Russia Doesn’t Have a Ministry for Nationality Affairs but Komi Republic Does

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 27 – Moscow has struggled to come up with an administrative structure to manage nationality policy, a structure that history has shown it can’t easily life with because to be effective it would have to have too much power but that it can’t live without because that would make it far more difficult to manage the multi-national population.

            As a result, since 1991, the Russian government has gone through a number of administrative arrangements, first with a ministry of nationality affairs and now settling on a Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs (FADN) (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/04/like-its-tsarist-and-soviet.html).  

            In Russia’s federal subjects, officials have had similar problems, setting up nationality affairs ministries in the 1990s, then abolishing them, and then reviving them alone. The nationality affairs ministry in the Komi Republic was typical in following that pattern (windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/01/window-on-eurasia-komis-get-nationality.html).  

            But unlike many that existed in the 1990s and then were abolished or marginalized, the Komi ministry has found a niche: the Komi ministry focuses not on the two largest nationalities of the republic, the ethnic Russians and the Komis but on indigenous peoples and to a lesser extent on minorities from other parts of the Russian Federation.

            That focus on indigenous peoples – the Nenets, Khanty, and Mani who together number only 260 people – is highlighted in the ministry’s latest policy program for the next three years (minnats.rkomi.ru/presscenter/news/84285/ and nazaccent.ru/content/45751-v-komi-utverdili-plan-razvitiya-korennyh-malochislennyh-narodov/).

            Such an institution and this focus are important in their own right; but they may matter even more because Moscow may view these things as a model for how it could not only organize but define minority nationalities, increasing putting the numerically small indigenous peoples at the center of nationality policy and leaving larger minorities out of this arrangement.

            Moscow appears to be moving in that direction already with the FADN which devotes more attention to the small indigenous peoples and far less to the larger nations than the size of either justifies. And what is happening in Komi could thus be a model for the redefinition not only of nationality policy but of the structures managing it.