Soviet Census (1937) - Census

Census

The census was held on January 6, 1937; in addition to the general census in the cities, towns and villages, a special census was held by the NKVD in the Gulag camps and among the border guards; by the Red Army, which took a census of military personnel; and the railroad, which took a census of passengers. When the data was first processed, it soon became obvious that the final enumeration would be no more than 162 million people. 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 Soviet famine of 1932-1934. Also, despite the expected number of living prisoners of the Gulag to be 4 million, only 2.6 million were accounted for.

On January 11 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. Still, despite the total recount in 25,000 settlements, only 4,887 previously unenumerated persons were found. The preliminary result of the census, reported to the Stalin in middle of March 1937, was 162,039,470 people, much lower than the "criminally decreased" registered numbers of 170-172 million or Stalin's expectation of 180 million people.

Another serious blow was a very high percentage of people who stated that they were religious. 55.3 million or 56.7% of those who provided answers stated they were religious (the question was asked only of people older than 16 years old), 42.2 million stated they were atheists and around 1 million refused to give an answer. Historian V. B. Zhiromskaya stated that people expected to be persecuted if they declared themselves as belonging to a religion but considered the answer to be important: If many people would say they are religious, the authorities would have to open the churches, was a common attitude. The Soviet authorities were so upset by the results of the census that they did not include a question on religion in any future censuses.