Ethnic heterogeneity of the urban and rural population of the regions of Russia according to the results of the 2021 census

Abstract

In connection with the complication of ethnic processes in Russia, which have a different nature of the course in urban settlements and rural areas, the importance of studying the various ethnic characteristics of the urban and rural population increases. The aim of the study is to identify regional differences in the ethnic mosaic of the urban and rural populations based on the results of the 2021 All-Russian Census. An additional task of the study is to compare the ethnic mosaic of regions with the proportion of urban and rural populations in them that did not indicate their nationality. In Russia as a whole, the value of the ethnic mosaic index calculated for rural areas almost doubled the corresponding indicator for urban settlements. But there are about two dozen regions where the ethnic mosaic of rural areas is lower than in urban areas. The share of people “without nationality” in Russian urban settlements is more than four times higher than the share of this category of the population in rural areas. Correlation analysis confirmed the direct dependence of the proportion of persons “without nationality” on the share of the urban population. A negative, albeit weak, correlation was also found between the proportion of people “without nationality” and the ethnic mosaic of regions. The lowest proportion of representatives of this category of the population in Russia had the republics of the North Caucasus and several republics of the Ural-Volga region. On the one hand, these republics are distinguished by a high level of ethnic mosaicism; on the other hand, they are characterized by the preservation of ethnic traditionalism against the backdrop of a low proportion of the urban population.