Five Post-Soviet States are in Fact ‘Russian Republics,’ Zen.Yandex’s Ethnographer Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 10 – Ethnic Russian republics, the Zen.Yandex blogger who uses the screen name ethnographer,  “are those countries where the majority of the population thinks in and speaks Russian and receives and processes information in the Russian language” (zen.yandex.ru/media/sur3/piat-russkih-respublik-dannye-interneta-5deabf829c944600ade6e73e).

            Politics has driven the formation and division of peoples in the past. Thus, Russians were subdivided into three nations, the Russians, the Belarusians and the Ukrainians out of political considerations. But “in the age of information, certainly it is more correct to define nationality by the language in which people think, speak and process information.”

            Rulers will always play games with census data, but “in a global information world, it is now impossible to conceal anything.” Using the Internet and counting the number of sites in Russian out of the total number in any particular country, it turns out that there are “five Russian republics” – Russia (95 percent of all sites), Ukraine (87 percent), Belarus (84 percent), Kazakhstan (80 percent) and Kyrgyzstan (76 percent).

            “If all five Republics were united in a single one,” the blogger says, “then their total population would be 200 million, of which Russians” defined as he does “would form 93 percent – or 186 million.”  In a related post, Ethnographer discusses what he calls “the non-existent peoples” Soviet power invented (zen.yandex.ru/media/sur3/zachem-v-sssr-pridumyvali-nesuscestvuiuscie-narody-5de8a995f7e01b20cf9533b1).

            Such slippery use of terms makes a declaration by Vladimir Chizov, the permanent representative of Russia to the EU, especially disturbing. Speaking to the annual European Russian Forum which this year focused on “Russian identity outside of Russia,” he said that the Russians are “the largest divided people in the world” (ria.ru/20191209/1562173176.html).

            The Russian diplomat stressed that as a result of the demise of the USSR,”25 million ethnic Russians ‘in one hour’ found themselves beyond the borders of their historic motherland” with no regard to their own decisions.  Russians continue to suffer from the consequences of this tragedy to this day.” 

            If the Russian people are defined linguistically as Vladimir Putin tends to and as Ethnographer does, then the number of Russians beyond the borders of the Russian Federation is even larger and the reason for focusing on the issue of this supposedly “divided people” apparently more compelling and immediate.