faudzil.blogspot.com: RACE & ETHNIC

9 October 2014

RACE & ETHNIC - Russians

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Russians (Russian: русские, russkiye) are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, who speak the Russian language and primarily live in Russia. They are the most numerous ethnic group in Russia constituting more than 80% of the country's population according to the census of 2010, and the most numerous ethnic group in Europe.

Ethnonym

There are two Russian words which are commonly translated into English as "Russians". One is "русские" (russkiye), which most often means "ethnic Russians". Another is "россияне" (rossiyane), which means "citizens of Russia". The former word refers to ethnic Russians, regardless of what country they live in and irrespective of whether or not they hold Russian citizenship. Under certain circumstances this term may or may not extend to denote members of other Russian-speaking ethnic groups from Russia, or from the former Soviet Union. The latter word refers to all people holding citizenship of Russia, regardless of their ethnicity, and does not include ethnic Russians living outside of Russia. Translations into other languages often do not distinguish these two groups.

Origins

Further information: Rus' people, Primary Chronicle and Lech, Czech and Rus

Three generations of a Russian family, ca. 1910

The modern Russians formed from two groups of East Slavic tribes: Northern and Southern. The tribes involved included the Krivichs, Ilmen Slavs, Radimichs, Vyatichesand Severians. Genetic studies show that modern Russians do not differ significantly from Poles, Slovenians, orUkrainians. Some ethnographers, like Zelenin, affirm that Russians are more similar to Belarusians and to Ukrainians than southern Russians are to northern Russians. Russians in northern European Russia share moderate genetic similarities with Uralic peoples,^[32]^[34] who lived in modern north-central European Russia and were partly assimilated by the Slavs as the Slavs migrated northeastwards. Such Uralic peoples included the Merya^[35] and theMuromians.^[34]^[36]

Outside archaeological remains, little is known about the predecessors to Russians in general prior to 859 AD when the Primary Chronicle starts its records.^[37] It is thought^{[by whom?]} that by 600 AD, the Slavs had split linguistically intosouthern, western, and eastern branches. The eastern branch settled between the Southern Bug and the Dnieper Rivers in present-day Ukraine; from the 1st century AD through almost the turn of the millennium, they spread peacefully northward to the Baltic region, forming the Dregovich, Radimich and Vyatich Slavic tribes on the Baltic substratum, and therefore experiencing changed language features such as vowel reduction. Later, both Belarusians and South Russians formed on this ethnic linguistic ground.^[38]

From the 6th century onwards, another group of Slavs moved from Pomerania to the northeast of the Baltic Sea, where they encountered the Varangians of the Rus' Khaganate and established the important regional center of Novgorod. The same Slavic ethnic population also settled the present-day Tver Oblast and the region of Beloozero. With the Uralic substratum, they formed the tribes of the Krivichs and of the Ilmen Slavs.

Population

In 2010, the world's Russian population was 129 million people of which 86% were in Russia, 11.5% in the CIS and Baltic countries, with a further 2.5% living in other countries.^[39]

Russia[edit]

Russians outside of Russia[edit]

Ethnic Russians in former Soviet Union states in 1994

The percentage of ethnic Russians throughout the former Soviet Union at the time of the last census in each of these countries.

Main article: Russian diaspora

Ethnic Russians historically migrated throughout the area of former Russian Empire and Soviet Union, sometimes encouraged to re-settle in borderlands by Tsarist and later Soviet government.^[40] On some occasions ethnic Russian communities, such as Lipovans who settled in the Danube Delta or Doukhobors in Canada, emigrated as religious dissidents fleeing the central authority.

After the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War starting in 1917, many Russians were forced to leave their homeland fleeing the Bolshevik regime, and millions became refugees. Many white émigrés were participants in the White movement, although the term is broadly applied to anyone who may have left the country due to the change in regime.

Today the largest ethnic Russian diasporas outside of Russia live in former Soviet states such as Ukraine (about 8 million), Kazakhstan (about 3.8 million), Belarus (about 785,000), Latvia (about 520,000) with the most Russian settlement out of the Baltic States which includes Lithuania and Estonia, Uzbekistan (about 650,000) and Kyrgyzstan(about 419,000).

