“No well-organized state can direct its own state economy without knowing how many inhabitants it has”: the preparation and conduct of the All-Crimean census of April 15, 1921

The article studies the procedure and mechanism of the first statistical survey of the Crimean Peninsula conducted by the Soviet government in 1921. The population census, the inventory of all industrial enterprises and all the components of agriculture as well as the processing of the data of the statistical survey were complicated by several economic, social, political, and cultural factors. The key factors were the organizational incompletion of Soviet institutions in Crimea, the spring sowing campaign, the famine, the ignorance of the Russian language among the bulk of the Tatar population, and the mistrust of the rural population to all sorts of surveys and censuses. At the same time, other factors which facilitated the success of the census were analyzed. First of all, it is the highly qualified and experienced staff of the Crimean Statistical Bureau and the intensive organizational and methodological activity of its chairman M.E. Benenson, a well-known Crimean statistician. Also, the author mentions the wide and interested involvement of school teachers in the census. And, finally, intense propaganda work among the population: appeals to the urban and rural population published in the newspapers in the Russian and Tatar languages and face-to-face talks. The conclusion is made about continuity in conducting statistical surveys of pre-revolutionary time and the first demographic and agricultural censuses conducted by the Soviet government.