Another Uraza Bayram.
Countless photos showing zillions of Muslims filling up Moskvabad’s streets. More gleeful shitposts from /pol/ to svidomy forums about imminent Russabia.
But you don’t have to be a particularly big fan of open borders with Central Asia to be able to look at statistics.
In a series of recent posts, Russian blogger Ivan Vladimirov tallied the percentage of newborn ethnic Russians relative to the percentage of Russians as a whole per region.
This is a solid approach, because while counting immigrants is hard – estimates of illegal migrants in Russia vary all over the place – doing so for newborns is far easier. Ultimately the vast majority of births happen in hospitals, and it is difficult to imagine a vast Uzbek/Tajik underground baby boom taking place, not least because of the banal fact that the vast majority of Gastarbeiters are males.
Anyhow, bearing in mind that newborns today reflect society in 30-50 years’ time, the figures are actually quite encouraging (from an assimilationist perspective).
The percentage of ethnic Russians is increasing across almost the entirety of core Russia.
Here is another set of maps from blogger n_avdeev.
The first one shows the percentage of ethnic Russians by region:
The second shows the percentage of ethnic Russians younger than 5 years by region (note that green numbers represent an increase, and red numbers a decrease, relative to the total percentage of ethnic Russians):
You can actually see the majority Russian areas getting even more Russian. This even includes Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, despite them being Gastarbeiter magnets.
The Chuvash, Udmurts, Karels, Komi, Mari, and Mordva are steadily becoming Russians. The Republic of Karelia, once a separate Soviet Socialist republic from 1940-1956, has gone from being 57% Russian in 1926 to 82% by 2010 (and 94% amongst infants), while the comically named Jewish autonomous oblast has seen its Jews decline from 16% of the population in 1939 to 1% by 2010, and becoming 93% Russian overall (98% amongst infants).
Unsurprisingly, the Ukrainians and Belorussians are becoming Russians at an even faster pace, as are as the few remaining Jews and Germans.
Only the Tatars and Bashkirs are holding their own in their ethnic republics, though outside them, they too are dissolving into Russiandom.
However, in regions already mostly populated by highly fertile, underdeveloped, and lower IQ ethnic minorities, such as the North Caucasus (esp. “DICh”, i.e. Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya) and some Siberian regions such as Tyva and the Sakha Republic, the share of ethnic Russians is falling, often at a precipitous rate.
If Russia has an equivalent to US states like Arizona and Texas, where the original White American stock is steadily being outpaced by demographic expansionism from more virile southern ethnicities, it is Stavropol krai (81% total vs. 77% infants), Astrakhan oblast (67% vs. 64%), and the Altai republic (57% vs. 51%).
However, these are literally the only major exceptions to a pattern where ethnic Russians are stable or increasing in the parts of the country where they already constitute a solid majority. In this sense, Russia is far better off not just relative to the US, where non-Hispanic Whites now total 62% of the population and account for less than 50% of new births since 2011, but also many West European countries that have gone from being ~99% to 85%-90% White in the space of just a couple of generations (see Mark Yuray’s map to the right).
Since ethnic Russians don’t have particularly high fertility rates (though they are not significantly lower than those of non-DICh and Mongoloid Siberian minorities), the primary vehicle through which Russianizationization occurs must happen on account of differential rates of intermarriage with Russians (in such marriages, children typically adopt the dominant Russian culture).
Another blogger, Oleg Lisovsky, has compiled figures on intermarriage for both men and women.
Around 70% of Ukrainians and Belorussians marry Russians, so assimilation there is particularly fast, considering also the barely indistinguishable nature of those cultures.
These figures are considerably lower amongst the Christian Caucasian (Armenians, Georgians) and Finno-Ugric (20%-50%) nationalities, and extremely low amongst the Tyvans and DICh peoples (<5%).
On the basis of this data, Vladimirov also compiled a map of the intermarriage coefficient for Russia’s regions. Unfortunately, the scale is not specified, but one can make out the general pattern:
- High levels of intermarriage in the regions where there are substantial ethnic minorities amongst large Russian majorities;
- Moderate levels of intermarriage in regions with near homogenous Russian populations and predominant ethnic minorities;
- Extremely low levels of intermarriage in DICh (who barely even intermarry amongst themselves).