Russian Orthodox Church inShanghai around 1948

Over a million Russian Jews emigrated to Israel during and after the Refusenik movements; some brought ethnic Russian relatives along with them. Over a million Russian-speaking immigrants live in Israel,^[41] around two-thirds of them Jewish.^[42] There are also small Russian communities in the Balkans, including Lipovans in the Danube delta,^[43] Central European nations such as Germany and Poland, as well Russians settled in China, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina and Australia. These communities may identify themselves either as Russians or citizens of these countries, or both, to varying degrees.

People who had arrived in Latvia and Estonia during the Soviet era, including their descendants born in these countries, mostly Russians, became stateless after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and were provided only with an option to acquire naturalised citizenship. The language issue is still contentious, particularly in Latvia, where ethnic Russians have protested against plans to liquidate education in minority languages, including Russian. Since 1992, Estonia has naturalized some 137,000 residents of undefined citizenship, mainly ethnic Russians. 136,000, or 10 percent of the total population, remain without citizenship. Both the European Union and theCouncil of Europe, as well as the Russian government, expressed their concern during the 1990s about minority rights in several countries, most notably Latvia and Estonia. In Moldova, theTransnistria region (where 30.4% of population is Russian) broke away from government control amid fears the country would soon reunite with Romania. In June 2006, Russian PresidentVladimir Putin announced the plan to introduce a national policy aiming at encouraging ethnic Russians to immigrate to Russia.^[44]

Significant numbers of Russians emigrated to Canada,Australia and the United States. Brighton Beach, Brooklyn andSouth Beach, Staten Island in New York City is an example of a large community of recent Russian and Jewish Russianimmigrants. Other examples are Sunny Isles Beach, a northern suburb of Miami, and in West Hollywood of the Los Angeles area.

At the same time, many ethnic Russians from former Soviet territories have emigrated to Russia itself since the 1990s. Many of them became refugees from a number of states of Central Asia and Caucasus (as well as from the separatist Chechen Republic), forced to flee during political unrest and hostilities towards Russians.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, many Russians who were identified with the White army moved to China — most of them settling in Harbin and Shanghai. By the 1930s, Harbin had 100,000 Russians. Many of these Russians had to move back to the Soviet Union after World War II. Today, a large group of people in northern China can still speak Russian as a second language.

Russians (eluosizu) are one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China (as the Russ); there are approximately 15,600 Russian Chinese living mostly in northern Xinjiang, and also in Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang.

Culture[edit]

Main articles: Russian culture and List of Russian people

Saint Basil's Cathedralon the Red Square,Moscow

Russian culture originated from that of the East Slavs, who were largely polytheists, and had a specific way of life in the wooded areas ofEastern and Northern Europe. The Scandinavian Vikings, or Varangians, also took part in forming the Russian identity and state in the early Kievan Rus' period of the late 1st millennium AD. The Rus' accepted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, and this largely defined Russian culture for the next millennium, namely as a synthesis of Slavic and Byzantine cultures.^[45] After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russia remained the largest Orthodox nation in the world and claimed succession to the Byzantine legacy in the form of the Third Rome idea.^{[citation needed]} At different points of its history, the country was strongly influenced by European culture, and since the reforms of Peter the Great Russian culture largely developed in the context of Western culture. For most of the 20th century,Marxist ideology shaped the culture of the Soviet Union, where Russia, i.e. the Russian SFSR, was the largest and leading part.

Russian culture is varied and unique in many respects. It has a rich history and a long tradition in all of the arts,^[46] especially in fields ofliterature^[47] and philosophy, classical music^[48]^[49] and ballet,^[50] architecture and painting, cinema^[51] and animation, all of which had considerable influence on world culture.

Russian literature is known for such notable writers as Aleksandr Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Platonov,Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Varlam Shalamov. Russians also gave the classical music world some very famous composers, includingPiotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and his contemporaries, the Mighty Handful, including Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In the 20th-century Russian music was credited with such influential composers as Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinski, Georgy Sviridov, and Alfred Schnittke.

Language

Main article: Russian language

Russian (русский язык (help·info), transliteration: Russkiy yazyk, [ˈruskʲɪj jɪˈzɨk]) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of three (or, according to some authorities^[who?], four) living members of the East Slavic languages, the others being Belarusian, Ukrainian and Rusyn.

Examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century onwards, and while Russian preserves much of East Slavonic grammar and a Common Slavonicword base, modern Russian exhibits a large stock of borrowed international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. Due to the status of the Soviet Union as asuper power, Russian had great political importance in the 20th century, and is one of the official languages of the United Nations.

A group of Russian children, 1909.Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.

