the first column of these three, thus enumerated only the official designations. The
alphabetical list of self-designations enumerated all 879 ethnic names and variants with unique
codes in alphabetical order.

16
recognition usually implied more or less pronounced differences in language
and culture or religion.42 As a rule, such groups were considered as
subcategories of larger encompassing entities.43
However, when representatives of such subgroups claimed a separate
ethnic identity and were against their inclusion into larger categories, they
were shown in the comprehensive dictionary as separate categories of census
registration. I have already mentioned the disputed case of Kriashens, who
claimed a separate identity from Volga Tatars and had sent many appeals to
the federal government, stating their desire to be enumerated separately from
Tatars in the future Russian census, as it had been the case in the 1926 census.

Census Technologies and Identity Politics

The political pressures and heated discussions around census issues were
motivated in part by the inadequate understanding of census procedures. Many
journalists covering the census preparation campaign, politicians, and even
scholars, who had a vested interest in the census categorization, had a vague
idea of how census-taking and census results coding operate in practice. The
Tatarstan media campaign against the so called “division of the Tatar nation”
is a case in point. One of the leaders of the Tatar nationalist movement (TOTs –
Tatar Public Centre) and, at the time, a deputy of the Russian State Duma,
Fandas Safiullin initiated in December 2001 a media campaign, arguing that as
the nationalities dictionary of the planned census “divided the Tatars into six
peoples.” The Tatar historian and anthropologist Damir Ishakov claimed that
the list divided them into nine peoples. Newspaper correspondents, basing on
interviews with Safiullin, Iskhakov, and Rafael Khakimov, an advisor to the
Tatarstan president M. Shaimiev, were alleging that the Tatars were
“splintered” into 19 or even 45 groups. 44 They declared that Tatars would not
be allowed during the census to call themselves just “Tatar”, and would
instead have to choose from many different ethnonyms, a procedure that
would destroy the unity of ‘the Tatar nation’.
The IEA RAS census committee members in their interviews to mass media
stressed many times that the census dictionaries were not based on any
hierarchy, reminiscent of Stalin’s famous triad (“a nation, a people, a tribe”)
or similar rank ordering of ethnonyms. They operated instead with census
categories, reflecting self-designations and their variants used in ethnic self-
identification during the census-taking. However, the conflict between
academic and ethnic (or folk) classifications was not entirely bridged. For
42
The most obvious example here is Mordva-Moksha and Mordva-Erzia, speaking two different
and mutually incomprehensible, though closely related Finno-Ugric Mordvinian languages, and,
at the same time, stressing the idea of the unity of the Mordva, irrespective of linguistic
adherence.
43
For example, a traditional division of Mari into “east-meadow” and “mountain,” speaking
their own languages, has been preserved. Overall, 24 such subgroups were identified, most of
which had not been mentioned in Soviet censuses after 1926; they formed a substantial
increment to the previous 1989 census list.
44
Gavrilenko A. “Vpishem sebia v istoriiu rodiny,” Respublika Tatarstan (Kazan), February 14,
2002.

