The most remarkable feature of the Soviet Union's demography is its ethnic diversity. More than 90 ethnic groups are indigenous to the territory of the Soviet Union. Ethnic Russians composed only 50.8 percent of the population according to preliminary 1989 census results. The article examines official Soviet statistics for the period 1959 to 1989 to illustrate some of the risks in describing Soviet demographic behavior. Is fertility in the Soviet Union high or low? Answer: both. Is the Soviet population growing rapidly or slowly? Answer: both. The changing ethnic composition of the population of the USSR as a whole reflects large differences in growth rates of ethnic groups; the changing composition of the USSR by region also reflects differences in migration by ethnic group. Differences in growth rates are reshaping the ethnic composition of the Soviet labor force. For the USSR as a whole between 1979 and 1989, three-fourths of the net increment to the working ages was contributed by the one-sixth of the population in 1979 that was traditionally Muslim in religion.
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References
1.
Accordingly, unless noted otherwise, all data in this article from the 1959 and 1970 Soviet censuses refer to the present population, and all data from the 1979 and 1989 censuses refer to the permanent population.
2.
Life expectancy at birth is probably overestimated, due to underreporting of deaths, overstatement of age at death, and overstatement of age in Soviet censuses. Idem, “The Changing Shape of Soviet Mortality, 1958-85: An Evaluation of Old and New Evidence,”Population Studies, 43:243-265 (July 1989).
3.
3. For further discussion of the changing ethnic composition of the Soviet population, see Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, “Demographic Sources of the Changing Ethnic Composition of the Soviet Union,”Population and Development Review, Dec. 1989, vol. 15.
4.
4. These data have appeared in a variety of sources and are based either on Soviet censuses - of 1959, 1970, 1979, and 1989 - or on vital registration statistics. The data on ethnic groups for 1989 come from preliminary unpublished official data from the 1989 Soviet census.
5.
5. We use this year because it is the latest year for which we have data on all of the indicators for which the following comparison is to be made.
6.
6. This is a conventional grouping of the Soviet republics, except for our placing of Azerbaijan with the other Muslim republics rather than with the two other Transcaucasian republics of Armenia and Georgia.
7.
7. For a discussion of the terminology used in Soviet statistics on ethnic groups, see Brian D. Silver, “The Ethnic and Language Dimensions in Russian and Soviet Censuses,” in Research Guide to the Russian and Soviet Census, ed. Ralph S. Clem (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 70-97.
8.
Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, “Estimating Russification of Ethnic Identity among Non-Russians in the USSR,”Demography, 20:461-489 (Nov. 1983).
9.
9. For further discussion, see Anderson and Silver, “Demographic Sources.”
10.
10. The Muslim population of the USSR, for example, consists of - in addition to the titular nationalities of the six Muslim SSRs - the Volga Tatars, with 6.6 million people in 1989; the Peoples of Dagestan, with 2.1 million; the Chechens, with 1.0 million; and 21 more Muslim nationalities.
11.
11. Estimation of the amount of ethnic reidentification requires data on the age distribution of the population by nationality. To date - Dec. 1989 - no data on age by nationality have been published for either the 1979 or 1989 Soviet censuses.
12.
12. In Figure 2d, we are able to depict rates of natural increase - births minus deaths - by region, because birth and death rates are reported for SSRs. In Table 2, we are not able to depict rates of natural increase of ethnic groups because birth and death rates are not reported for nationalities. But the growth rates given in the table's panel C closely approximate the rates of natural increase, since only a few nationalities have experienced substantial international migration in recent decades.
13.
13. For further illustrations of this general point, see Brian D. Silver, “Levels of Sociocultural Development among Soviet Nationalities: A Partial Test of the Equalization Hypothesis,”American Political Science Review, 68:1618-1637 (Dec. 1974).
14.
