Power and Ethnicity in the Finno-Ugric Republics of the Russian Federation

Abstract

There are more than ten Finno-Ugric peoples living within the borders of the Russian Federation. On the map, political units mark off eight of them (Khanty and Mansi are within the borders of the same district). Their share in the country's total population is a mere 3 percent. With most of these ethnicities inhabiting the European part of Russia, they have historically had very close ties to Russia's political past and its emergence as a unified state. Not represented in the country's political infrastructure until the first quarter of the twentieth century, many of them finally received their due after 1920. Formalized as districts and later as republics in the Soviet period, in the 1990s autonomous was dropped in favor of full republican status within the Russian Federation. For the purposes of comparative analysis, we selected three of the Russian Federation's Finno-Ugric regions the Republics of Komi, Mordovia, and Udmurtia. Even though we based the selection on what is formally a nonpolitical criterion (we grouped together regions whose title ethnicities are linguistically, his-