Polish Census of 1931 - Nationality Question and Criticism

Nationality Question and Criticism

Veracity of the census' results has been questioned already in the 1930s, particularly in the part related to national minorities. Contrary to expectations on the side of national minorities themselves, the census used the concept of mother tongue and religion to classify the respondents, rather than nationality. The 1921 census had included a nationality question which was replaced in the 1931 census by the "mother tongue" question; this change was protested by Ukrainians and Jews, many of whom were bilingual or trilingual. Moreover, many Jews considered Polish to be their mother tongue.

This situation created a difficulty in establishing the true number of non-Polish citizens of Poland. Some authors used the language criterion to establish the actual number of minorities, which left Belarusians seriously under-represented, as over 707,000 people declared they speak "local" rather than any other language. Other authors used approximation based on both language and declared religion. After World War II in Soviet bloc countries the interpretation of the census was used for political purposes, to underline the officially-supported thesis that pre-war Poland owned areas where non-Polish population made up the majority of inhabitants. For this purpose some authors combined all non-Polish speakers in South-Eastern Poland (namely Ukrainians, Belarusians, Rusyns, Hutsuls, Lemkos, Boykos and Poleszuks) into one category of "Ruthenians".

Some authors explain that the change in questions asked by the census officials was due to Polish government's wish to minimise the presence of minorities and represented an attempt to maximize the effects of a decade of educational policies stressing the Polish language. Tadeusz Piotrowski called the 1931 census official but "unreliable", noting that it had underestimated the number of non-Poles, and that in particular, Poles were not a majority in the Nowogródek Voivodeship and Polesie Voivodeship.

After World War II the pre-war chairman of the Polish census statistical office, Edward Szturm de Sztrem, stated that the returns had indeed been tampered with at the executive level, particularly in the east and south-east, although the extent of any possible tampering remains unknown.