Russian has palatal secondary articulation of consonants, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found in almost all consonant phonemes and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language. Another important aspect is thereduction of unstressed vowels, not entirely unlike a similar process present in most forms of English. Stress in Russian is generally quite unpredictable and can be placed on almost any syllable, one of the most difficult aspects for foreign language learners.

Russian language has official status.

Russian language has official status, but lower than the state

Russian language has no official status, but is known with much of the population.

Russian language – one of the six official languages of the UN. According to data published in the journal «Language Monthly» (№ 3, 1997), approximately 300 million people around the world at the time owned the Russian language (which puts this language in 5th place on prevalence in the World). 160 million considered Russian as native language (7th in the world). The total number of Russian speakers in the world on the 1999 assessment – about 167 million, about 110 million people speak Russian as a second language. In a sociological study of Gallup (Gallup, Inc), dedicated to the Russian language in the post-Soviet states, 92% of the population in Belarus, 83% in Ukraine, 68% in Kazakhstan and 38% in Kyrgyzstan, Russian language chosen to complete the questionnaire for the survey . Institute designated this section of the study as «Russian as the Mother Tongue». In the U.S. state of New York in 2009, an amendment to the electoral law, according to which in all cities in the state, home to over a million people, all related to the election process documents should be translated into Russian. Russian language has become one of the eight foreign languages in New York, which must be printed on all official materials of the campaign. Previously been included in the list of Spanish, Korean, Filipino, Creole languages and three dialects of Chinese.

Prior to 1991, Russian was the language of international communication of the USSR, fulfilling the functions of the state language. It continues to be used in countries formerly part of the Soviet Union, as the mother tongue of a significant portion of the population and as a language of international communication. In places of compact residence of immigrants from the former USSR countries (Israel, Germany, Canada, the United States, Australia, etc.) Russian-language periodicals, work stations and television channels are available, and Russian-language schools have been opened, where Russian is actively taught. In the countries of the Eastern Bloc in Central Europe, before the end of the 1980s, the Russian language was the main foreign language taught in schools. All astronauts working in the International Space Station are required to speak Russian.

Religion

Main article: Religion in Russia

Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery, the resting place of many eminent Russian émigrés after 1917

Cross of the Russian Orthodox Church

As of a 2012 sociological survey on religious adherence, 58,800,000 people or 41% of the total population of Russia adhere to the Russian Orthodox Church.^[52]^[53]^[54] But other sources gave higher estimates between 63%^[55] to over 80%^[56] of ethnic Russians identify themselves as Orthodox. It has played a vital role in the development of Russian national identity. In other countries Russian faithful usually belong to the local Orthodox congregations which either have a direct connection (like theUkrainian Orthodox Church, autonomous from the Moscow Patriarchate) or historical origin (like the Orthodox Church in America or a Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia) with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Non-religious Russians may associate themselves with the Orthodox faith for cultural reasons. Some Russian people are Old Believers: a relatively small schismatic group of the Russian Orthodoxy that rejected the liturgical reforms introduced in the 17th century. Other schisms from Orthodoxy include Doukhobors which in the 18th century rejected secular government, the Russian Orthodox priests, icons, all church ritual, the Bible as the supreme source of divine revelation and the divinity of Jesus, and later emigrated into Canada. An even earlier sect were Molokans which formed in 1550 and rejected Czar's divine right to rule, icons, the Trinity as outlined by the Nicene Creed, Orthodox fasts, military service, and practices including water baptism.

Other world religions have negligible representation among ethnic Russians. The largest of these groups are Islam with over 100,000 ethnic Russian followers,^[52] and Baptists with over 85,000 Russian adherents.^[57] Others are mostly Pentecostals, Evangelicals, Seventh-day Adventists, Lutherans and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union various new religious movements have sprung up and gathered a following among ethnic Russians. The most prominent of these are Rodnovery, the revival of the Slavic native religion also common to other Slavic nations,^[58] Another movement, very small in comparison to other new religions, is Vissarionism, a syncretic group with an Orthodox Christian background.

Genetics[edit]

Despite enduring the Mongol occupation beginning in the 13th century, the genetic legacy of East Eurasians in Russians remain minimal despite the close proximity.

Y-DNA[edit]

Russians show the y-DNA R1a with frequencies ranging from 33.4% in North Russia to 49% in rest of Russia.^[32]^[59]^[60] R-M17 (and sometimes alternatively defined as R-M198), is particularly common in a large region extending from South Asia and Southern Siberia to Central Europe and Scandinavia.(Underhill 2009) ^[61] and in parts of India.^[62] The percentages of Y-chromosome markers vary in ethnic Russian populations by latitude and region.

