The census revealed the social class, native language, religion, and profession of citizens, which were aggregated to yield district and provincial totals.

Running population registrations – including births, marriages, and deaths – were carried out by religious organisations until 1918.

By 1897, significant experience had been accumulated in local, mainly urban, population censuses that had been conducted since the later half of the nineteenth century.

On 26 February 1877, the draft of "Regulations on the General National Census", which was developed by a commission under the Ministry of Finance, was submitted to the State Council; however, it was not discussed there, possibly due to the Russo-Turkish War that occurred from 1877 to 1878.

In the early 80s of the nineteenth century, the Ministry of Internal Affairs began to receive statements from some zemstvo assemblies and governors about the need to conduct a population census as soon as possible; this was due to the unbalanced distribution of taxes among peasant families and an increase in arrears in collections from the population.

The census project was suggested during 1877 by Pyotr Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, a famous Russian geographer and director of the Central Statistical Bureau, and was approved by Czar Nicholas II in 1895.

For the first stage (December 1896 — January 1897) the counters (135,000 persons: teachers, priests, and literate soldiers) visited all households and filled in the questionnaires, which were verified by local census managers.

The questionnaire contained the following questions: In the census summary tables, nationality was based on the declared primary language of respondents.

[citation needed] The total population of the Russian Empire was recorded to be 125,640,021 people, 62,477,348 or 49.73% of whom were men and 63,162,673 or 50.27% were women—the median age was 21.16 years.

[10] The census did not contain a question on ethnicity, which was deduced from data on mother tongue, social estate and occupation.