There are two Russian words which are commonly translated into English as "Russians". One is русские (russkiye), which in modern Russia most often means "ethnic Russians". The other one is россияне (rossiyane), derived from Россия (Rossiya, Russia), which denotes "people of Russia", regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation. In daily usage, those terms are often mixed up, and since Vladimir Putin became president, the ethnic term русские has supplanted the non-ethnic term.[50]: 26
The name of the Russians derives from the early medieval Rus' people, a group of Norse merchants and warriors who relocated from across the Baltic Sea and played an important part in the foudation of the first East Slavic state that later became the Kievan Rus'.[51][52]
The ancestors of modern Russians are the Slavic tribes, whose original home is thought by some scholars to have been the wooded areas of the Pinsk Marshes, one of the largest wetlands in Europe.[53] The East Slavs gradually settled Western Russia with Moscow included in two waves: one moving from Kiev toward present-day Suzdal and Murom and another from Polotsk toward Novgorod and Rostov.[54] Prior to the Slavic migration in the 6-7th centuries, the Suzdal-Murom and Novgorod-Rostov areas were populated by Finnic peoples,[55] including the Merya,[56] the Muromians,[57] and the Meshchera.[58]
From the 7th century onwards, the East Slavs slowly assimilated the native Finnic peoples,[59] so that by year 1100, the majority of the population in Western Russia was Slavic-speaking.[54][55] Recent genetic studies confirm the presence of a Finnic substrate in modern Russian population.[60]
Outside archaeological remains, little is known about the predecessors to Russians in general prior to 859 AD, when the Primary Chronicle starts its records.[61] By 600 AD, the Slavs are believed to have split linguistically into southern, western, and eastern branches.[citation needed]
The Rus' state was established in northern Russia in the year 862,[62] which was ruled by the Varangians.[63]Staraya Ladoga and Novgorod became the first major cities of the new union of immigrants from Scandinavia with the Slavs and Finns.[64] In 882, the prince Oleg seized Kiev, thereby uniting the northern and southern lands of the East Slavs under one authority. The state adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state as a result of in-fighting between members of the princely family that ruled it collectively.[65]
After the 13th century, Moscow became a political and cultural center. Moscow has become a center for the unification of Russian lands.[66] By the end of the 15th century, Moscow united the northeastern and northwestern Russian principalities, overthrew the "Mongol yoke" in 1480,[67] and would be transformed into the Tsardom of Russia after Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547.[68]
In 1721, Tsar Peter the Great renamed his state as the Russian Empire, hoping to associate it with historical and cultural achievements of ancient Rus' – in contrast to his policies oriented towards Western Europe. The state now extended from the eastern borders of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to the Pacific Ocean, and became a great power; and one of the most powerful states in Europe after the victory over Napoleon. Peasant revolts were common, and all were fiercely suppressed. The Emperor Alexander IIabolishedRussian serfdom in 1861, but the peasants fared poorly and revolutionary pressures grew. In the following decades, reform efforts such as the Stolypin reforms of 1906–1914, the constitution of 1906, and the State Duma (1906–1917) attempted to open and liberalize the economy and political system, but the Emperors refused to relinquish autocratic rule and resisted sharing their power.
