SUMMARY:

Sergei Sokolovskiy, the guest editor of this discussion, speaks as an expert on population diversity who participated on the team of researchers preparing “instruments,” including lists of nationalities and languages, for the censuses of 2002 and 2010. Commenting on the issues raised by other participants in this discussion, he explains the rationales behind the choices made by his team of experts and examines the consequences of different decisions made by the Russian state. The initial intention to postpone the census from 2010 to 2013 and then the reversal of this decision led to the interruption of financing for preparing the census. This, in turn, prevented a major revision of the questionnaire in a way that would allow respondents to express and register multiple identities. The article examines in detail another aspect of the unimplemented revision that concerns the linguistic program of the census. Sokolovskiy provides insider-information on, and professional analysis of, the exclusion from the questionnaire of questions pertaining to confessional identity. The bulk of the article deals with the ethnic classifications composed by the expert team of the Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Sokolovskiy explains the mechanisms for selecting ethnic denominations and for calculating the results of the census, and claims that breaking up large national groups into smaller units has a different rationale than the political implications usually derived from it by national activists. In showing how the population policy embedded in the 2002 and 2010 censuses differed from the earlier patterns of nominating groups of nationalities, he refers to the history of Soviet censuses and highlights instances that have led to the mobilization of ethnicities and national conflicts. Finally, Sokolovskiy turns to the latest tendency to dismiss the census as a major instrument for studying population and considers arguments pro and contra.