One notes that this applies even to small population groups within DICh, such as the Laks, of whom there are 161,000 in Dagestan and 179,000 in Russia according to the 2010 census. Male Laks marry female Laks 85% of the time and ethnic Russians 5% of the time (my grandfather is a very rare case); female Laks marry male Laks 88% of the time and ethnic Russians a mere 1.2% of the time.
Three are three main lessons to take away from this:
(1) Russia is simply not undergoing population replacement/displacement on the American or West European model. There is, to be sure, considerable… métissage, but it is primarily happening between genetically and psychometrically similar peoples – and in many cases, this is something that has been happening for centuries anyway (e.g. north Russians are basically admixed Slavs and Finno-Ugrics anyway).
(2) The DICh regions are a lost cause in terms of assimilation, but in all fairness, they probably always were. They are very distinct from the rest of Russia, and understandably so, since like Central Asia, they were only annexed in the middle of the 19th century. They are also absurdly ethnocentric in terms of marriage and reproduction.
During the course of the next century, it seems inevitable that Russians will fade away from the other ethnic minority Caucasian republics, such as Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and North Ossetia, as well as Kalmykia and Tyva.
The only places in the North Caucasus where a demographic “struggle” of sorts is occuring with respect to traditional Russian majority regions are Stavropol krai and Astrakhan oblast, but even there, the scale of the problem is decidedly smaller than in America’s borderlands with Mexico’s or Western Europe’s inner cities.
(3) The system of ethno-republics, apart from feeding corrupt regional oligarchies, also seems to act as a break on assimilation. The prime historical example is of course the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which foistered a Ukrainian identity upon Malorussians within its territories – including Novorossiya, where they were essentially just settlers – whereas the Malorussians of the Russian Kuban have almost all became Russians since the 1920s by dint of being in the RSFSR. However, as the demographic statistics above make it clear, the same trends are playing out, to some extent, even within the Russian Federation proper.
This is why most Russian nationalists have tended to dislike federalism and ethnic minority republics, and urge a return to the imperial system of guberniyas.
A few notes:
An the antitode to corruption is being included in the large super ethno republic of Russia? Where’s the proof of that wishful thinking? Also, it seems absurd to postulate that similar assimlation trends are not occuring within Ukraine.
There’s a couple of oddities within this statement that need exposure. The Soviet Socialist Republic only furthered an organic program of Ukrainianization that was already well established and popular among the ‘Malorussian’ masses when it first took over these areas. A name change in ethnicity is nothing new in the world, look at the Great Russians themselves who for centuries were known as ‘Muscovites’ before adopting the more modern sounding ‘Russian’ (Rosiiyan). Also, labeling the massive migration of Ukrainians into the fertile steppes of Ukraine as ‘just’ settlers, somehow trying to bolster your irredentist sentiments that somehow these territories are less Ukrainian then Russian, is quite a weak and an untenable position. 99.999% of the Russian element in Novorosiya were imported from the North. As late as 1851, there were only 30,000 Russians living in the Kherson and Odessa gubernias. Contrast that with almost 704,000 Ukrainians (MaloRussians). http://www.istpravda.com.ua/articles/2014/05/7/142762/
Interesting data for Russia! 🙂
I would like to make a minor point about the Kuban, though–the ethnic Ukrainians there weren’t given a choice whether or not to identify as Russians–were they? Indeed, I had the impression that they were forced to assume an ethnic Russian identity regardless of their wishes. Am I wrong in regards to this?
@Mr. Hack: You appear to be correct that there was already a semblance of Ukrainian national identity even before 1917. Indeed, this appears to be why the Ukrainians had their own popular Socialist Revolutionary Party during this time.
Still, I am wondering how differently Russia would look if it had avoided Bolshevism and instead pursued a policy of integration. I mean, such a policy of integration could have had significant success in some areas (when combined with intermarriage and universal literacy, of course); however, it could have also increased resentment and thus strengthened non-Russian national identities in some other areas. Indeed, it’s certainly a very interesting question.
Indeed, this is the very ugly underbelly of Russian nationalism and imperialism. Karlin is very hesitant to explain just how Russification needs to proceed in order to achieve the ‘greatness’ that only the Russian language and culture can bestow upon the poor misguided Ukrainians:-)
Unfortunately, I don’t possess a crystal ball and can’t answer you question. I do know that what the Bosheviks initially encountered in lands that had a Ukrainian majority was based on pragmatism and a need to show the local population that they offered something more progressive than Russian imperialism. They needed to quiet things down and the initial policies of Ukrainianization (using Ukrainian in educational institutions and using the local language more in
civic life) was one way of achieving this goal.