17
instance, academic classifications of languages did not contain such
designations as ‘Mari’ or ‘Mordvinian’, as both Mari and Mordva speak different
and mutually incomprehensible idioms 45, which are viewed by linguists as
separate languages, whereas people themselves (specially those who live
outside the borders of the respective republics) tend to say in response to the
question what language they use, just ‘Mari’, or ‘Mordvinian’. Some people
were claiming that they are Bulgars46 and Chud’47, using self-designations from
ancient history accounts, which were not included into the nationalities lists. I
should also reiterate the fact that the task of the census experts on coding
ethnic composition of the country was based on a preconceived understanding
of ethnicity and on what they considered to be the key features of an ethnic
group. This had led to a series of methodological difficulties and
inconsistencies in inclusion or exclusion of certain ‘candidates’ as legitimate
census categories (groups that were historically based on a particular
confession or estate status). The most prominent case of the latter was the
case of the Cossacks.
In its response to the letter of one of the Cossack leaders 48 the IEA RAS
academic council reminded that “the regional Cossack groups (‘troops’) were
formed from different ethnic components, and the share of Russians among
them had not been not always predominant. In eastern Cossack groups there
were many Kazakhs, Kalmyks, Buriats etc. The Kuban’ Cossacks are nearer by
their origin to Ukrainians than to Russians. Before 1917 the Cossacks were
forming one ‘estate socio-professional group’, which had formed ‘some specific
cultural traits and an estate identity’. Different Cossack troops have their own
cultural traditions, but they were never considered as separate peoples or a
people. There is no ground to state that after the revolution during the Soviet
regime the Cossacks turned into an ethnic community or a group of ethnic
communities. The contemporary Cossack movement is established ‘on romantic
representations of the past’ and is inspired by ‘perspectives to state service
enrollment’.”49 In accordance with this understanding Goskomstat adopted a
special procedure for counting Cossacks not as a separate ethnic group, but as
a subgroup among Russians, Ukrainians, Kalmyks and Buriats. A special box at

45
The respective languages are officially designated by different names, such as Moksha and
Erzia, in the case of the two Mordovian languages, or Meadow and Mountain Mari, in the case of
Mari.
46
There were about 150 people in Kazan (presumably originating from an ancient group of
Volga settlers, mentioned in ancient manuscripts, who were assimilated by incoming Turkic
tribes and formed the modern Tatars) according to the 1989 census, who claimed to be
Bulgars.
47
Inhabitants of a single village in the Russian North, who, in their attempt to get the status of
an indigenous small-numbered people, started to use as a self-designation the term Chud’,
taken from old Russian manuscripts.
48
The letter by V.F. Khizhniakov, a plenipotentiary of Cossacks in the presidential
administration, to the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Osipov (№ A-25-1-306
on May 11, 2000; translated and cited from a copy in the author’s personal archive).
49
Response letter to the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Osipov from IEA
RAS (№ 14110/2143, June 13, 2000; IEA RAS archive).

18
the bottom of the census form had been reserved to mark Cossacks during
coding. The mark was meant for counting all Cossacks for the purposes of a
special governmental support program, but not as a separate ethnic group as
some of the Cossack leaders wished.
In contradiction to this procedure, the Nagaibaks, a group with a similar
Cossack ancestry and estate status (otherwise known as Tatar Cossacks), were
registered as a separate ethnic group, as Goskomstat had taken as obligatory
the list of indigenous peoples provided by a special government decree 50,
where Nagaibaks were listed as one of the ‘indigenous small-numbered groups’.
The reluctance to register identities based on confession (with notable
exclusion of Jews, Kriashens, and Yezids51) was motivated by the absence of
the question on religious affiliation in the census and the idea that religious
affiliations constitute a separate classification domain from ethnic identity.

