Mixed, Merged, and Split Ethnic Identities in the Russian Federation

Abstract

Russia, which remains home to several hundred ethnic groups and fourteen linguistic families, inherited much of the Soviet Union’s legacy with respect to ethnic and linguistic categorization. The policies of categorization and official recognition of various ethnic and linguistic groups continue to influence these identities in the Russian Federation. The Russian state paid due attention to ethnicity and linguistic diversity and largely ignored the racial diversity of its population mainly due to the fact that classifications of the racial composition of the country crisscrossed ethnic and linguistic divisions and, unlike ethnicity, did not form the basis for political mobilization. This chapter details such issues as the variation of ethnic designations in official documents and mixed marriage research; the official categorization of the country’s population in censuses, particularly in the first post-Soviet population census of 2002; Russian academic research traditions in ethnicity studies, as well as current approaches to the problem of categorization and official recognition and the use in administrative practices of ‘mixed’ (in terms of ethnic and language affiliation) categories.