People might be interested in this, as I was discussing earlier racial attitudes in Russia.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------ Moscow News April 24-30, 2002 Moscow, a City of Ethnic Diversity By Yevgenia Obukhova, Vremya MN
Only the upcoming census will show what ethnic groups live in the Russian capital, and how large they are
Don't Trust Statistics
During the 13 years since the latest census, Moscow city authorities have not bothered to get even a rough picture of the capital's ethnic mix or an estimate of the size of each ethnic group living here. Here is just one example: A 1994 micro-census taken in the capital showed that Russians accounted for 90.5 percent of the population. Yet some experts believe that,
compared to 1989, the proportion of Russians has declined while others are convinced that the opposite is true.
"Various figures are being cited: Say, there are two million ethnic Azeris or one million Armenians or 40,000 Chechens in Moscow," says Djana Logasheva, Cand. Sc. (Hist.), deputy chief of the Moscow House of Ethnic Culture Information and Analysis Department. "But where do these figures come from? Who made the calculation?"
According to Valentin Nikitin, chairman of the State Duma Nationalities Committee, since 1989 random sampling of the capital's ethnic groups has been conducted on a regular basis. What, then, is the origin of myths about the share of a particular ethnic group in the city's population?
"The trouble is that there is now a vast number of quasi-research firms in the sphere of ethnic sociology that specialize in conducting polls on commission," explains Vasily Filippov, section chief at the Russian Academy of Sciences Center for Cultural and Regional Studies. "Information coming from such firms cannot be trusted: It is virtually impossible to conduct a representative ethno-sociological survey in Moscow. There is no credible information about the ethnic or demographic mix of Moscow's population. Anyone claiming to have such information is either misled or deliberately tries to mislead the public."
The core problem is illegal migration. According to the Interior Ministry, there are between 1.5 million and three million illegal aliens in Moscow. This wide disparity of estimate shows that neither the authorities nor law enforcement agencies or ethnographers have any reliable information. A way out is a target-specific research project.
"Expert appraisal procedure is an American invention," Vasily Filippov says.
"It is based on informed intuitive judgment by experts. The algorithm is simple. First, information is gathered and collated from various state and government agencies such as the police, internal visa and registration departments, the migration committee, and so forth. These departmental statistics are shown to experts who assess the data credibility and offer substantiated estimates of the size of particular ethnic groups. Then the experts study each other's estimates, upon which mean estimates are obtained. This is far cheaper and more effective than polling people in the street."
Will Census Help?
But there is no need for this kind of study now, it seems. With the census not far off, we will soon learn what ethnic groups live in the capital, what
proportion of the total population they constitute, and so forth. Or will we?
"It is not known how many ethnic groups are represented in the capital," Djana Logasheva says. "The list of ethnic groups that Muscovites are to choose from in defining their ethnic identity in the course of the census has yet to be finalized; not even the concept of ethnicity per se has been defined. Take, for instance, Bulgars. Are they a separate ethnic group or are they Tatars?"
Last March, the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology did submit to the Duma Nationalities Committee a list of 171 ethnic groups. Now, prior to approval, it is to be reduced to 158-160. Minor ethnic communities will also
be covered by the census, but then they will be incorporated into larger ethnic groups.
Arguably the biggest snag that will come up in the course of the census is the problem of ethnic identity. If someone wants to be recorded as an ethnic
Korean, Korean it will be. No one can predict how children of mixed parentage will identify themselves or how the question about the native tongue will be
answered by, say, Moscow's ethnic Armenians or Daghestanis, who speak only Russian but are sure that their native tongue is the language of their people. If the correlation of various ethnic groups has drastically changed,
compared to 1989, the cause could be not so much migration as the freedom to
choose one's ethnic identity. After all, whereas in the past it paid to be a
Russian, now people are no longer sure about that.
The bottom line is that we don't know anything about the people we live side
by side with, and neither do the city authorities. Nothing is known about the settlement patterns of various ethnic groups in Moscow (old settlement boundaries are now blurred) or about the ethnic breakdown of various social and professional groups. So all myths about the so-called ethnic crime are just that - myths.