Fundamentals of Ethnodemography Preface to an Instruction Manual

A course in ethnic demography did not exist in higher educational establishments, either in Russia or in republics of the former USSR, until 1991. There were two reasons why such an interesting course—and an extremely important one under the conditions of a multinational state—was ignored. The first concerns the young age of the scholarly discipline itself, which has arisen relatively recently at the convergence of ethnology and demography and has not yet earned the authority to become a course in higher educational establishments. The second, and perhaps more important, reason that ethnic demography has not appeared in higher educational institutions is that the demographic indicators for some countries clearly did not correlate with the propagandistic veil thrust in our faces from the pages of newspapers and magazines, as well as from other mass media. For example, students might have wondered: Why are so many people leaving socialist Vietnam and Cuba? Why do the countries of a socialist orientation in Africa have worse demographic indicators than the countries that do not adhere to this orientation? Why is it that the socialist countries of Europe are so far behind the capitalist states in a demographic indicator such as infant mortality, so highly reflective of the quality of life

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