Major Innovations in the Census of 2002 in Regard of Nationalities List

With the introduction of 16 census categories of Daghestan smallest
ethnic groups, which were considered independent census categories only in
1926, and 13 categories designating various groups in Siberia and the Far East,
the list of nationalities for the 2002 census became longer than the previous
list for the 1989 Soviet census. The previous attempts initiated under Stalin to
reduce the number of ethnic categories by joining smaller groups to larger
neighboring groups had already been reversed in the first post-Stalin census of
1959. Since that time every census had officially acknowledged, via its
dictionaries of nationalities, over 100 groups. The “ethnic revival” of the 1990s
made public and institutionalized through various NGOs and ethnic movements
many ethnic groups, previously recognized only by ethnographers and linguists.
As most of these groups preserved their separate identities, the new
dictionaries introduced them into the future census categorization. Besides the
already mentioned Andi-Dido peoples of Dagestan, many groups, previously
counted among Altai (such as Teleut, Kumanda, Telengete, Tubalar, Chelkan)
and Tatar (such as Nagaibak, Kriashen, Siberian Tatar, Karagash) were added.
The issue of Kriashen proved to be the most sensitive due to the strongest
opposition from authorities of Tatarstan. The attempt of the Kriashen leaders
to get the recognition in the census as a separate ethnic group was only
partially successive. On the one hand, Tatar nationalist leaders had put a
pressure on Mentimir Shaimiev, the president of Tatarstan, and via him on the
federal administration, to re-classify Kriashens as a sub-group of Tatars. The
pressure had been put also on census-takers in Tatarstan to register Kriashens
as 'Christened Tatars' (a term which has been considered etymologically the
same as Kriashen, but which established a firm classificatory link for Kriashens
as a subgroup of Tatars).On the other hand the grass-root support of the
50
The decree #255 of the government of the Russian Federation (March 24, 2000) “On the
Unified List of Small-Numbered Indigenous Peoples of the Russian Federation”.
51
Yezids formed a separate census category in accordance with the wish expressed by their
leaders, although formerly they were treated as a subgroup of Kurds, differing from the latter
in religious affiliation.

19
aspirations of the Kriashen leaders was in fact less than expected: out of an
estimated number of 100-120 thousand Kriashens only 25 thousand named
themselves as such during the census. Another 7,000 named themselves (or
were registered by the census-takers) as 'Christened Tatars' (kreschenye
tatary). Yet another part of the Kriashen population, residing predominantly
outside of Tatarstan, mostly in Cheliabinsk region, but also in Bashkiria,
numbering almost 10,000 named themselves Nagaibak. Nagaibaks are by origin
Kriashens who were serving under the Czars as Cossaks and were settled along
the border of the expanding Russian state. So, the total number of the group as
registered by the census of 2002 is 40-42 thousand, which is, by all estimates,
is less than half of the expected Kriashen population of the country.

The “Others” As a Residual Classification Category

The category of “others” (prochie) is probably the most interesting
category of the nationalities lists, irrespective of its residual nature. Its
contents had never been documented, commented, or published. The category
hides the strategies of “owning” and “othering,” which, being unreflected and
intrinsic to classification procedures, created peculiar optics of the
classification space. However, before I discuss the optics, I should comment on
the rationale for a reductionist strategy in the compilation of census
dictionaries.
Every anthropologist who has done fieldwork in local communities knows
from experience that there exist far more self-designations, including those
that might be viewed as “ethnic,” than census registers ever mention. In the
case of Russia, the list of such self-appellations could be extended to probably
tens of thousands, instead of the several hundreds that were included in the
alphabetic list of nationalities for the 2002 census. 52 Unfortunately, both
politicians and scholars were not ready to embrace such radical liberalization
of classifications and to part with substantial, though symbolic power that is
involved in official classificatory procedures.

52
This fact, as well as, after 1993, the constitutional right of persons to proclaim their own
ethnic identity (Art. 26.1), made me argue for an open list of nationalities. Since 1987 or 1988,
when the preparation of the previous 1989 census was in progress, I had been a proponent of
the principle of the open list, which had been perceived at the time as fairly innovative
(Sokolovski 1994; some tables from this article collection, summarizing ethnic categories used
in several Soviet censuses, are available in English, as they were reproduced in Tishkov 1997:
15-21.). In practical terms, this principle implies the registration of all the answers given to the
“nationality question”, with a subsequent coding, in which letters of the Russian alphabet
rather than whole terms receive unique two-digit codes (5 first letters of the term used for
self-designation are then used as the unique ten-digit code of the term). This simple procedure
makes the recourse to any preliminary categorization unnecessary. The results of the census
are then presented in non-aggregate form, and afterwards the various census users, each of
whom employs their own classificatory procedures, relevant for their own purposes, use them
for their own ends. Back in 1989 Goskomstat officials and the specialists from the Institute of
Ethnography, with Solomon Bruk, a well-known specialist on ethnic classifications, acting as
the Institute census commission’s head, discarded the open list principle. It was rejected for
both technical and political reasons. There was no technical possibility to use multiple-digit
codes for coding various self-designations.