It’s possible, likely even, but I think Karlin’s point is that it could’ve worked for the rest of Ukrainians (for many of them, at any rate) as well.
: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t use the Kuban as an example of Ukrainian Russification given the apparently coercive nature of this Russification. Indeed, a better example of Russification might be the Russification of Ukrainians in areas such as Kazakhstan (to my knowledge, the descendants of the early Ukrainians who settled in Kazakhstan have either mostly or completely completely been Russified).
Also, to be honest, I think that Anatoly is simply fantasizing and regretting the fact that Russia couldn’t Russify the Ukrainians and Belarusians in the 20th century. Honestly, I don’t think that such fantasies are necessarily bad things; after all, many countries had missed opportunities which could have made them stronger (more Russians = a stronger Russia).
In addition to this, you appear to be correct that the Bolsheviks’ nationality policy appears to have been at least in part based on a desire to placate the various nationalities and thus avoid Austria-Hungary’s fate. Indeed, for what it’s worth, even though the Bolsheviks promoted national self-consciousness in their various territories, they also appear to have tried–with some success–to create a unified “Sovok” identity. In turn, this explains why most of the Soviet Union’s population voted to keep the Union intact in March 1991.
Finally, for what it’s worth, I think that Russia’s best bet to create a unified Pan-Russian identity encompassing Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians would have been if Russia had managed to capture Galicia from Austria sometime before 1880. Before 1880, Pan-Russian sentiments among Galicia’s population appear to have been quite large. In contrast, by 1917, Galicia was firmly Ukrainian in terms of its national identity and Ukrainian national consciousness was already emerging in Russian-controlled Ukraine as well (in spite of the increased literacy–up to 40-60% by 1917–in Russian-controlled Ukraine).
: Oh, I agree that some Ukrainians could have been Russified in the absence of Bolshevism. Heck, if Russia would have acquired Galicia early enough (before 1880 or so), I suspect that the vast majority of Ukrainians would have been Russified over the 20th century (since if Galicia ends up under Russian rule early enough, Galicia wouldn’t become a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism and thus wouldn’t become a base from which to spread Ukrainian nationalist ideas to the rest of Ukraine).
Frankly, my point here is that the Kuban doesn’t exactly appear to be a good example of how Russification should be accomplished. After all, non-coercive Russification is surely better than forced Russification, no?
Well, it didn’t happen so why re we wasting so much time discussing ‘what ifs’? A new book has appeared on the horizon that seems to tackle some of your questions, written by Johannes Remy entitled: ‘Brothers or Enemies: the Ukrainian National Movement form the 1840’s to the 1879’s:
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/2090
Even one of these svidomite morons was too many, scurrying around every tangentially related thread like a rat in a cellar. Nobody cares for your rustic dialect or your Ruritanian farce of a “state”. It will be a happy day when you are shut down for good.
So the Russian government tracks the ethnicity of newborns? If so, neat.
As you say, it appears to be based on the 2010 Census, and it does account for ethnicity by age group.
Here, go to “4. Население по национальности и владению русским языком по субъектам Российской Федерации.”
Ethnicity of those 5 year olds was declared by their parents in the census, that’s pretty straightforward.
Larger point is that related ethnic groups bordering each other eventually become friends and allies. This is the case with Scandinavians, with Spanish-Portuguese, Czechs and Slovaks, etc… It is simply hard to sustain hostility when languages, religions, cultures are similar and the groups are neighbours.
That’s why the enormous effort and expense by the Western ‘friends’ to stir up the hostility, to separate these related groups, will eventually fail. And might even backfire. In retrospect the hatreds will seem irrational and embarrassing. It takes a semi-retarded Georgetown ‘professor’ to plan and dream of a permanent hatred between let’s Ukrainians and Russians. It is a form of Risk game for them, they don’t get what actually happens there. The short-term damage is enormous, and there are many like Mme Nuland who knew fully well what they were doing, but there simply will not be permanent hostility there.
Yes you are. “”Ukrainian”” is a political identity that nobody in their sane mind would adopt unless they had a vested economic interest.
Not sure how the Russian statistical system works, but I wonder if someone who was not Russian could merely call themselves Russian. That would be my worry, but I’m the worrying type.
