Controversial issues of studying the ethnodemography of the Russian urban population of Bashkortostan

The article briefly analyses the methods of studying the number of the Russian population of Bashkortostan in the works of domestic authors. The author concludes that the study of this problem relies on outdated methods. Historians and sociologists use the number of cities established by the state. However, in reality the number of urban settlements was much higher, but they were not considered cities. The theory of ‘true cities’, created in Russia in the early twentieth century, allows us to clarify the number of cities and, accordingly, the urban population. Recently, some researchers have started to use this theory, what allowed to significantly increase the real number of urban Russian population.