published in Eastern Economist #416, January 21, 2002
Without a whole lot of fanfare, Ukraine’s leaders decided to mark the 10th anniversary of the last time Ukrainians stood up to be counted – the independence referendum Dec. 1, 1991 – by asking them to stand up and be counted properly. So, Dec. 5-14, the country underwent its first official census.
Reaction was mixed among Ukrainians. Most people didn’t seem to mind the 70¢ per person pricetag the process carried with it – Hr 200mn or US $38mn, according to Oleksandr Osaulenko, who runs DerzhKomStat, the state statistics committee.
Without doubt it’s a big chunk of change to spend on something that could be considered non-essential. Hospitals don’t have equipment and medicine. Schools lack textbooks. Teachers and nurses aren’t being paid regularly in many places. And so on.
But that wasn’t what bothered people, it seems.
Just as the census was about to go into full swing, a phone interview published in an obscure Moscow paper, Trud [see RC#29] made a lot of Ukrainians sit up and take notice. In it, their president went on the record saying he thought Russian should have official status in Ukraine.
On Dec. 4, Chernivtsi Governor Teofil Bauer reported that Romanian activists were putting pressure on ethnic Moldovans in Bukovyna to declare themselves Romanian citizens. The Odesa-Ismail Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church began pushing not to renew or expand the Ukrainian language.
Whatever side of the fence they fell on, Ukrainian citizens were not pleased that the census was being politicized.
Even in the West, census information, like any other data, can be used for political purposes. The worst example is the jerrymandering of electoral districts according to the racial and other profiles of various neighborhoods that census data provides. And there is no doubt that some canvassing and propaganda go on when social services dollars are at stake. (Is someone with less than 50% Mexican ancestry “Hispanic” or “white”?)
In this neck of the woods, the history of censuses is even blacker. Back in the Middle Ages, when Russia first began counting the men on its territory – women and children didn’t figure –, protests by peasants who did not want to appear on the “Devil’s lists” even resulted in fatalities.
Right after the 1932-3 Holodomor (Manmade Famine), Josef Stalin held a census. When the results came in, he promptly confiscated them and executed all those who were involved. The evidence of his bloodthirsty policies clearly did not please the Great Leader.
You might think, then that Mr. Osaulenko would have had a hard time finding anyone willing to be a canvasser in Ukraine. But that was not a problem. Some 250,000 people were needed to complete the task, and across Ukraine an army made up mostly of women began going door-to-door Dec. 5.
Since one thing that worried a lot of people was safety, this was to the good.
Once things got underway, the media began airing stories about Russian-speaking canvassers harrassing people who insisted on registering as native-speaking Ukrainians, even in Kyiv. (I didn't find any reports of the reverse happening anywhere in Ukraine.)
This was connected, in a number of instances, with canvassers noting information down, not on the forms as they were supposed to, but on scraps of paper or in notebooks.
Den’ columnist Klara Gudzyk wrote: “Since both sides are extremely aggravated by the formulation of the language questions, this seems to me to indicate that the questions are on the money.”
Uriadoviy Kuryer’s Anastasia Matiushina agreed: “The language questions are neither ambiguous nor leading.”
Judge for yourself: The census survey on language consists of three very straightforward questions:
(a) Your mother tongue is ___________.
(b) If your mother tongue is not Ukrainian, please indicate if you are fluent in Ukrainian. ___________
(c) Other language that you speak fluently ___________.
That’s it. So, how can one and the same set of results to the same set of questions possibly lead “to the establishment of a second official language,” and “to the continuing discrimination against the great Russian tongue?” Only if someone changes the formulation of these questions.
Mykyta Kasianenko, the Simferopol correspondent for Den’, confirmed that this was happening: “Many canvassers phrased questions in a leading fashion, such as ‘What language did you learn in school?’ What could people living in Crimea possibly have learned in school when, even today, 95% of all Crimean schools are Russian?”
All this fuss got me thinking. So I talked to 10 people I know. They come from Kyiv, L’viv, Odesa and Kirovohrad.
Not one of them had anything bad to say about the canvassers or about the questions. Most had said the interviews were brief and professional. Only one family had refused to respond at all. “Those questions are unconstitutional,” the son told me.
“Which ones?”
“About work and incomes.” Like many Ukrainians who work in the shadow economy, they didn’t want to go on the record about money.
“You didn’t have to answer them.”
“That’s true,” he said. “Actually, I think our dog scared them off, but they probably got the information from our neighbors anyway.”
One journalist put the whole exercise in a different perspective. “The whole purpose of any census is to allow individuals to declare who they are,” wrote Matiushina, “the way they see themselves.”
A Kyivite I spoke to did just that. “The canvasser wouldn’t let me put more than one language as the second language, so I put English and German for my husband and my children, not Russian.” Native Russian-speakers didn’t have that constraint: they could put Ukrainian in (b) and another language in (c).
The average Ukrainian has long moved on to other things. Says one young woman from Kirovohrad, “I don’t think the census results are going to reveal much, but I’m pretty certain they will largely be accurate.” That already says a lot. •
–from the notebooks of Pan O.
No comments:
Post a Comment