The Sealed Census
1937 · Sealed Archive Cabinet · Work 703 of 1,871
The storage room of a state archive in Moscow in 1937, a tall grey-green sheet-steel cabinet about two metres high with one door standing half open, inside it shelves packed to the top with bundles of grey-brown cardboard folders tied with cloth tapes and hemp cord, the folders plain and unmarked and seen from their spines and edges, a length of hemp cord drawn across the two door handles and joined by a lump of dark red sealing wax with a smooth blank surface, a single bare light bulb hanging on a cloth-covered flex above the cabinet, bare concrete floor, bare plastered walls painted grey fading into darkness, a wooden stepladder at the side, a deserted silent room.
- What it was used for
- The Soviet census of 6 January 1937 was meant to count how many people lived in the Soviet Union. It had been in preparation since 1932. A special commission under Vyacheslav Molotov, set up in September 1935, struck many sensitive questions from the schedule. The preliminary result was 162 million inhabitants, and many settlements had fewer people than at the previous count. The records were then officially declared defective, kept secret and destroyed. Statisticians were arrested or shot. Ivan Kraval, head of the statistical administration, was shot on 26 September 1937 and rehabilitated only in 1956. Mark Tolts writes that during the Great Terror of 1937 to 1939 three successive heads of the Central Statistical Administration were executed.
- What was new
- There is no technical novelty here. What was new was the procedure for handling an unwanted result: not correction, but secrecy, destruction and execution. That the figure itself was the point can be read from the repeat. The new census of 17 January 1939 gave a preliminary 167.3 million, reported by Ivan Sautin. On 10 March 1939, at the 18th Party Congress, Stalin named about 170 million before the results were in, and the official final figure then came to 170,557,093. Tolts names as means a direct one-per-cent inflation and manipulated control forms. To conceal the concentration of prisoners in the north and east of Russia, the census forms of 759,550 prisoners were also added to other parts of the country. The complete data appeared only in 1992.
What the sources leave open: The work's title is not unambiguous, and the work's own page could not be retrieved in this run. I have taken it to mean the Soviet census of 1937, whose records were kept secret and destroyed. The sources give no final figure for 1937, only the preliminary 162 million. For the actual 1939 count they give 167.3 and 167.6 million.