Non-Russians Less Likely to Says They Have an All-Russian Civic Identity than are Ethnic Russians, Barinov Concedes

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 26 – Moscow has long trumpeted figures showing that more than 92 percent of the residents of the Russian Federation tell pollsters that they have a common all-Russian civic identity; and officials from Vladimir Putin on down insist that this shows how overwhelmingly united the population now is.

            But in many ways, this figure is like the average temperature of patients in a hospital because it combines many who are prepared to declare that they have adopted a civic identity and those less likely to make such a statement. And thus the figure in which the Kremlin places so much faith conceals as much as it reveals.

            That was highlighted this week when Igor Barinov, the head of the Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs, made his annual report to the Duma committee on nationality affairs. Among other things, he spoke about differences among federal subjects on the issue of the identification of their populations as civic Russians (business-gazeta.ru/article/676106).

            According to the FADN chief, larger shares of residents of five federal subjects – Kaluga, Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk, Novosibirsk and Lipetsk – say they have higher rates of identification as civic Russians, from 97.5 percent to 99.4 percent than the countrywide average of 92.6 percent.

            But five others – the republics of Ingushetia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Mordvinia and Khakassia – have significantly lower rates – from 85.5 percent to 87.7 percent. All those above the all-Russian average are predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts, while all those below that number are non-Russian republics and three of the five have non-Russian ethnic majorities.

            On the one hand, one would expect that ethnic Russians would find it easier to identify as civic Russians given the way Moscow has promoted that identity. But on the other, it is clear that the decision of a greater share of non-Russians to resist doing so highlights the continuing importance of their ethnic identity and may limit the Kremlin’s integration plans.

            An article published more than 60 years ago in Soviet times -- Jerome M. Gilison’s “Soviet Elections as a Measure of Dissent: The Missing One Percent” in The American Political Science Review 62: 3 (1968): 814-826 – suggests why that is so. It demonstrated that even though all Soviet citizens were expected to vote for CPSU candidates, a small percent did not.

            The way in which that share of those who didn’t vote for communist candidates was not the same everywhere. In those republics, like the occupied Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – it was far higher, albeit within this limited range than in ethnic Russian oblasts and krays of the RSFSR.

            At the time, Gillison’s article generated a certain amount of mirth given the small shares of voters who defaced their ballots even in the Baltic countries. But two decades later, the importance of such actions became obvious as the republics which had the highest negative votes proved to be the leaders of the march to independence that led to the end of the USSR in 1991.

            That is one of the reasons why Barinov and other Moscow officials are worried: They remember what happened in the last decades of Soviet power and they want to block anything similar from happening in the future to the absurdly misnamed given Putin’s policies Russian Federation.