Ethnic Russians historically migrated within the areas of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union, though they were sometimes encouraged to re-settle in borderland areas by the Tsarist and later Soviet government.[70] Sometimes ethnic Russian communities, such as the Lipovans who settled in the Danube delta or the Doukhobors in Canada, emigrated as religious dissidents fleeing the central authority.[71]
According to the 2021 Russian census, the number of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation decreased by nearly 5.43 million, from roughly 111 million people in 2010 to approximately 105.5 million in 2021.[74]
The main ones are the Northern and Southern Russian groups. At the same time, the proposal of the ethnographer Dmitry Zelenin in his major work of 1927 Russian (East Slavic) Ethnography to consider them as separate East Slavic peoples[76] did not find support in scientific circles.[citation needed]
Russia's Arctic coastline had been explored and settled by Pomors, Russian settlers from Novgorod.[77]
Cossacks inhabited sparsely populated areas in the Don, Terek, and Ural river basins, and played an important role in the historical and cultural development of parts of Russia.[78]
In accordance with the 2008 research results of Russian and Estonian geneticists, two groups of Russians are distinguished: the northern and southern populations.[47][79]
Central and Southern Russians, to which the majority of Russian populations belong, according to Y chromosome R1a, are included in the general "East European" gene cluster with the rest East and West Slavs (Poles, Czechs and Slovaks), as well as the non-Slavic Hungarians and Aromanians.[46][47][48] Genetically, East Slavs are quite similar to West Slavs; such genetic similarity is somewhat unusual for genetics with such a wide settlement of the Slavs, especially Russians.[80] The high unity of the autosomal markers of the East Slavic populations and their significant differences from the neighboring Finnic, Turkic and Caucasian peoples were revealed.[47][46]
Consequently, the already existing biologo-genetic studies have made all hypotheses about the mixing of the Russians with non-Slavic ethnic groups or their "non-Slavism" obsolete or pseudoscientific. At the same time, the long-standing identification of the Northern Russian and Southern Russian ethnographic groups by ethnologists was confirmed. The previous conclusions of physical anthropologists,[82] historians and linguists (see, in particular, the works of the academician Valentin Yanin) about the proximity of the ancient Novgorod Slavs and their language not to the East, but to west Baltic Slavs. As can be seen from genetic resources, the contemporary Northern Russians also are genetically close of all Slavic peoples only to the Poles and similar to the Balts. However, this does not mean the northern Russians origin from the Balts or the Poles, more likely, that all the peoples of the Nordic gene pool are descendants of Paleo-European population, which has remained around Baltic Sea.[47][81]
Russians have sometimes found it useful to emphasize their self-perceived ability to assimilate other people to the Russian ethnicity - and as a historic great power with imperial expansionist tendencies the Russian state has sometimes encouraged Russian-centred monoculturalism. Steppe peoples, Tatars, Baltic Germans, Lithuanians and native Siberians in Rus', Muscovy or the Russian Empire could in theory become "Russians" (Russian: русские) simply by accepting Russian Orthodoxy as their faith.[83][84]
The attitude of ready inclusivity is summed up in the popular phrase (sometimes attributed to Emperor Alexander III of Russia) - Хочешь быть русским - будь им! (transl. You want to be Russian - be that!).[85]
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Russian literature split into Soviet and white émigré parts. In the 1930s, Socialist realism became the predominant trend in Russia. Its leading figure was Maxim Gorky, who laid the foundations of this style.[108]Mikhail Bulgakov was one of the leading writers of the Soviet era.[109]Nikolay Ostrovsky's novel How the Steel Was Tempered has been among the most successful works of Russian literature. Influential émigré writers include Vladimir Nabokov.[110] Some writers dared to oppose Soviet ideology, such as Nobel Prize-winning novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote about life in the Gulag camps.[111]
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.[citation needed]
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.[187]
^ abKappeler, Andreas (2023). Ungleiche Brüder: Russen und Ukrainer vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart [Unequal Brothers: Russians and Ukrainians from the Middle Ages to the Present] (in German). München: C.H.Beck oHG. ISBN978-3-406-80042-9.
^Paszkiewicz, H.K. (1963). The Making of the Russian Nation. Darton, Longman & Todd. p. 262.
^McKitterick, R. (15 June 1995). The New Cambridge Medieval History. Cambridge University Press. p. 497. ISBN0521364477.
^Mongaĭt, A.L. (1959). Archeology in the U.S.S.R. Foreign Languages Publishing House. p. 335.
^Ed. Timothy Reuter, The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume 3, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 494-497. ISBN0-521-36447-7.
^
Interactions between gene pools of Russian and Finnish-speaking populations from tver region: Analysis of 4 million snp markers. 2020. Bull Russ State Med Univ. 6, 15-22. O.P. Balanovsky, I.O. Gorin, Y.S. Zapisetskaya, A.A. Golubeva, E.V. Kostryukova, E.V. Balanovska. doi: 10.24075/BRSMU.2020.072.
^The Primary Chronicle is a history of the Ancient Rus' from around 850 to 1110, originally compiled in Kiev about 1113.