20
 The reductionist tradition heavily weighed on the preparation of the 2002
census instruments. As I mentioned above, the main sources for nationalities
lists were, besides the nationalities dictionaries for several previous censuses
(mostly, 1989 and 1979), various academic publications, and, to some degree
(especially with the newly introduced categories) also unpublished fieldwork
data, drawn from interviews with anthropologists. Most of the official
publications, particularly of the encyclopedic kind, were reductionist in their
nature as well, as their authors tended to register either the most frequent or
officially known self-designations of the groups. The absence of the group’s
self-designation from previous census dictionaries or from standard academic
reference literature was a critical impediment to a group’s official
acknowledgement. Although such considerations and constraints were
substantially weakened, with the general crisis of legitimization of all former
theoretical constructions, they were not completely overcome, and resurfaced
each time when a “new” ethnic term was introduced as a possible candidate
for inclusion in the census dictionaries. Hence, the conceptual construction of
a novel ethnic term operated, unreflectively and surreptitiously, throughout
the preparation of the new census instruments. The exclusion of some self-
designations or entire categories from the list meant that the people who use
them would be counted in the category of ‘Others’ (prochie). As the most
frequent ground for such an exclusion was the immigrant or foreign origin of
the group and presumably low number of people expected to use the group’s
self-designation, the category of ‘others’ effectively delineated the rest of the
categories as ‘ours’, which was conceived as ‘the peoples of Russia’. Hence,
through sorting self-designations into ‘our’ and ‘foreign’ the IEA RAS
commission members resorted to the well-known primordialist strategy of
linking ethnicity to territory.53
53
In a letter dated November 21, 2001 (#8-0-14/834), addressed to Valery Tishkov, Director of
the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, the head of the Goskomstat Census and
Demographic Statistics Department, Irina Zbarskaia, asked the IEA RAS census commission
members to correct minor differences between the lists of nationalities in the drafts of
alphabetical and comprehensive dictionaries and “if possible, to reduce the list of nationalities
and ethnic groups.” There were a number of suggested reductions in the attachment to the
letter. Based on the results of a discussion with the commission, which took place at
Goskomstat on October 22, 2001, the Census Department suggested to withdraw from the lists
Bengali, Cherkessogai (a subcategory of Armenians, speaking the Circassian language), Romei
and Urum (subcategories of Greeks, using vernaculars of the Turkic linguistic family), Adjar and
Ingiloi (subcategories of Georgians), Sart-Kalmak (a subcategory of Kalmyk, residing mainly in
Kyrgyzstan), and Hinalug (a group, speaking their own language, which is close to Lezgin, and
residing mainly in Azerbaijan). Separate categories of Laz, Megrel, and Svan were suggested to
be treated as subcategories of Georgians. Using that letter as a justification for reductions,
Valery Tishkov suggested a shortening of the nationalities list, which at the time looked
drastic. From more than 190 main categories (with additional 26 subcategories) of the drafts,
Tishkov took out 33 categories, mainly of “foreign origin,” so that after Goskomstat and his
own reductions, only 158 main categories were left on the list. Shortly afterwards, on
December 6, 2001 the list had been reduced to 152 main categories (Bartangi, Vakhi, Batsbii,
Rusyn, Yagnobi, and Yazgulami were taken out from the lists by Tishkov). At a much later
stage, the Goskomstat Census Department changed its decision to reduce the lists, as such a
reduction meant the increase of the census category of “others,” and most of the “foreigners”

