The census started in Crimea on October 14 and will last until October 25. Russia has allocated about 380 million rubles “to take account of the population newly acquired” as a result of the annexation of what the Kremlin calls the “Crimean Federal District” and Sevastopol, which it calls “a federal city.” More than 8,000 enumerators are conducting the census. It is taking place under conditions of annexation and accompanied by the slogan “Everyone matters for Russia.” An active advertising campaign on TV, in the press, and on street billboards preceded the census.
According to the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, the ongoing collection of information is an informal event, but the results are needed for promoting “development of the peninsula.” Rosstat (Russia’s statistics agency) argues that the census is conducted to facilitate the further development of social and economic programs for the region. However, many question truthfulness of Russia’s official statements on Crimea. The Russian authorities have enough data already to produce all kinds of plans, especially since the Kremlin says it has developed and approved the Federal Target Program for the Development of Crimea until 2020. The Crimean Tatar community, which is now exposed to increased pressure from the government, believes, despite official statements of the Russian authorities, that the new deportation is not on the cards, that the Kremlin is once again preparing to resettle the Crimean Tatars, because the Soviet government also conducted a census before the deportation of 1944.
At a press conference held in Simferopol on September 14, Rosstat’s head Aleksandr Surinov said that the census would be indeed brought forward. It was originally supposed to be held in October 2015. “It was then decided that the information is needed even sooner,” he said. Let us recall the last census to date was held in Crimea in 2001 as part of the all-Ukrainian census. The autonomous republic’s population at the time was 2,033,000. Of these, 58.5 percent were of Russian ethnicity, 24.4 percent were ethnic Ukrainians, and 12.1 percent were Crimean Tatars.
It is known that the census is conducted as a face-to-face interview without the need to produce an ID. Only citizens of Russia are eligible for it. Crimeans are being asked 33 questions from the list, including the place of residence, education level, marital status, ethnicity, income, living conditions. For those refusing to participate in the census, their forms will be filled out without their participation with data on sex and age from the passport service’s files.
Photo replica by Mykola SEMENA
The leader of the Crimean Tatar people, Ukrainian MP Mustafa Dzhemilev stated he was convinced that the census was part of a plan for the deportation of Crimean Tatars from the peninsula. Another part of the plan allegedly involves drafting Crimean Tatar young men into the ranks of the Russian military.
Establishing the ethnic composition of the population of Crimea is considered to be an important objective of the census, however, if someone declares unwillingness to state their nationality, the enumerator is not obliged to insist on an answer. Surinov said, for example, that a significant number of people did not want to indicate their ethnicity in Russia at the time of the censuses of 2002 and 2010.
“This fact may indicate an underlying desire of the census’s organizers to falsify data on the ethnic composition of the population of Crimea,” a political analyst who asked not to be named told The Day. “The peculiarity of this census is that the Crimean Tatars and the Ukrainians who have stayed on the peninsula are interested in a precise identification of their numbers. Following the census, these groups should demand, citing its data, an adequate number of places in schools with their languages serving as mediums of instruction, and an adequate use of these languages, which have been, by the way, declared to be the state languages of Crimea, but are now subject to persecution. Suffice it to say that all Ukrainian-language books were recently destroyed in a Simferopol school in full view of its students. However, if the ethnicity is optional on the census form, then profiles of those people who said that they are Crimean Tatars or Ukrainians can be redacted without their participation to state that they have refused to specify the ethnicity, and thus the actual numbers of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars can be falsified. Meanwhile, the government will know the exact numbers in any case, but they may officially announce the falsified data following the census...”
Surinov told the press that Russian experts would act as observers and advisors, as well as, perhaps, take part in the face-to-face interviews jointly with the Crimean enumerators, as he said, “to check on them.” The Crimeans believe it to be suspicious as well. Who can know exactly who came together with the enumerators and called themselves a supervisor, and whether they serve also with the FSB, draft board or some other security service?
The organizers promise that the first results of the census will appear by the end of this year, and the final ones will be announced by May 2015.
