All-Russian Census and the Erasure of Identity (1897)
The empire conducted the general census of 1897, embedded in the doctrine of the "triune Russian people". The linguist Sergei Bulich, in his article for the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, classified Ukrainian speech thus: "the Little Russian dialect of the Russian language"[1]. Historians of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences note: "The census of 1897 recorded not nationality but the respondents' native tongue, and since many Ukrainians named Russian as such, there were in fact more ethnic Ukrainians than indicated in the census"[2]. The census also recorded the reach of the Ukrainian language. According to its consolidated volume, the "Little Russian dialect" - the imperial name for the Ukrainian language - was named as their native tongue by 22,380,551 people out of 125,640,021 counted in the empire, that is 17.8%: the empire's second language by number of speakers after Great Russian (Russian)[3]. Nearly one in four speakers lived outside the nine Ukrainian governorates, and in the Kuban region (now mostly Krasnodar krai of Russia) Ukrainian was the most widespread native language[3].
Actors
| ID | Name | Procedures |
|---|---|---|
| G0009 | Russian Empire | 1 |
Instruments Applied
| ID | Name | Procedures |
|---|---|---|
| S0008 | Government | 1 |
Procedures Carried Out
The denial to Ukrainians of the status of a separate people at the level of official doctrine. The linguist Sergei Bulich, in the article "Little Russian dialect" of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (1896), formulated: "The relation of the L[ittle] Russian dialect to the Russian language may be likened to the relation between the Slovak dialect and the Czech language… but not to the relation between the Polish, Czech, Serbian and similar languages, on the one hand, and Russian, on the other"[1] - by this classification Ukrainian was a dialect within the Russian language. This doctrine was applied to the entire empire by the Central Statistical Committee, which conducted the census of 1897: in the tables of the consolidated volume, "Little Russian" ran as a subdivision of a single "Russian language", and its speakers were counted into the overall total of "Russians"[3]. This wrote 22,380,551 people into the "Russians" - speakers of the empire's second language after Great Russian (55,667,469)[3]. Nearly one in four of them - 5,374,863 people - lived outside the nine Ukrainian governorates: in Voronezh governorate 915,883 people named Ukrainian as their native language, in the Don Host region (now mostly Rostov oblast of Russia) - 719,655, in Kursk governorate - 527,778, in Bessarabia (now Moldova and the south of Odesa oblast) - 379,698, in Grodno governorate (now western Belarus) - 362,526, in Stavropol governorate - 319,817, in Lublin and Siedlce governorates (the Kholm region and Podlachia, now eastern Poland) - 304,261, in Siberia - 223,274, of them 54,422 in the Amur and Primorye regions, in Akmolinsk region (now northern Kazakhstan) - 51,103[3]. In the Kuban region (now mostly Krasnodar krai of Russia) Ukrainian was the most widespread native language: 908,818 people declared "Little Russian" (Ukrainian) as their native language against 816,734 with "Great Russian" (Russian), out of a regional population of 1,918,881[3]. The census methodology also undercounted Ukrainians, notes the collective monograph of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences: "The census of 1897 recorded not nationality but the respondents' native tongue, and since many Ukrainians named Russian as such, there were in fact more ethnic Ukrainians than indicated in the census"[2].