21
 Other hidden factors, influencing the results of the sorting procedure of a
multitude of ethnic terms, come to the forefront, if one analyzes both the
degree or ‘depth’ classificatory gaze and the hidden stock of ethnic terms
relegated to the residual category of “others.” Here the metaphor of optics, or
classificatory lens, that has been mentioned above, helps to reveal the
peculiarities of the ethnic self-designations selection. As in photography, where
the brighter the light, and the smaller the lens aperture, the more enhanced
the visual field and richness of detail, the classificatory gaze of the IEA RAS
census commission members was intentionally myopic. It produced greater
detail while looking at the notorious “peoples of Russia,” but was less
scrupulous in distinguishing the subcategories of the peoples of the ‘near
abroad’ (former Soviet republics), and became progressively sketchy with
ethnic terms and ethnic group composition from the ‘far abroad’. This might
look natural, as the analogous census instruments in every country, which
registers its ethnic composition, are more detailed in respect to ‘native
groups’, than to recent immigrants, or the temporary population from other
countries of origin, especially remote ones. This classificatory myopia is based
on colonial imagination and on unconscious strategies of ‘othering’, that
deserve our attention.
The first draft of the list of nationalities, compiled by October 2001,
mentioned more than 200 categories, and the next version of March 2002
contained only 174 categories; and instead of 113 languages—143. At the same
time, over 30 ethnic categories and 12 languages, which were mentioned in the
1989 census, were removed from the 2002 census lists. Many of them had been
reintroduced into the lists at later stages. The exact criteria for
inclusion/exclusion varied depending on the case under consideration and do
not easily lend themselves for summarizing. The largest group of excluded
categories was the group, which in the 1989 census was designated as
“nationalities, residing predominantly outside of the borders of the USSR.”
That group in the 1989 census consisted of 35 categories, many of which were
either regional groupings, such as “peoples of India and Pakistan,” or country-
of-origin designations such as Americans, English, French, Spanish and so
forth.54 All these categories were excluded on the suggestion of Valery Tishkov
in November 2001. In supporting his position, he put forward three arguments.
First, many of the categories from this group are essentially country-of-origin
designations and do not refer to ethnic composition (such as Americans,
French, Italians, Spaniards, and Cubans).55 Second, many people from these
were reintroduced into the list. As a result, the number of the main categories reached again
192 (with alternative designations the alphabetical list contained 879 ethnonyms; the linguistic
dictionary listed 170 languages and three times as much alternative designations of languages).
54
The designation of “English” had also been used for the Welsh, Scots, Irish, and other
peoples or ethnic groups from Great Britain.
55
It was pointed out that these designations refer most of the time to citizenship, and not to
ethnicity, as every country of origin of these population categories is characterized by a
complex ethnic composition. For instance, Galicians, Catalonians, Basques, and Gypsies live in
Spain; Corsicans, Bretons, Walloons, and Alsatians in France; Sardinians, Friulians, Ladinos,
Germans, and Slovenes, in Italy, and so forth.

22
categories have left the country since 1989 (Albanians, Cubans, Croats, Serbs,
Czechs and Slovaks among them). Third, some of these categories apply to so
few people that they could be relegated without much concern to the residual
category of "others" (such as Austrians, Albanians, and several others). The
reduction of the draft list of nationalities coincided with the first hearings of
the Census Law in the State Duma, during which some of the deputies voiced
their concern over “splitting-up the country’s population into too many groups”
and over attempts to “divide” nations into “artificial entities.” 56
Not all of the ‘foreigners’ were excluded from the list. The groups that
had expectedly large population counts remained. Bulgarians, Finns, Greeks,
Pushtuns (who replaced, together with Uzbeks and Tajiks, the former
composite category of Afghans), Chinese and Vietnamese were among them.
The latter two composite categories remained on the list, even though they
were essentially country-of-origin designations, comprised not only of the
dominant Han and Viet peoples, but also of many other ethnic groups,
originating from China and Vietnam. The justification for preserving these
designations was that in Russia they usually name themselves as Chinese and
Vietnamese, or, rather, give as self-designations their Russian-language names
kitaitsy, and vietnamtsy. Hungarians, Koreans, Kurds, Mongols, Poles,
Romanians, Turks, and Uighurs were not excluded from the list on the grounds
of their expected considerable population counts.57
The startegy of ethnic territorialization, thus, had been covertly operative
throughout the procedures of the compilation of the lists of ethnonyms,
remaining an unintentional principle of categorization. A good example of
“progressive myopia” in detailing the ethnic composition of the so-called
‘native and ‘less native’ categories might be the approach to the cases of the
ethnic composition of Altai, Kazakh and Turkmen. If all of the groups
comprising the category of Altai were given separate codes (and many of the
so-called ‘tribes’ were further decomposed into clans with clan self-
designations registered in the alphabetical dictionary), only those tribal groups
which live along the border of Russia with Kazakhstan were registered for
Kazakhs, and none of the tribal groups of Turkmen were included into the lists,
as Turkmenistan has no borders with Russia. The rationalization for the
principle of sorting and inclusion/exclusion was the expectation that people in
their homelands, or residing close to them would be more prone to give their
local self-designations (including tribal and clan), than those whose places of
origin are not located within the territory of Russia or on its borders. Thus, a
Turkmen was expected to give as the answer to the nationality question
"Turkmen" (or, in Stavropol region, where a compact group of Turkmen had
resided since the XVIIth century—"Truhmen"), but not Tekin, Goklen, Iomud,

