Erzyan Whose Family Denied Their Nationality More Angry at Russians who were Indifferent to Attacks on Her than Those who Did the Attacking

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 23 – The Horizontal Russia portal runs a feature every few weeks in which a non-Russian who has lived with a lie about their nationality eventually comes to realize who they really are, often experiencing denials by those close to them and attacks by fellow students and Russians encountered in the streets.

            The latest in this series is about Varvara, a 23-year-old from Nizhny Novgorod, who grew up thinking she was an ethnic Russian because that is what her parents insisted upon and only came to recognize that she was an Erzyan, one of the two subgroups of the Mordvin super-nation (semnasem.org/articles/2026/05/19/nerusskij-mir-varvara).

            As is often the case with this series, which is illustrated comic book style, her words about her experiences provide insights into how ethnicity works in the Russian Federation that are richer and perhaps even more important than polls can reveal even if some would dismiss her words as anecdotal.

            Varvara says she was born and grew up in Nizhny Novogorod oblast and while she recognized from childhood that she didn’t look like most of her ethnic Russian fellow pupils and was attacked for that, she defined herself as a Russian because that is what her parents insisted upon and filled in Russian on all official documents.

            When she reached the age of 17, she was a regular web surfer and once posted a sharp criticism of Russian bloggers who called for confining non-Russians to concentration camps and killing them as Hitler had killed the Jews. When she objected, they responded by saying they knew where she lived and would send her to such camps eventually,

            Three years later, her brother told her that one of her grandparents was a Mordvin and that led her to begin exploring her genealogy. Her mother refused to talk about this, insisted that she was a Russian and that in her view, Mordvins were “ugly” and “backward” and in general people she didn’t want to be exposed to, let alone be thought part of.

            As this was happening, she was verbally abused by a drunken Russian for being a Mordvin; but Varvara says that what really disturbed her were not such attacks but the fact that no one came to her defense when they were made. That made her feel that she remained at risk.

            Her story ends happily: she found a job where her insistence that she is an Erzyan did not provoke negative comments but only interest and respect for the fact that she found her true nationality despite the actions of family members and others, including fellow pupils and Russians on the street.