^Payne, Robert; Romanoff, Nikita (1 October 2002). Ivan the Terrible. Cooper Square Press. p. 67. ISBN978-1-4616-6108-5. Archived from the original on 28 September 2023. Retrieved 2 September 2023.
"Russia's population nightmare is going to get even worse". The Economist. 4 March 2023. Archived from the original on 10 April 2023. The decline was largest among ethnic Russians, whose number, the census of 2021 said, fell by 5.4m in 2010-21. Their share of the population fell from 78% to 72%.
^Teriukov, A.I. (2016). "Поморы" [Pomors]. Большая российская энциклопедия/Great Russian Encyclopedia Online (in Russian). Archived from the original on 9 September 2022. Retrieved 14 January 2024.
^
Nițescu, Julia (15 December 2022). "From Individual Destinies to an Emergent Community: Latins in Sixteenth-Century Moscow". In Simon Dreher, Simon; Mueller, Wolfgang (eds.). Foreigners in Muscovy: Western Immigrants in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Russia. Taylor & Francis. ISBN9781000802986. Retrieved 15 May 2024. Conversion to Orthodoxy became a rather common means for accessing positions at the court or entering the service of the grand prince. As the Muscovite state grew, it became the preferred method for integrating non-Orthodox individuals, whether Latins or Tatars.
^Khazanov, Anatoly M. (10 November 2020) [2003]. "A State without a Nation? Russia after empire". In T. V. Paul, T. V.; Ikenberry, G. John; Hall, John A. (eds.). The Nation-State in Question. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 93. ISBN9780691221496. Retrieved 15 May 2024. Russian nationalists considered linguistic and even cultural assimilation insufficient. To them and even to the majority of the general public, the sine qua non of assimilation was conversion to Orthodoxy. The Russian literature is abundant with characters of non-Russian ancestry who refer to their profession of the Orthodox faith in order to prove their Russianness.
^
For example:
Koldovskaya, Mariya (1998). "Хочешь быть русским - будь им!". Voĭna i rabochiĭ klass. Izd. gazety "Trud". p. 11. Retrieved 15 May 2024.
^ ab"Russian". University of Toronto. Archived from the original on 12 August 2021. Retrieved 9 July 2021. Russian is the most widespread of the Slavic languages and the largest native language in Europe. Of great political importance, it is one of the official languages of the United Nations – making it a natural area of study for those interested in geopolitics.
^Wakata, Koichi. "My Long Mission in Space". JAXA. Archived from the original on 11 March 2020. Retrieved 18 July 2021. The official languages on the ISS are English and Russian, and when I was speaking with the Flight Control Room at JAXA's Tsukuba Space Center during ISS systems and payload operations, I was required to speak in either English or Russian.
^"Official Languages". United Nations. Archived from the original on 13 July 2021. Retrieved 16 July 2021. There are six official languages of the UN. These are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. The correct interpretation and translation of these six languages, in both spoken and written form, is very important to the work of the Organization, because this enables clear and concise communication on issues of global importance.
^Letopisi: Literature of Old Rus'. Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary. ed. by Oleg Tvorogov. Moscow: Prosvescheniye ("Enlightenment"), 1996. (Russian: Летописи // Литература Древней Руси. Биобиблиографический словарь / под ред. О.В. Творогова. – М.: Просвещение, 1996.)
^Muckle, James (1984). "Nikolay Leskov: educational journalist and imaginative writer". New Zealand Slavonic Journal. Australia and New Zealand Slavists' Association: 81–110. JSTOR40921231.
^Boyd, William (3 July 2004). "A Chekhov lexicon". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 29 March 2022. Retrieved 15 January 2022. ...Chekhov, whatever his standing as a playwright, is quite probably the best short-story writer ever.
^Adams, Matthew S. (2014). "Rejecting the American Model: Peter Kropotkin's Radical Communalism". History of Political Thought. 35 (1). Imprint Academic: 147–173. JSTOR26227268.
^Brom, Libor (1988). "Dialectical Identity and Destiny: A General Introduction to Alexander Zinoviev's Theory of the Soviet Man". Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. 42 (1/2). Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association: 15–27. doi:10.2307/1347433. JSTOR1347433. S2CID146768452.
