Paul Goble
Staunton, Feb. 1 – In advance of the 2021 census, Moscow agree to allow residents of the Russian Federation to declare two or more nationalities and two or more native languages (business-gazeta.ru/news/457162), a major victory for Academician Valery Tishkov and an even larger defeat for the country’s non-Russians (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/09/tishkov-continues-his-campaign-against.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/07/2020-census-threatens-tatars-other-non.html, and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/12/one-cant-be-half-ukrainian-or-half.html).
Tishkov has pushed for this for more than a decade, but he gained support 18 months ago because he argued that such a possibility would minimize tensions over identity between Bashkortostan and Tatarstan and provide insights into the way in which non-Russians are assimilating to the Russian nation (nazaccent.ru/content/35053-opredelis-ili-proigraesh.html).
The first census results on these points can’t be encouraging to either the ethnographer or his supporters in Moscow. Indeed, they can be read as an indication that non-Russians are not assimilating in the ways the center hopes. Instead, people are identifying with other closely related non-Russian nations rather than with the Russian one.
The Nazaccent portal reports that the 2021 census shows that 388 people in the two Middle Volga republic listed themselves as Tatar-Bashkirs, 58 said they were Bashkiro-Tatars, and 49 indicated they were Bashkir Tatars (nazaccent.ru/content/39920-v-rossii-naschitali-pochti-500-bashkiro-tatar-i-tataro-bashkir.html).
As small as these figures are, they totaled almost twice as many of people there who listed themselves as dual Bashkir-Russian or Tatar Russian. According to Nazaccent, the census reported only 172 of the former and 83 of the latter, truly miniscule numbers and a clear sign that these groups aren’t assimilating to the Russian nation via this pathway at least.
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