1937 Soviet census

[3] On 1 December 1935, Joseph Stalin made a speech, on the Meeting of Kolkhozniks with the Soviet and Party leaders:[4] Everybody says that the material situation of workers has dramatically improved, that life has become better and more fun.

Official statistics based on the registered birth and death rates implied that the 1937 census should show a population of 170–172 million.

[2][1] On 21 September 1935, Sovnarkom adopted a decision On the organization of registration of natural population changes (О постановке учёта естественного движения населения) most probably authored by Stalin:[2] The organs of registration were often used by the class enemies who had sneaked in there (priests, kulaks, Whites) and made their own counterrevolutionary saboteurs work to deliberately hide population growth by registering the same deaths multiple times.Historian A. G. Volkov,[2] claims that the idea that a significant number of individual deaths were double-counted is absurd, but Soviet historians claimed otherwise.

It included: Later the commission was joined by All the documents related to the census were prepared by TsUNKhU and edited personally by Joseph Stalin.

A. G. Volkov speculates that never in modern history was such a routine technical matter as a census so micromanaged by such high officials.

[2] A comparison between the two variants is shown in the table below: a) mention "temporarily absent" b) state the reason (vacations, business trip, visiting, etc.)

Stalin removed the double accounting (of those present at the time of the census and of those permanently living at an address), thus significantly reducing the accuracy of the calculations.

It was coupled with a very maladroit time for the census: the night from 5 to 6 January – that is, the eve of Russian Orthodox Christmas, when people are extremely mobile.

The worst disagreement between the expected and the obtained data were in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, North Caucasus and the Volga region, the areas that were the strongest hit by the Holodomor famine.

[1] On 11 January, the chief of TsUNKhU Kraval sent telegrams requesting a total recount of a whole settlement if any doubt arose that somebody might be missing there.

There is evidence that many managers appointed to lead the statistical organization tried to avoid starting their new jobs in desperate attempts to escape persecution.

A Pravda editorial stated that the "enemies of the people gave the census counters invalid instructions that led to the gross under-counting of the population, but the brave NKVD under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov destroyed the snake's nest in the statistical bodies".

In his report to the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) he said:[7] Some workers of the old Gosplan thought that during the second five-year plan (1933–1938) the annual growth of the population was three to four million people.

It was a fantasy or worse.The new Soviet Census (1939) showed a population figure of 170.6 million people, manipulated so as to match exactly the numbers stated by Stalin in his report to the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party.

The data became influential for evaluating the number of victims of the Great Purge, World War I, and the 1930s famines, including the Holodomor.