^ abcExcerpted from Curtis, Glenn E., ed. (1998). "Russia – Music". Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress. Archived from the original on 25 June 2021. Retrieved 25 June 2021.
^Norris, Gregory (1980). Stanley, Sadie (ed.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition. London: Macmillan. p. 707. ISBN978-0-333-23111-1.
^Higgins, Charlotte (22 November 2000). "Perfect isn't good enough". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 8 April 2022. Retrieved 7 July 2021. Thirty years ago Gidon Kremer was rated as one of the world's outstanding violinists. Then he really started making waves...
^Scaruffi, Piero. "Ganelin Trio". Archived from the original on 9 July 2021. Retrieved 7 July 2021. The Ganelin Trio was the greatest ensemble of free-jazz in continental Europe, namely in Russia. Like other European improvisers, pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin, woodwind player Vladimir Chekasin and percussionist Vladimir Tarasov too found a common ground between free-jazz and Dadaism. Their shows were as much music as they were provocative antics.
^Pellegrinelli, Lara (6 February 2008). "DDT: Notes from Russia's Rock Underground". National Public Radio. Archived from the original on 31 March 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2021. For the Russian band DDT, it was hard enough being a rock group under the Soviet regime. The band, which formed in 1981, gave secret concerts in apartments, bomb shelters, and even kindergarten classrooms to avoid the attention of authorities... Later, the policies of perestroika allowed bands to perform out in the open. DDT went on to become one of Russia's most popular acts...
^"Eldar Ryazanov And His Films". Radio Free Europe. 30 November 2015. Archived from the original on 31 March 2022. Retrieved 27 May 2021. Eldar Ryazanov, a Russian film director whose iconic comedies captured the flavor of life and love in the Soviet Union while deftly skewering the absurdities of the communist system... His films ridiculed Soviet bureaucracy and trained a clear eye on the predicaments and peculiarities of daily life during the communist era, but the light touch of his satire helped him dodge government censorship.
^Prokhorova, Elena, "The Man Who Made Them Laugh: Leonid Gaidai, the King of Soviet Comedy", in Beumers, Birgit (2008) A History of Russian Cinema, Berg Publishers, ISBN978-1845202156, pp. 519–542
^Birgit Beumers. A History of Russian Cinema. Berg Publishers (2009). ISBN978-1-84520-215-6. p. 143.
^Rem Koolhaas, James Westcott, Stephan Petermann (2017). Elements of Architecture. Taschen. p. 102. ISBN978-3-8365-5614-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Jarzombek, Mark M.; Prakash, Vikramaditya; Ching, Frank (2010). A Global History of Architecture 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons. p. 544. ISBN978-0470402573.
^There is no official census of religion in Russia, and estimates are based on surveys only. In August 2012, ARENAArchived 12 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine determined that about 46.8% of Russians are Christians (including Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and non-denominational), which is slightly less than an absolute 50%+ majority. However, later that year the Levada CenterArchived 31 December 2012 at the Wayback Machine determined that 76% of Russians are Christians, and in June 2013 the Public Opinion FoundationArchived 15 April 2020 at the Wayback Machine determined that 65% of Russians are Christians. These findings are in line with PewArchived 10 May 2020 at the Wayback Machine's 2010 survey, which determined that 73.3% of Russians are Christians, with VTSIOMArchived 29 September 2020 at the Wayback Machine's 2010 survey (~77% Christian), and with Ipsos MORIArchived 17 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine's 2011 survey (69%).
Sankina, S. L. (2000). Этническая история средневекового населения Новгородской земли [Ethnic history of the medieval population of the Novgorod land] (in Russian). Saint Petersburg. ISBN5-86007-210-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Zelenin, Dmitry K. (1991) [1927]. Восточнославянская этнография [Russian (East Slavic) Ethnography] (in Russian). Translated by K.D. Tsivina. Moscow: Nauka. Archived from the original on 1 August 2021. Retrieved 2 August 2021. [First published in German as Russische (Ostslawische) Volkskunde (Berlin; Leipzig, 1927).]{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)