In RF Population Centers of Under 200 People, Ethnic Russians Form Either Huge Majorities or are Completely Absent, Census Data Show

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 22 – One of the reasons villages continue to be a major force in the development of nationalities in the Russian Federation is that population centers there with 200 or fewer people are dominated by a single nationality, ethnic Russian in most cases but non-Russian in the remainder, according to census data analyzed by the To Be Precise portal.

            There are 95,000 villages in the Russian Federation, the portal says. In these, the share of ethnic Russians exceeds 90 percent in two thirds and in more than half of those forms 99 percent. In 7800 of the country’s villages, the share of ethnic Russians does not exceed ten percent and, in 2700 of these, is under one percent (tochno.st/materials/sostavliaet-dolia-etniceskix-rnusskix-v-kazdom-sestom-naselennom-punkte).

            What this means is that despite all the shifts in population there over the last century and rapid urbanization, villages in the Russian Federation remain largely mono-ethnic and thus serve as a support for traditional values among Russians and the basis for the survival of national ones among the non-Russians.

            That is what makes developments in the villages so important, symbolically in the case of ethnic Russians and overwhelmingly practically in the case of non-Russians, and means that all of Moscow’s steps to urbanize the population and combine villages to save money have enormous consequences for the ethnic future of the Russian Federation. 

            To Be Precise acknowledges that census data on this issue as well as many others remains problematic, but it suggests that these numbers clearly indicate that the coming together of nationalities that the Kremlin talks so much about isn’t happening in the villages but rather they overwhelmingly remain in separate ethno-national worlds.