From Siberia to Sweden, Counting Heads Proves Vital to World Planning : Census: On foot and on skis, in helicopters and canoes, astride donkeys, yaks and horses, population counters travel to every corner of the Earth. They must battle the elements, anger, fear, indifference and politics.

The small Russian army swept through the world’s largest country, knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors from St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea to the far eastern edge of Siberia.

Armed not with weapons and arrest warrants but with pencils and questionnaires, these non-military troops conducted the first census in Russia since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.

The results, to be released later this year, will portray a dramatically changing population, said Murray Feshbach, a demography professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

“Russia’s birthrate is dropping, its people are aging, income is being redistributed and ethnic composition is shifting due to migration and refugees,” Feshbach explained. “If the people don’t lie too much, this survey, even though it is only a 5% sampling of Russia’s roughly 150 million people, will give us important facts about those changes.”

Head-counting has been going on throughout the world virtually since there have been heads to count.

On foot and on skis, in helicopters and canoes, astride donkeys, yaks and horses, census-takers have traveled to every corner of the Earth. They have battled the elements, angry animals, fear, indifference and politics.

“A census is an absolutely essential tool for planning and development,” said Alex Marshall of the United Nations Population Fund.

“You can’t really know about a country or the world without accurate censuses,” agreed Carl Haub, demographer for the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. “They show us where we’ve been, where we are, where we’re going.”

Census data provides the basis for drawing political boundaries and for locating new schools, hospitals and housing.

Fertility and mortality rates will be vital at the World Conference on Population and Development, set for September in Cairo. They’ll also help answer less critical but important questions such as if and when India will overtake China as the world’s most populous nation.

The United States moved up to third position after the Soviet Union split its population of 285 million among 15 countries. Russia, still the biggest of the group, is now sixth in the world. Neither fourth-ranked Indonesia nor fifth-ranked Brazil is expected to surpass the United States in the foreseeable future.

Head counts were carried out long before the Roman word “census” entered the language--usually to register men for military service or to collect taxes.

Babylonians conducted a stock-taking around 3800 B.C., the Chinese about 800 years later. The Old Testament Book of Numbers is a listing of families and tribes. History’s most famous census occurred when Caesar Augustus ordered the entire Roman Empire--then the known world--to report to inhabited centers to be enumerated and taxed. Among those who journeyed to Bethlehem were Joseph of Nazareth and his wife, Mary, who was to become the mother of Jesus.

Sweden held the first modern European census in 1749. The United States was the first country to write a census requirement into its Constitution (for purposes of congressional reapportionment). It boasts the longest string of regular, uninterrupted enumerations, one every 10 years since 1790.

As recently as 1970, 36 countries, many of them African nations emerging from colonialism, had not taken a modern census, according to the U.N. Population Fund.

So the U.N. stepped up its assistance programs, offering technical aid, training and money.

With U.N. help, most countries follow standardized procedures and increasingly employ state-of-the-art equipment. Still, Marjorie Dauphin of the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Statistical Programs Center told of unusual situations and problems.

Some countries turn the census into a kind of national holiday. Nigeria ordered its borders closed and its people to stay home during its census week. To help publicize its census, Zimbabwe held a national lottery to guess the country’s population.

In many desert lands, a common strategy is to wait for the dry season and station workers at water holes to count arriving nomads.

An irate housewife once chased a U.S. census-taker down the street with an ax, yelling that it was “none of the government’s damn business” how old she was or how many bathrooms she had in her home.

In Germany, about 300 citizens’ groups, concerned about government snooping, forced a four-year postponement of the country’s census in the mid-1980s. Civil and political disturbances have caused delays or cancellations of censuses in recent years in some countries, including Haiti, Lebanon, Pakistan, Zaire and Cambodia.

China poses one of the greatest challenges. During its 1990 census, about 7 million enumerators were hired to count the billion-plus Chinese. Although China has received computers and other modern equipment from the United Nations, some rural village leaders still use the abacus, an ancient hand calculator, for quick first-level tallies.

In about a half-dozen countries today, population is actually dropping.

In the world as a whole, though, the number of inhabitants continues to rise--now about 5.6 billion and counting--to an expected 8.4 billion by 2025.