14. Russians experienced very little international migration. Thus their growth in the Soviet Union as a whole is primarily the result of natural increase. The net number of Russian migrants into a region was estimated as the difference between the number of Russians in the region at the second date and the number of Russians there would have been in the region if the Russian population had grown between censuses proportionately to the Russian population in the entire Soviet Union. For more discussion of these estimates, see Anderson and Silver, “Demographic Sources.”
15.
15. Strictly speaking, there can be no net migration rate because there is no population at risk of net migration; however, such a measure is conventionally referred to as a net migration rate.
16.
16. In 1959-70, an estimated 69 percent of the net Russian migration to the Muslim republics was to Kazakhstan; in 1970-79, an estimated 44 percent of the net Russian migration to these republics was to Kazakhstan.
17.
Anderson and Silver, “Demographic Sources.”
18.
18. See “Party's Draft Platform on Nationalities Policy,”Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 13 Sept. 1989, pp. 1-8.
19.
19. We have heard reports of IMRs of over 100 for some remote parts of Siberia, within the RSFSR. No IMRs that high have been officially published for any region of the Soviet Union in recent years, however.
20.
20. Elsewhere we estimated the IMRs for the indigenous nationalities of the Muslim republics. We found that in 1959, the IMRs of people belonging to the indigenous nationalities were lower than the IMRs of the European-background population - such as Russians and Ukrainians - living in the Muslim republics. This is implausible. See Barbara A. Anderson, Brian D. Silver, and Jinyun Liu, “Mortality of Ethnic Groups in Soviet Central Asia and Northern China,”Research Reports (University of Michigan, Population Studies Center), Sept. 1989, no. 89-158.
21.
21. See Anderson and Silver, “Infant Mortality in the Soviet Union.”
22.
idem , “Patterns of Cohort Mortality in the Soviet Population,”Population and Development Review, 15:471-501 (Sept. 1989).
23.
23. G. Bondarskaia and L. Darskii, “Etnicheskaia differentsiatsiia rozhdaemosti v SSSR” (Ethnic differentiation of fertility in the USSR), Vestnik statistiki, Dec. 1988, no. 12, pp. 16-21.
24.
24. A real increase in fertility between 1959 and 1970 could have occurred as a result of a reduction in the proportion of women of childbearing ages who are married to much older men. See Barbara A. Anderson, “Male Age and Fertility: Results from Ireland prior to 1911,”Population Index, 41:561-566 (1974).
25.
For indirect evidence of improvement in registration of births, see idem, “The Effects of the Registration System on the Seasonality of Births: The Case of the Soviet Union,”Population Studies, 42:303-320 (July 1988).
26.
W. Ward Kingkade , An Evaluation of Selected Soviet Population Statistics, CIR Staff Paper no. 9, U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Center for International Research, Nov. 1985.
27.
27. This measure actually understates the difference between Muslim and non-Muslim fertility, because it does not take into account differences in the age structures of the regional populations. Since the age distribution of women in the Muslim republics is much younger than the age distribution of women in other regions, proportionately fewer Muslim women would be near the end of their childbearing years.
28.
28. The latest date for which age data for the Soviet population have been published is 1987, a noncensus year. Age distributions in Soviet censuses are subject to error caused by undercounting of young children, older adolescents, and young adults, as well as age misstatement, including age exaggeration, by old people. For further discussion, see Anderson and Silver, “Estimating Census Undercount”; Lea Keil Garson, “The Centenarian Question: Old Age Mortality in the Soviet Union 1897-1970” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1986). We do not have enough information to correct the age distributions for each region.
29.
idem , “Patterns of Cohort Mortality in the Soviet Population.”
30.
30. Recall that, as shown in Figure 2a, only 32 percent of births in 1987 ocurred in the Muslim republics. Moreover, only 25 percent of the 15- to 19-year-olds in 1987 resided in the Muslim republics.
31.
The Central Asian republics report fairly low adult male mortality. We think that this is partially a result of underreporting of mortality and overstatement of age in Central Asia. See Anderson and Silver, “Changing Shape.”
