‘More than 20 Million Rsians’ from Ethnically Mixed Families and Speak Russian, Putin Told

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 30 – Vladimir Zorin, a prominent Russian ethnographer who earlier served as nationalities minister, told Vladimir Putin at the meeting in Nalchik this week of the Presidential Council on Inter-Ethnic Relations that “more than 15 percent” of all Russian citizens are products of ethnically mixed marriages and that many of them speak Russian.

            This must be reflected in the upcoming 2020 census because experiences with the last two Russian censuses show that “there exist definite risks of ethnic mobilization and attempts by certain people in certain regions to favor certain nationalities,” Zorin continued (business-gazeta.ru/article/448157).

            Because the approaching census will allow people to respond via the Internet, he implied, this may give such people greater opportunities to distort the ethnic and linguistic situation in the Russian Federation away from the ethnic Russians and Russian speakers toward non-Russians and those whose first languages are not Russian.

            Igor Barinov, head of the Federal Agency for Nationalities Affairs, agreed. He pointed out that “a large number of people unfortunately did not indicate their nationality in the 2010 census and that our task – that of the organs of power, the institutions of civil society, and national religious unions – is to promote the maximum involvement of citizens in the census.”

            The Nalchik meeting of the council took place later than that body’s charter requires. The council is supposed to meet twice a year, but because of Putin’s schedule, it is now meeting only about once, yet another indication of the downgrading of nationality issues in the Kremlin all words to the contrary notwithstanding.

            In addition to the warnings about the 2020 census, participants in this meeting from Putin on down stressed as the Kremlin leader put it that nationality issues are first and foremost the responsibility of regional leaders, yet another way that Moscow is continuing to try to distance itself from this task.

            Officials also noted that Moscow has certified textbooks only in ten non-Russian languages, a fact that means many republics are forced to use older ones without such certification and that the central government is not paying for the textbooks. That puts another kind of downward pressure on non-Russian language instruction.

            Moreover, other participants said, the number of instructors in non-Russian languages is too small to meet demand, and the salaries and status of such teachers remains too low to attract more people to this profession. But perhaps the most significant comments at the meeting came for Ildar Gilmutdinov, a Duma deputy who oversees nationality issues there.

            He called on Putin to support a draft bill to create alphabets, grammars, and punctuation rules for numerically small peoples who are often called “non-literary” because they lack these things. Now, Gilmutdinov said, there are “more than 30.” The Kremlin leader responded that “oral culture is much more reliable and stable and maintains itself better than written culture.”

            And the deputy urged Putin to support non-Russian language broadcasts on public television. At present, that service broadcasts only in Russia. It has no licenses for the languages of the peoples but it would be good as the regions request that they could be given programs in their national languages.”