The People
Although ethnic Russians constitute more than four-fifths of the country's total population, Russia is a diverse, multiethnic society. More than 120 ethnic groups, many with their own national territories, speaking some 100 languages, live within Russia's borders.
Many of the minority groups are small - in some cases consisting of fewer than a thousand individuals - and only the Tatars, Ukrainians, Chuvash, Bashkir, Chechens, and Armenians have more than a million members each. The diversity of peoples is also reflected in the country's numerous minority republics and autonomous administrative units. In most of these divisions, however, the eponymous nationality (which gives its name to the division) is outnumbered by Russians. Since the early 1990s ethnicity has underlain numerous conflicts, notably in Chechnya and Dagestan, within and between these units; many national minorities have demanded more autonomy and, in a few cases, even complete independence.
While linguistically the population of Russia can be divided into various groups - the Indo-European, the Altaic, the Uralic, and the Caucasian - the Russian language, a Slavic language of the Indo-European group, predominates and is homogeneous throughout Russia. This unifying factor can largely be explained historically. The Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in eastern Europe between the third and eighth centuries ad, and the first Slav state, Kievan Rus, arose in the ninth century. After the Tatar (Mongol) invasions the centre of gravity shifted to Moscow, and from the sixteenth century the Russian empire expanded to the Baltic, Arctic, and Pacific, numerically overwhelming the indigenous peoples. Today, East Slavs - mainly Russians but including some Ukrainians and Belarusians - constitute an overwhelming majority of the total population and are prevalent throughout the country. But Russian is not the country's only Indo-European language: the Ossetes of the Caucasus speak an Indo-Iranian language, and ethnic Germans and Jews (recognized as an ethnolinguistic group rather than a religious one) also employ their own languages in everyday life.
The Altaic grotip is dominated by Turkic speakers. They live mainly in the Central Asian republics, but there is an important cluster of Turkic speakers between the middle Volga and southern Urals, comprising the Bashkir, Chuvash, and Tatars. A second cluster, in the North Caucasus region, includes the Balkar, Karachay, Kumyk, and Nogay. There are also numerous Turkic- speaking groups in southern Siberia between the Urals and Lake Baikaclass="underline" the Altai, Khakass, Shor, To fa lar, and Tuvans. The Sakha (Yakut) live mainly in the middle Lena basin, and the Dolgan are concentrated in the Arctic. Manchu-Tungus languages are spoken by the Evenk, Even, and other small groups that are widely dispersed throughout eastern Siberia. The Buryat, who live in the Lake Baikal region, and the Kalmyk, who live primarily to the west of the lower Volga, speak Mongolian tongues.
The Uralic group, which is widely disseminated in the Eurasian forest and tundra zones, has complex origins. Finnic peoples inhabit the European section: the Mordvin, Mari (formerly Cheremis), Udmurt (Votyak) and Komi (Zyryan), and the closely related Komi-Permyaks live around the upper Volga and in the Urals, while Karelians, Finns, and Veps inhabit the north-west. The Mansi (Vogul) and Khanty (Os- tyak) are spread thinly over the lower Ob basin. The Samoye- dic group also has few members dispersed over a vast area: the Nenets in the tundra and forest tundra from the Kola Peninsula to the Yenisey, the Selkup around the middle Ob, and the Nganasan mainly in the Taymyr Peninsula.
There are numerous small groups of Caucasian speakers in the North Caucasus region of Russia. Abaza, Adyghian, and Kabardian (Circassian) are similar languages but differ sharply from the languages of the Nakh group (Chechen and Ingush) and of the Dagestaman group (Avar, Lezgian, Dargin, Lak, Tabasaran, and a dozen more).
Several Paleo-Siberian groups share a common mode of life in far eastern Siberia but differ linguistically from the other language groups and from each other. The Chukchi, Koryak, and Itelmen (Kamchadal) belong to a group known as Luorawetlan, which is distinct from the Eskimo-Aleut group. The languages of the Nivkh (Gilyak) along the lower Amur and on Sakhalin Island, of the Yukaghir of the Kolyma Lowland, and of the Ket of the middle Yenisey are completely isolated, though it is likely that Yukaghir is a relative of the Uralic languages. How to preserve its linguistic heritage is one of Russia's current challenges, in that few of the languages of the smaller indigenous minorities are taught in schools, and so may disappear over the course of the next two generations.
Settlement in Town and Country
Any discussion of Russia's urban-rural divide also must address the population disparity between the European portion of the country and Siberia, the latter of which constitutes three- quarters of the country's territory but contains only about one-fifth of its population. Despite large-scale migrations from west to east, beginning in the 1890s and continuing throughout the next century - including the forced deportations at various times of criminals, political prisoners, and ethnic minorities - today the bulk of the country's population still lives in the main settled belt of European Russia, extending between St Petersburg (north-western Russia), Kemerovo (Siberia), Orsk (southern Urals), and Krasnodar (northern Caucasus).
About one-fourth of Russia's population as a whole lives in rural areas. Population densities in the rural areas of European Russia range from 25 to 250 persons per square mile, with the higher concentrations occurring in the wooded steppe. East of the Urals, across the southern part of the West Siberian Plain, rural densities are considerably lower, rarely exceeding 65 persons per square mile, and beyond the Yenisey settlements are highly dispersed. Thanks partly to industrialization and partly to changing political circumstances, in the second half of the twentieth century rural depopulation was a clear trend, especially in the European section: in the last decades of the century, the rural population there fell by about 25 per cent overall, though it grew in what is now the Southern federal district. Because migration out of rural areas was particularly prevalent among the young, many rural areas are now inhabited primarily by the elderly.
The bulk of the rural population lives in large villages associated with the collective and state farms (kolkhozy and sovkhozy, respectively) established by the former Soviet regime. These farms have carried on the long-established Russian tradition of communal farming from nucleated settlements. Individual farms started to reappear in the post-Soviet years. By 1995 there were nearly 300,000 private farms, though in the next decadc the numbers stagnated or declined. Private farms, however, still produce a tiny fraction of agricultural output.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, industrialization and economic development have led to a substantial increase in urbanization. Nearly three-fourths of Russia's population now live in what are classified as urban areas. In the cities, particularly Moscow, population densities are comparable with other European cities. Moscow, the largest metropolis, has twice the population of its nearest rival, St Petersburg, which in turn dwarfs Russia's other major dries, such as Chelyabinsk, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod (formerly Gorky), Novosibirsk, Omsk, Perm, Rostov-na-Donu, Samara (formerly Kuybyshev), Ufa, and Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk).
Several major urban concentrations have developed in the main industrial regions. St Petersburg (the tsarist capital) stands alone as the northernmost metropolis, whereas Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod are part of the large urbanized central industrial region, which has a score of large cities, numerous smaller towns, and an urban population that constitutes about one-fifth of Russia's total. In the Ural Mountains region, the towns are more widely spaced and include numerous small mining and industrial centres, as well as a number of towns with more than 250,000 inhabitants, which altogether amount to an urban population about half that of the Moscow region. The only slightly less populous Volga region has towns strung out along the riverbanks, with a particularly dense concentration in the vicinity of Samara. European Russia also includes a portion of the Donets Basin (Donbass) industrial zone, arbitrarily split by the Russia-Ukraine boundary; this area's largest city is Rostov-na-Donu, but there are numerous smaller centres.