At Putin’s Order, Russian Scholars Launch First Major Research Program since 1950s on Ethnic Russians

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 24 – Vladimir Putin has ordered the ministry of science and higher education to organize a new ethnographic study of the ethnic Russian nation over the next three years (vz.ru/news/2025/12/22/1382532.html), the first such country-wide study of that subject since the 1950s. 

            The program which will be led by the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology and involve scholars at ten universities is something Russian nationalists have long wanted and will further tilt Russian academic attention away from the non-Russians, the traditional focus of ethnographic research there, toward the ethnic Russian majority. 

            Ethnic Russian nationalists for decades have been alarmed that the country’s ethnographic institute has focused on the non-Russians and neglected the ethnic Russian majority, a position that defines how many there think and how their intellectual progency spread across the country do as well.

            For the latest example of such criticism and of delight that Putin is changing the direction of ethnography in the Russian Federation in a “correct” direction, see Olga Andreyeva’s passionately expressed article,“The Russian People Returns” (in Russian, in Vzglyad, Dec. 24, at vz.ru/opinions/2025/12/24/1382853.html).

            At one level, of course, one can only welcome expanded attention to ethnic Russians as a community; but at a more fundamental way, this shift, ordered from on high, almost certainly at a time of budgetary stringency will mean that scholars in the Russian Federation and the Russian government following them will devote less attention to the non-Russians.

            But this increased scholarly attention to ethnic Russians may backfire on its Kremlin author, on the one hand, by increasing public awareness of how diverse the Russian nation is, something Putin doesn’t like to admit, and on the other, by encouraging Russian nationalists to take an even harder line against non-Russians, something likely to provoke strong reactions.