In North, Some Ethnic Russians Again Aren’t Calling Themselves Russians, Ethnographer Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 7 – In some places where members of different groups live together for long periods of time, the borders between their identities are far more fluid than many Russian officials would like, with people who they think have every reason to identify as ethnic Russians choosing instead to identify as members of a non-Russian group.

            Andrey Tutorsky, an ethnographer at Moscow State University who specializes on the Northern regions of the Russian Federation, says that there “before the revlution were a multitude of local identities – Pomors, Siberians, Volgars, and so on. And then their identities became one – Russian within Soviet” (lenta.ru/articles/2020/03/08/tutorsiy/).

            Now, however, the older pattern is reemerging, albeit typically for smaller areas and groups, like the Tudvlyane, Sitskari, Katskari, and Mesherski, rather than over larger territories. But what this means, he suggests, is that now in the Russian North, there are Russians “who simply don’t call themselves Russians” anymore.

            Even when three f the fur grandparents were ethnic Russians, it seems to some living there that being Russian has no particular meaning or importance while being a Karelian has “a certain cachet,” Tutorsky says, a means of setting oneself apart “from ‘the gray mass’ of Russians.”

            Among the examples he gives are in districts at the border between Komi and Russian areas in the Komi Republic and among those who identify as Pomors on one basis or another. In the former, people increasingly identify with the villages in which they live rather than with any larger “ethnic” group.

            And in the latter, there is real confusion about what being a Pomor means. It most accurately means those who live on the littorals of the rivers and seas of the North and who maintain themselves by fishing and hunting. But it is also used by people there who sometime engage in that kind of activity but who work mostly in more modern sectors.

            And third, the ethnographer continues, “simply all residents of the Russian North are called Pomors” and often identify as such.  That can lead to identifications that don’t conform to government standards. At the very least, it means that “the Pomor theme is important for every northern resident.”

            “At the end of the 1990s,” Tutorsky continues, there was an effort to set up a Pomor autonomy. A website was created, and contacts were established with Pomor groups abroad.  That prompted the FSB t get involved, and everything was shut down. Now, he says, people there, real Pomors and Russians too, are waiting for a new softening in Moscow.

            For background on the Pomors and their current situation and aspirations, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/04/pomor-lands-not-yet-proud-catalonia-but.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/02/optimization-means-liquidation-pomors.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/11/pomors-seen-in-moscow-as-ethnic.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/06/in-russian-north-official-ethnic.html.