The ethnic composition of Vilnius (for convenience's sake, I'll just use Vilnius here, but keep in mind this city has many names: Wilno [Polish], Vilnia [Belorussian], Vilna [Russians and Jews]) is somewhat nebulous and defies an easy demographic answer. The Russian empire conducted a census in 1897 and the city had 152, 532 residents, of whom 40 percent were Jews, 31 percent Poles, 20 percent Russians, and 2.1 percent Lithuanians. These figures are deceptively precise. The census itself though was based upon "native language" and the tsarist officialdom was highly leery of the national question, which is why the number of "Russians" in the census is quite high as they enfolded both Ukrainian and Belorussians as part of the city's Russian community. Furthermore, the officials likely downplayed the number of Poles in the city as the anti-Polish sentiments of the tsarist state ensured that they would not accept any evidence of a Polandization outside of the borders of Congress Poland. This bias reflected itself in other tsarist era mapping projects wherein Polish/Catholic areas became erased or discounted. The census also precluded the existence of "national amphibians" who spoke multiple languages and for whom the issue of of national identity was much more malleable.

The issue becomes even more cloudy given that the fact that nationality/ethnicity in Russia's Northwest and Western provinces were not fixed and still evolving at the turn of the century. This is perhaps best seen in the case of Vilnius's Jewish population, who could Russify, tap into the Polish activism and push for a position as Polish Jews, or argue that being a Jew was its own ethnic category distinct from other groups in the Northwest Provinces. The last option increasingly emerged as the dominant one as Jewish organizations emerged such as the socialist Bund or Zionism hat fostered such particularism. Yet this trend should not obscure the fact that ethnic identity was seldom clear-cut or innate.

The 1897 census's low numbers of Lithuanian speakers reflects that "Lithuanian" itself was a very hazy concept for identity during this time. The area's surrounding Lithuanian national activists sought to project onto Vilnius a historical provenance that stretched back to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Like the tsarist state, these Lithuanian activists used a very skewed sense of statistics and ethnography to confirm their biases. Belorussian or Polish speakers were Lithuanians who simply spoke Polish by an accident of history in this schema. After the First World War, the Poles also employed a similiar methodology to project onto Vilnius a strong Polish identity.

The long and short of it is there is no clear answer as much of the data on the city's ethnic composition reflected nationalist or state imperatives and grossly oversimplified or ignored the Vilnius's multiethnic reality.

Sources

Bartov, Omer, and Eric D. Weitz, editors. Shatterzone of Empires Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

Petronis, Vytautas. Constructing Lithuania: Ethnic Mapping in Tsarist Russia, Ca. 1800-1914. Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2007.

Seegel, Steven. Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Snyder, Timothy. The Reconstruction of Nations Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.