Taking the Count

It was still dark as the householder shuffled to the door at 8 one snowy Moscow morning last week. "Good morning," chirped one of the two girls with large badges pinned to their fur collars. "We've come to count you." Thereupon the enumerators were ushered into the warm kitchen to spread out their questionnaires. The Soviet Union's first nose count since 1939 was under way.

Across one-sixth of the world time practically stopped that day. Trains and planes scheduled to be moving as the day began took off with canvassers aboard. In such remote spots as the Pamir mountains and the offshore Arctic islands of Siberia, census takers traveling by camel, helicopter, dog sled or on foot had been allowed a ten-days' head start. All the rest of the 600,000 enumerators--four times the number employed in the U.S.'s 154-million count of 1950--had to tabulate their citizens according to where they were on the midnight of Jan. 14. and they had only eight days to do the job.

Answers to the 15 questions (sex, age, marital status, nationality, language, schooling, job, place of work, "social group"), explained the newspaper Trud, ''will provide information necessary to achieve the majestic tasks set out by the seven-year plan." Knowing how suspicious the citizenry is of the bureaucracy, the government asked no income questions, required no documents and was satisfied with verbal answers.

By April, massed tabulating machines in Moscow should tell Khrushchev's planners whether a rising birth rate has made good Russia's catastrophic World War II losses. These losses led the government 2 1/2 years ago to reduce its estimate of the Soviet population from 220 million to 200 million, and played a part in forcing Khrushchev to scrap Communism's last five-year plan two years early, when it became plain that the labor force obviously could not meet all production goals.

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