Demographic “catastrophe” of the Russian Finno-Ugric peoples: Social and political motivation for the drift of identities

Abstract

The results of the 2021 population census showed a sharp and significant decrease in the number of Finno-Ugric peoples in Russia. For example, the number of Karelians decreased by 46.7 %, Komi-Permyaks — by 41 %, Mordovians — by 35 % (in 1939, the number of Mordovians was 1375 thousand people, in 2021 — 484 thousand). Between the 2002 and 2010 censuses there was also a large-scale decline in the number of Finno-Ugric peoples, which allowed some local ethnic activists to talk about a “demographic catastrophe”, “extinction of peoples”. The idea of “extinction” began to be actively exploited at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s and became the basis for the formation of ethno-national movements, the programs of which were built on the concept of “the revival of peoples”. In Komi, the Committee for the Revival of the Komi People was created, in Mordovia, the society “Velmena” (“Revival”) arose. The leaders of ethnic and ethno-political organizations strove to act not only as culturetragers, but also as moral censors not only for their own ethnic groups, but also for regional communities as a whole. But their mission failed, because ethnic entrepreneurs not only failed to become leaders of public opinion in the regions inhabited by the Finno-Ugric peoples, but turned out to be incapable of developing effective programs for ethno-cultural development, which was shown by the results of the census. In addition, the census showed that the transformation of the Finno-Ugric ethnic groups from agrarian to urban ethnic groups leads to an obvious strengthening of the processes of individual integration into the host urban communities, in which the Russians are the dominant group, and the Russian language dominates in all spheres of communication.