The Russian Empire Census of 1897 was the first and the only census carried out in the Russian Empire. It recorded demographic data as of .

Previously, the Central Statistical Bureau issued statistical tables based on fiscal lists (ревизские списки).

The second Russian Census was scheduled for 1915, but was cancelled because of the World War I (and never happened in the Russian Empire because of the Russian Revolution of 1917).

Organization

The census project was suggested by famous Russian geographer and chief of the Central Statistical Bureau Pyotr Semenov-Tyan-Shansky in 1877, and was approved by Tsar Nicholas II in 1895.

The census was performed in two stages. In the first stage (December 1896 — January 1897) the counters (135,000 persons: literate soldiers, teachers and priests) visited all households and filled in the questionnaires, which were verified by local census managers. In the second stage () the counters simultaneously visited all households to verify and update the questionnaires.

The data processing took 8 years using Hollerith card machines. Publication of the results started in 1898 and ended in 1905. In total, 119 volumes for 89 guberniyas, as well as a two-volume summary, were issued.

The questionnaire contained the following questions:

• Family name, given name, patronymic or nickname (прозвище)

• Gender

• Relation with respect to the head of the family or household

• Age

• Marital status

• Social status: sosloviye (estate of the realm), rank or title (сословие, состояние, звание)

• Place of birth

• Place of registration

• Usual place of residence

• Notice of absence

• Faith

• Mother language

• Literacy

• Occupation (profession, trade, position of office or service), both primary and secondary

In the census summary tables, nationality was based on the declared mother language of respondents.

Census results

The results of the census are too broad to publish, but its online Russian version can be found here: .

The total population of the Russian Empire was recorded to be 125,640,021 people (50.2 % female, 49.8 % male).

By native tongue

The most spoken languages, from which nationality was determined were:

• Slavic tongues:

• *Russian language: 83,933,567

• **Great Russian (i.e., Russian): 55,667,469

• **Little Russian (i.e.,Ukrainian):22,380,551

• **White Russian (i.e., Belarusian): 5,885,547

• *Polish: 7,931,307

• *Other Slavic tongues: 224,859

• Lithuanio-Latvian tongues: 3,094,469

• *Lithuanian: 1,210,510

• *Zhmud (Samogitian): 448,022

• *Latvian: 1,435,937

• Romance tongues: 1,143,000

• *Moldavian and Romanian: 1,121,669

• Germanic tongues: 1,813,717

• *German: 1,790,489

• Yiddish (:ru:Еврейский): 5,063,156

• Kartvelian (South Caucasian) tongues: 1,352,535

• Caucasian mountain tongues: 1,091,782

• Other Indo-European languages: 2,190,597

• *Tajik and Persian: 382,120

• Finnish tongues: 3,502,147

• *Estonian: 1,002,738

• Turkic-Tatar tongues: 13,373,867

• *Uzbek and Sart languages: 1,695,189

• Other languages: 925,018

• Total Russian Empire: 125,640,021

Largest cities

Largest cities of the Empire according to the census (thousands of inhabitants):

• Saint-Petersburg — 1264,9

• Moscow — 1038,6

• Warsaw — 626

• Odessa — 403,8

• Łódź — 314

• Riga — 282,2

• Kiev — 247,7

• Kharkiv — 174

• Tiflis (Tbilisi) — 159,6

• Wilno (Vilnius) — 154,5

• Saratov — 137,1

• Kazan — 130

• Rostov-on-Don — 119,5

• Tula — 114,7

• Astrakhan — 112,9

• Katerynoslav (Dnipropetrovsk) — 112,8

• Baku — 111,9

• Kishinev (Chişinău) — 108,5

• Helsinki — 93

• Mykolaiv — 92

• Minsk — 90,9

• Nizhny Novgorod — 90,1

• Samara — 90

• Orenburg — 72,4

• Yaroslavl — 71,6

• Vitebsk — 65,9

• Yekaterinodar (Krasnodar) — 65,6

• Tsaritsyn (Volgograd) — 55,2

• Ivanovo-Voznesensk (Ivanovo) — 54,2

• Tomsk — 52,2

• Omsk — 37,3

Assessment

As many other census in the era of nationalism, the results of this census are biased and skewed towards the nationality preferred by the authorities, in this case, Russian, in order to inflate the numbers of population of Russian ethnicity.Anna Geifman, Russia under the last tsar: opposition and subversion, 1894-1917, Wiley-Blackwell, 1999, ISBN 1557869952, 118-119 Thus for example, the number of Poles is underrepresented. Imperial officials also classified Ukrainian and Belarusian languages as belonging to Russian group and labeled those nationalities as Little Russian for Ukrainians and White Russian for Belarusians.