You would hope so. These nations have already achieved this mature status where one would hope that the Russians and Ukrainians would too. Unfortunately, most Russophiles (including Karlin) have developed a chauvinistic stance towards all things Ukrainian, refer to the Ukrainians culture and national aspirations as being ‘unnatural’ or contrived. Here are just a few examples of what I mean from this thread alone:
Karlin:
So, according to Karlin, the natural evolvement of the Ukrainian national identity was achieved by some cunning and ‘deceitful’ method (to ‘foist’: to force another to accept especially by stealth or deceit).
5371:
Here, to represent a pro-Ukrainian viewpoint, one is branded a ‘svidomite’ (pet term of Russophiles when talking about proud Ukrainians), a ‘moron’, the Ukrainian language is a ‘rustic dialect’, and the Ukrainian state is imaginary (Ruritarian).
These are common enough views held by Russian nationalists and Russophiles that make it exremenly difficult to forge common good neighborly bonds!
My parents were Ukrainian, and nobody was paying them to be so. Where do you come up with this unimaginative trite, anyway?…
Are svidomites born or made? I don’t know, but they swarm to whine about everything!
Good find! I was sceptical, but it looks like these maps are legit. Still shocked about the data for Moscow though – it just doesn’t feel right.
“Ukrainian-American” or “Ukrainian-Canadian”, I would bet. Inventing ‘identities’ for themselves is a favorite American pastime. (It doesn’t help that the American government puts out monetary incentives to do this.)
…says the guy, who keeps posting tedious anti-Russian propaganda. The fact of the matter, “Ukrainians” who live in modern day Russia tend to quickly dissolve into Russian-ness. If it was a real ethnicity, they would have persisted.
That’s why Russia annexing the Ukraine, absorbing its population (deporting crazy ones to Canada) would be a realistic, plausible way to end the current conflict. It doesn’t have to be like India-Pakistan relationship, because the Ukraine is not remotely equal to Russia, and with a little effort, can be completely erased.
British and Irish?
The differences are minimal, but the history of hostility is a long one.
Anti-Putin, anti-imperial, anti-chauvinist perhaps, but show me one anti-Russian statement that I’ve made? Just one (you wont, because I haven’t). You’re starting to sound like a real madman Keverich, do you even read what you write:
Goodluck Madman – better than you have tried, and noone has yet succeeded! 🙂
Ukrainian, as in born and raised in Ukraine. No ‘incentives’ were ever paid to my parent! So, what superior’ bloodlines might you represent Mr. Coward, or is it an ‘anonymous’ admixture? 🙂
In the Black Sea region, including Kuban, there was a cossack identity that was neither russian, nor ukrainian. Cossack Hosts were gradually disbanded and the cossacks, forcibly or willingly, assimilated to russian or ukrainian identities according with the pretty arbitrary borders between the two.
I assume you’ve meant almost indistinguishable?
That only applies within the EU. In normal circumstances your close neighbour is your biggest enemy. Germany and France fought three wars from 1870 to 1939. Russia and Ukraine are in conflict now. Pakistan and India face each other with nuclear weapons. Vietnam and China are not buddies.
It is [a politician’s] business to get and hold his job at all costs.
If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
Update: They have a leak close to your ear and Russian peters out and it goes extinct.
Jerome Branch Corbell has incurable cancer and is cryogenically frozen in the year 1970 in the faint hope of a future cure. His body is revived in 2190 by an oppressive, totalitarian global government called “The State”. His personality and memories are extracted (destroying his body in the process) and transferred into the body of a mindwiped criminal. After he is awakened, he is continually evaluated by Peerssa, a “checker”, who has to decide whether he is worth keeping. With the threat of mindwiping looming over his head, Corbell works hard to pass the various tests.
Peerssa decides that Corbell is a loner and born tourist. This makes him an ideal candidate to be the pilot and sole passenger of a Bussard ramjet, whose mission is to find and seed suitable planets as the first step to terraforming them. Disgusted with the State’s treatment of him as an expendable commodity, Corbell hijacks the ship and takes it to the centre of the galaxy. It was at this point that the original short story ended.
Peerssa tries to talk him out of it, but fails. Peerssa and The State resort to subterfuge; an artificial intelligence program based on Peerssa’s personality is secretly transferred into the ship’s computer using the link with Earth. Though the Peerssa AI opposes the detour, it cannot disobey Corbell’s direct orders.
