No One Knows if the Finno-Ugric Peoples in Russia are Actually Declining in Number, Estonian Ethnographer Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 20 – It is an article of faith among Russian officials and a proposition widely believed by many scholars that the numerically small Finno-Ugric nations now within the  borders of the Russian Federation are on their way to extinction and that each succeeding Russian census shows this.

            But Art Leete, an ethnographer at the University of Tartu, says that Russian censuses are so inaccurate especially with regard to nationality and language that no one can say for certain  how fast or even whether the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia are declining in number (sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/c21-teadus/aga-akki-soomeugrilased-ei-haabugi/ in Estonian; summarized in Russian at mariuver.com/2024/09/20/finno-ugry-ne-ischeznut/#more-78617).

            Russian and Western writers have long believed that it is the fate of numerically small peoples to be assimilated into larger ones, a belief that shapes the observations they make and the data they collect and interpret. This may be true in general, but its truth is not confirmed by Russian census data for the Finno-Ugric peoples of the Russian Federation.

            In the Estonian journal Sirp, Leete offers a close analysis of how the 2020/21 Russian census was conducted in regions where the Komi and Nenets nationalities live. Not only did the census takers fail to contact at least a third of the residents there, but they were actively discouraged from doing so and told the numbers would be inserted later.

            Some of the errors introduced reflected simply the difficulties of conducting a census during a covid pandemic, but many more, the ethnographer argues, reflected the prejudices of the regional and central Russian government, prejudices that in general Western researchers failed to challenge or assumed were about the same for ethnic Russians and non-Russians.

            But that was not the case. Regional officials have little interest in gathering ethnic and language data among non-Russians between censuses and thus when census takers don’t talk to residents and officials rely on intercensal data sets, there is a much larger distortion of reality for the non-Russians than for the ethnic Russians.

            Leete urges all those who care about the Finno-Ugric peoples to do a close analysis of the latest Russian numbers. They are not accurate and in some cases they are internally inconsistent, the best possible evidence that census officials came up with numbers that fit their assumptions rather than reported what was actually there to be found.