Ethnic heterogeneity of Russian regions: Dynamics by decades in the post-soviet period

Abstract

Many Russian researchers note that the most important feature of ethnodemographic processes in Russia in the post-Soviet period was the increase in the overwhelming majority of republics in the share of titular peoples. To conduct a comparative characterization of the complexity of the national composition of the population of the country’s regions, as well as to compare changes in the level of ethnic heterogeneity over a certain period, the ethnic mosaic index is most often used. The purpose of this work is to identify general trends and features of changes in the ethnic heterogeneity of Russian regions in each of the three post-Soviet decades using the cartographic research method. The novelty of the proposed methodology is associated with the simultaneous display on the cartographic chart of two indicators: the dynamics of the index of ethnic mosaic and the proportion of the Russian population. In the first post-Soviet decade, the tendency to increase the mono-ethnicity of the country’s regions began to manifest itself more and more, which covered more than half of the subjects, both “Russian” and national. The processes taking place in this decade allow us to speak about the initial stages of regional ethnic polarization, which replaced the predominant growth of ethnic heterogeneity in the country’s regions during the Soviet period. In the second post-Soviet decade, the general trend towards regional ethnic polarization has already fully manifested itself, when the overwhelming number of “Russian” regions and most of the national subjects followed the path of mono-ethnization. In the third post-Soviet decade, there was a slight slowdown in the processes occurring in the first two post-Soviet decades, and even a partial return to the dynamics characteristic of the Soviet period. Nevertheless, the noted trends have not yet changed the general trend of the post-Soviet period, which can be characterized as an increase in regional ethnic polarization in the country due to the increase in mono-ethnicity of both “Russians” and the majority of national subjects of the Russian Federation.