ALTHOUGH THE SOVIET CENSUS DOES NOT POSSESS a constitutional mandate parallel to its American counterpart, the government of the Soviet Union attaches great importance to the census as a source of information vital to the needs of its complex economic and social planning apparatus. Lenin, who had analyzed results of the 1897 census of Tsarist Russia, was instrumental in initiating the first Soviet census in 1920, which he considered of paramount significance for guiding the construction of the emerging socialist state (Volkov, 1987, p. 10). The country's five-year development plans require projections of labor supply as well as demand for educational facilities, housing, and other goods and services, all of which draw upon data from the census. In the 1980s, as the Soviet economy experiences a virtual cessation in growth of its manpower reserves that will persist over the foreseeable future, the need to husband and monitor human resources receives high priority. One reflection of this objective is the expansion in scope of the 1989 census questionnaire discussed below. This note describes the scope and methodology of post-World War II Soviet censuses and discusses information available for the most recent census, conducted in January 1989. While the census has always deserved attention as the principal source of information about the Soviet population, in the present climate of major economic reform the results of the 1989 census will be awaited with keen interest.