The top four Y-DNA haplogroups among the sample of 1228 Russians are:^[32]

Haplogroup R1a (Y-DNA) – 19.8% to 62.7%, with an average of 46.7%
Haplogroup I (Y-DNA) – 0% to 26.8%, with an average of 17.6% (All regions), and 23.5% (Central and South Russia)
Haplogroup N (Y-DNA) – 5.4% to 53.7%, with averages of 21.6% (All regions), and 10% (Central and South Russia)
Haplogroup R1b (Y-DNA) – 0% to 14%, with an average of 5.8%

Eight Y chromosome haplogroup subclades, of West Eurasian origin, presented an average frequency greater than 1%, including R1a, N3, I1b, R1b, I1a, J2, N2, and E3b. All together, they account for >95% of the total Russian Y chromosomal pool. Of the 1228 samples, 11/1228 (0.9%) were classified up to the root level of haplogroups F and K. Only 9/1228 samples (0.7%) fell into haplogroups C, Q, and R2 which are specific to East and South Asian populations.^[32]

mtDNA

The mitochondrial gene pool of Russians are represented by mtDNA types belonging to typical West Eurasian groups. East Eurasian admixture was shown to be minimal and existed in low frequencies in the form of Haplogroup M.^[63]^[64] The same studies indicate West Eurasian haplogroups present at a frequency of 97.8% and98.5% among a sample of 325 and 201 Russians respectively.^[63]^[64]

Autosomal DNA

Autosomally, Russians are generally similar to populations in central-eastern Europe.^[65]

Notable achievements

Main articles: Timeline of Russian inventions and technology records and List of Russian inventors

Yuri Gagarin, first human in space (1961)

Russians have greatly contributed to the fields of music, sports, science and technology and the arts.

In science and technology, notable Russian scientists include Mikhail Kalashnikov (inventor and designer of the AK-47 assault rifle and PK machine gun), Dmitri Mendeleev, Nikolay Bogolyubov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (a founding father of rocketry and astronautics), Andrei Kolmogorov, Ivan Pavlov, Nikolai Semyonov, Dmitri Ivanenko, Alexander Lodygin, Alexander Popov (one of inventors of radio), Nikolai Zhukovsky, Alexander Prokhorov and Nikolay Basov (co-inventors of laser), Vladimir Zworykin, Lev Pontryagin, Sergei Sobolev, Pavel Yablochkov, Aleksandr Butlerov, Andrei Sakharov, Dmitry Ivanovsky, Sergey Korolyov and Mstislav Keldysh (creators of the Soviet space program), Aleksandr Lyapunov, Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky, Andrei Tupolev, Yuri Denisyuk (the first practicable method of holography),Mikhail Lomonosov, Vladimir Vernadsky, Pyotr Kapitsa, Igor Sikorsky, Ludvig Faddeev, Konstantin Novoselov, Fyodor Shcherbatskoy,Nikolai Trubetzkoy etc.

The first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, was a Russian, and the first artificial satellite to be put into outer space, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Soviet Union and was developed mainly by Russian aerospace engineer Sergey Korolyov.

Russian Literature representatives like Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin, and many more, reached a high status in world literature. Prominent Russian novelists such as Tolstoy in particular, were important figures and have remained internationally renowned. Some scholars have described one or the other as the greatest novelist ever.^[66]

Russian composer s who reached a high status in the world of music include Igor Stravinsky, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov,Sergei Prokofiev, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Russian people played a crucial role in the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Russia's casualties in this war were the highest of all nations, and numbered more than 20 million dead (Russians composed 80% of the 26.6 million people lost by the USSR), which is about half of all World War II casualties and the vast majority of Allied casualties.^[67] According to the British historian Richard Overy, the Eastern Front included more combat than all the other European fronts combined. The Wehrmacht suffered 80% to 93% of all of its total World War II combat casualties on the Eastern Front.

Russians
русские
russkiye

Alexander Nevsky	Peter the Great	Mikhail Lomonosov	Alexander Suvorov
Dmitri Mendeleev	Oleg Losev	Alexander Prokhorov	Sergei Korolev
Marina Tsvetaeva	Alexander Popov	Leo Tolstoy	Ivan Pavlov
Georgy Zhukov	Yuri Gagarin	Anna Kournikova	Anna Pavlova