After a lengthy journey (including a close approach to the super-massive black hole at the galactic axis), possible only due to the suspended animation devices on board, Corbell returns to the solar system. Although only about one hundred fifty years have passed on the ship, three million years have elapsed on Earth, due to relativistic time dilation. At first, he is confused and initially believes they might have come to the wrong system because it has changed considerably; the Sun has apparently evolved into a red giant and what might be Earth is in orbit around a super-hot Jupiter. Having followed a message clearly from humans (warning not to visit other human-occupied star systems), and being unable to survive going anywhere else, Corbell puts the ship into orbit around what is surely the Earth.
The Earth’s climate has changed, despite its new location in orbit around Jupiter. Among the most important changes is the increased surface temperature; the poles are temperate, while the former temperate zones reach temperatures of over 50 degrees Celsius (120+ degrees Fahrenheit). The Earth’s axial tilt is still 23.5 degrees so the poles experience 6 years of night and 6 years of day. Almost all remaining life on Earth has adapted to live in Antarctica. Elsewhere life is extinct except for some evidence of biological activity in the Himalayan mountains.
We’ll survive with the Rocky Mountain Way and Mountain Division tactics. Don’t pee in my ear and tell me it’s music.
On the contrary. Even though Ukrainians only have some 25% of the Russian per capita GDP, much lower standards of living (Ukraine is the second poorest country in Europe, after Moldova) and continue suffering from an even higher level of corruption (according to Transparency International), most of them do not seem to have any interest in getting reunified with Russia.
In fact, Ukrainian nationalists insist in considering themselves “superior” to their Russian neighbors. I was actually quite astonished to learn about this when I got acquainted with them during the events of 2014. A significantly poorer group of people not wanting to be assimilated into a richer country of very similar culture is a good proof of a genuine nationalist sentiment, I think.
Because reunification with Russia is less realistic at this point that ‘reunification’ with the USA.
The only way Ukraine will join Russia is via a complete de-ukrainization.
There is still much vested interest inside Ukraine that they can hit jackpot and monetize their ‘Ukrainian’ identity.
Remember that for almost 80 years ‘Ukraine’ received gigantic sums of money and other perks from the Soviet Union for the sole purpose of continuing the charade of a ‘Ukrainian’ identity.
The population of Ukraine still believes to this day that they can switch clients and continue this for another 80 years except with Germany or the USA instead of the Soviet Union.
There is a long, long way to the bottom before they become truly disillusioned and scrap their project. A sunk cost fallacy so huge will not dissolve over one or even two generations.
Wasn’t Anatoly saying some time ago (which surprised me) that in terms of genetic admixture, “Tatars” today are more Slavic than they are Central Asian?
This is, sorry, an absurd point (one originally made not by you, AK, but by the Boris N guy). Kuban once had a small Ukrainian pluraliy but never a majority; the territory of the Ukrainian SSR other than Crimea had healthy Ukrainian majorities.
In 1897 Kuban was 47.4% Ukrainian (Little Russian ) and 42.6% Russian (Great Russian). Figures for Kiev guberniya were 79.2% and 5.9%, respectively. For the Ekaterynoslav guberniya (so-called Novorossiya) these figures were 68.9% and 17.3%, respectively.
Moreover, Ukrainian identity in what became the Ukrainian SSR didn’t simply spring from Soviet times.
In the 1917 election, before the existence of the USSR, inhabitants of Kiev and other Ukrainian regions voted for Ukrainian-identity parties. During the civil war, there were no -zero! – significant Russian nationalist figures or armies arising from Ukrainian territories, including so-called Novorossiya. There were various nationalist warlords (Petliura, Grygoriev), Makhno the anarchist and others like him, some of whom allied with the Reds, but no Russian nationalist (White) presence. In contrast, Kuban produced both Ukrainian nationalists and Russian nationalists.
The situation of Kuban does little to prove the viability of a Russian project’s would-be implementation on Ukrainian SSR territory post 1920.
Can you point to any significant erasure of an established modern national identity? I mean, not some pre-modern people who en route to modernization took on some other name or identity.
Same is true of many Poles in Germany. Or Germans in Russia. Or any Europeans in America. So?
You need to work on your reading comprehension.
thanks for sharing this article i will follow this step
soon
Not really. Acctually, Poles started moving in Germany after fall of Comunism, so, we still have first generation immigrants. And, judging by other European immigrants in Germany, (eg, Serbs, Croats, Spaniards…) assimilation is rather slow. As far as Germans in Russia, they preserved their identity for few centuries. Ukrainians in Russia turn to Russians in first generation.