56
Concern voiced by the Speaker of the State Duma Gennadii Seleznyov and the Tatarstan
deputy, and former leader of the Tatar Public Centre, Fandas Safiullin.
57
At a later stage, after the drafts were compiled and handed to the Goskomstat Census
Department, the Department deputy director, Liudmila Yeroshina, concerned that the residual
category of “others” would be too large, decided to reintroduce most of the “foreigners” into
the lists.

23
Salor, or any other tribal designation. The commission members, remembering
that the list should not be “overlong,” tried to work out a consensus over the
inclusion/exclusion of every such clan designation.58
If we attempt to trace the underlying tropes of imperial imagination,
mapping ethnic identities over contemporary political boundaries and sorting
them into ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’, and relegating the most ‘foreign’ to the
category of ‘others’, or if we try to visualize the boundaries of ‘homelands’,
which were mentally reconstructed each time such a sorting occurred, we shall
uncover the ethnic map of Petrine Russia and its imperial successors. It is
astounding to realize how the Russian academic imagination, even among its
constructivist practitioners, resurrects and is still based on these practices of
imperial territorialization.
To sum up the metaphor of the myopic classificatory gaze, I should once
more underline its optics, which holds in sharp focus ‘our own’ homelands and
peoples, and becomes progressively blurred when it turns to ‘aliens’. This is a
gaze suited to settled communities as well, as it incarcerates nomads and semi-
nomads within their circumscribed ‘homelands’ and attempts to territorialize
every community residing within the political boundaries of the state. From
this perspective, the census remains an efficient tool for re-inscribing and re-
instating the state. It is also an efficient instrument for dealing with otherness,
employed for sorting various others into more and less ‘domestic’, by
domesticating the first and rejecting the latter. On the other hand, the Russian
population census of 2002 turned out to be the most liberal and democratic in
terms of both its procedures, publicly discussed and negotiated with a wide
range of stakeholders (leaders of various ethnic groups, republican elites,
media, academics etc.), as well as in terms of the access to its results.59

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As a rule, when such a discussion arose, those members of the commission who were sharing
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59
All the census results are not only published in 14 volume series and CDs, but are also
available at the official Federal Statistical Bureau website http://www.perepis2002.ru

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26
ATTACHMENT

Graph 1. Flow-chart of the census technology

census ethnic and linguistic

dictionaries elaboration assignment of
codes to dictionary
2000-2001
entries

elaboration of census completing the encoding answers

questionnaires 1 questionnaires during 2 in completed
2000-2001 census interviews questionnaires
Oct. 9-16, 2002 Nov.-Dec.,

experts census-takers coders

scanning codes in encoded computer count of the final check

questionnaires 3 census results 4 and census results
publication