It always fascinated me to browse through archives of all kinds. First of all, there is a feeling that you hold a piece of history in your hands. Second of all, there is a chance to stumble upon something interesting and forgotten by public. Exactly same thing happened to me when I was searching “Foreign Affairs” magazine archives. I was not looking for any specific but rather general information: White Russia. Among many results, one caught my eye. It was an article titled “The recent Russian census” and it was dated back in January 1928.
What was so interesting about? Numbers? Yes and No. Of course, numbers are useful facts but there was one more thing about the article. It was the way the communists conducted the second census in the history of Russia.
The census was carried out in the last half of December 1926, except some remote areas such as Siberia. The census was conducted on a large scale with 150,000 enumerators employed for this purpose. The total cost was place at about 14,000,000 rubles or 7,000,000 dollars (figures as of 1928).
The questionnaire comprised 15 questions: name, sex, age, race, language, birthplace, marital status, literacy, physical conditions, soundness of mind, unemployment, occupation, source of income etc. Noteworthy is absence of religion from the questionnaire.
The biggest concern was around question number four: race. Finally it was decided that this issue should be addressed from ethnographic rather that politico-cultural standpoint. Inquiry was to be made as to “Narodnast” (people)—which is defined as “a group of persons unified and differentiated from other such groups by certain common biological characteristics and by a common language,” whereas Nationality (Nationalnost) is considered as “narodnost plus culture plus state organization”.
Interestingly, on the Ukrainian cards, the “Nationality” was placed before “Narodnast” and in the Transcaucasus three words: “Tribe, Narodnast, and Nationality” appear on the census sheets.
Interesting approach, isn’t it? But what is really fascinating is that in Ukraine, White Russia and western provinces of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic there were special instructions. They stated that if a person claimed to be Russian, he was to be further asked to which of the three peoples (Narodnast): — Great Russian, Ukrainian or White Russian – he considered himself to belong. As a result of this census, there were about 4,4 million White Russians in the Soviet Union in 1928.
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