to RedFox: Not being a good theoretician, I was precautious in my comment to explicitly distinguish between ‘singular countables’ and ‘collective nouns (relating to people)’, which, as I can rely on your knowledge, “cannot be considered as grammatically animate”.
But, on the other hand, I'm curious about what the rule says: “A collective noun is a noun that refers to a group of people (!) or things” – in other words, “…refers to a group of animate (!) or inanimate objects”. So, the examples given by me DO refer to groups of animate objects (?). I 100% trust your expert opinion, but, my logic would NOT agree to the fact that collective nouns like ‘население, крестьянство, правительство, etc’ could refer to groups of inanimate objects …