This article considers national censuses in the US, France, and Russia based on new principles and held after their respective revolutions. The authors aim to find out to what extent the authorities succeeded in following enumeration procedures based on international regulations. It is demonstrated that a census is a dialectical process involving the state and the population, requiring reciprocal trust. France had no experience of organising censuses with the exception of those in the country's American colonies. The gentry wanted to keep control over their lands and would not share information about their population with the central authorities. In postrevolutionary France, the census held during the Jacobin terror was not entirely successful, with the state bureaucracy not being strong enough to organise a coherent census and different revolutionary committees taking uncoordinated measures to register the population. The US, however, had had a number of censuses organised by the British prior to the War of Independence. The first census in the United States was held in 1790 in compliance with the Constitution. As a result, the US has held censuses at decadal intervals ever since, but it faced a number of problems for a considerable amount of time, especially concerning the registering of racial minorities. Russia was at an advantage in that respect since it held the first all-Russian census in * The research is sponsored by the Russian Science Foundation grant (project 16-18-10105).
Modern demographers analyse regional and other infant mortality differentials as important factors behind the current life expectancy of Russian citizens (Kumo, 2017). Historically, however, the Russian Empire is simply displayed as one block with high infant mortality rates (Klüsener et al, 2014). Also with respect to cultural background factors, Russia is often perceived as religiously homogeneous with the Orthodox Church dominating the country. In reality, Russia has a long history of coexisting religious traditions. This includes both provinces with a majority of Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists or shamanistic populations as well as territories characterized by religious diversity and significant minority religions. Our project studies minority religious groups in the Urals, a province by the Ural Mountains stretching into Asia. While no territory can claim to be truly representative of this mega-country, we believe that this centrally located province is well suited to show some of the Russian variety, including differential infant mortality among the followers of minority religions, which is the topic of this article. We employ church record microdata to study Catholics, Jews and Old Believers in the main metal producing city of Ekaterinburg. 1
This article compares interethnic and interreligious marriages in Russia and Norway during the decades around 1900. State churches dominated religious life in both countries with over 90 percent of the population but both were losing influence during the period we focus on—rapidly in Russia after the 1917 Revolution. The part on Norway employs nominative and aggregate census material which from 1865 asked questions about religious affiliation, while the Russian case study utilizes the database of church microdata being built for Ekaterinburg—a railway hub and an industrial city in the Middle Urals, in Asia—in addition to census aggregates. Our main conclusion is that religion was a stronger regulator of intermarriage than ethnicity. Religious intermarriage was unusual in Ekaterinburg, even if official regulations were softened by the State over time—the exception is during World War I, when there was a deficit of young, Russian men at home and influx of refugees and Austro-Hungarian Prisoners of War (mostly Catholics and Lutherans). The situation was also affected by the 1917 Revolution creating equal rights for all religious denominations. The relatively few religious intermarriages in Norway were mostly between members of different Protestant congregations—nonmembers being the only group who often outmarried. We conclude that representatives of ethnic minorities and new religions seldom outmarry when religion was important for maintaining their identity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.