Russians

Russians

ETHNONYMS: Russkiy, Velikorusskiy; formerly, Rus', Ross

Orientation

Identification. Russians are the largest subdivision of the Eastern Slavs, the other members of which are Ukrainians and Belarussians. The Russian language emerged from the common East Slavic tongue, Ancient Russian or Old Church Slavonic, by the fourteenth century a.d. in the Rostov-Suzdal' area of central Russia.

Location. In 1979 eight administrative provinces (oblasts) of central Russia were over 97 percent Russian; in addition, over 90 percent of the population in a north' south ellipse encompassed by St. Petersburg, Arkhangel'sk, Gorki, Volgograd, Rostov-na-Donu, Belgorod, and Smolensk was Russian. Three areas in the Urals and western Siberia—Kurgan, Novosibirsk, and Kemerovo oblasts—likewise were over 90 percent Russian.

These Russian areas are flat or rolling, with a mix of forests and steppes, mostly glaciated in European Russia and loessial in western Siberia. They have cold, snowy winters and summers ranging from cool to very hot. Soils are podzolic in the north and chernozemic in the south. The Russian lands are transected by important rivers, the Oka, Volga, Don, Donets, and Severnaya Dvina in Europe and the Ob system in western Siberia. Peripheral waters include Lakes Ladoga and Onega, the White Sea, and the Gulf of Finland in the European North and the Sea of Azov in the south.

Natural conditions in the Russian environment have been profoundly altered by agriculture, which has left only residual forests south of Moscow; by extensive water development, especially on the Volga and Don; and especially by urbanization. In 1989 only fourteen of thirty primarily Russian oblasts were under 70 percent urban. Tambov, 56 percent urban, was the most rural Russian area in Europe. Conversely, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Ivanovo, and Yaroslavl in Europe and Kemerovo in Siberia were over 80 percent urban. The largest primarily Russian cities were Moscow (9.0 million), St. Petersburg (5.0 million), Nizhny Novgorod (1.4 million), and Novosibirsk (1.4 million).

Despite the degree of urbanization, Russians remain deeply attached to their natural environment. A dacha in the countryside, even if it is a humble cabin, is much sought after and often obtained. Russian poetry, which remains a highly esteemed expressive form (and a mainstay of education), often celebrates the beauty of the land. Contrast Pushkin's "Winter Evening" and Yesenin's "The Golden Grove Has Ceased to Speak." Although these poems were written years ago, the environment to which they refer—birches, oaks, pines, feather grass, nightingales and cranes, and the Russian rivers—has deep and pervasive meaning to this day.

Demography. Expanding with the rise of Muscovy, the Russian people numbered more than 8 million by 1678. Concentrated in central and northern Russia and thinly settled in the Urals and Siberia, they formed about 40 percent of the population of the Russian Empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1917 their numbers had grown to about 76 million, with somewhat less than half of these in their ancient core area but only 10 percent outside the boundaries of today's Russia. Prior to World War II the Russian population was characterized by high fertility and mortality—a crude birth rate of 33 per 1,000, a death rate of 23.6 per 1,000, and a life expectancy of about 44 years. World War II and its aftermaths had disastrous effects: the 1959 census reported that, for the ages 35 and over, there were only 54 men for 100 women, the absolute deficiency of men in these ages coming to 12.2 million. By 1979-1980 the Russian population had reached 137.4 million, with 25 percent of the gain between 1939 and 1979 coming from Russification, but the natural increase rate, with dropping fertility, averaged only about 6 per 1,000 over the same period. Recent Russian life expectancies at birth are among the lowest for any urbanized population: the 1988 figures were 69.9 years for both sexes, 64.8 years for men, and 74.4 years for women. Infant mortality for the Russian Republic in that year was 18.9 per 1,000 births (three-quarters of the USSR average). By 1979 one-third of the Russian population of 137 million lived in the old core area, another half elsewhere in the Russian Republic, and only 17 percent in the other parts of the USSR, where, however, they often constituted a large minority or a near majority (Estonia). Today the population is 150 million. The Russian population has grown at a historic rate of 0.9 percent annually.

Cardiovascular stress associated with smoking, alcoholism, the workplace, and family life is the major cause of death today. For women, the combination of heavy domestic work loads and full-time employment contributes to the death rate. This, as well as poor housing, spouse abuse (associated with alcoholism), and unplanned pregnancies partly account for a lifetime average of five abortions per woman—more than twice the number of live births. Fewer than 60 percent of Russian women practice a contraceptive method other than withdrawal or the rhythm method; the total number of women suffering from the consequences of abortions and related medical practices is hard to assess but certainly high.

Migration, particularly to and from Siberia, has had a marked effect on the population, with only 10 to 20 percent of the migrants remaining in their adopted homes after five years. Such movements of population are of course associated with social and political stress.

Linguistic Affiliation. Speakers of Russian form the largest East Slavic speech community, the other members being Ukrainian and Belarussian. After the Common Slavic, Common East Slavic, and Old Russian stages, the Russian language emerged in about the fourteenth century in central Russia (centered on Rostov-Suzdal'). The Russian language has historically been divided among northern, cental, and southern dialects and by marked differences between the popular, administrative, and ecclesiastical styles, which are still evident in vocabulary and syntax. Russian has also been influenced by other languages, notably Finno-Ugric in its early stages, Germanic, Turkic, Greek, Polish, and, above all, French and, most recently, English.

History and Cultural Relations

Since the fifteenth century, the Russian state has been distinguished by centralized, generally autocratic rule, strongly dependent upon a service class (oprichnina, dvoryanstvo, Communist party). This was particularly developed by Peter I. Even in 1987 a party monograph stated that "it is important that not only directors, but rank and file workmen, collective farmers, and intellectuals understand their place and role in perestroyka" (Laptev, ed., 1987, 22). Although alternative foci of power (the Orthodox church, the National Assembly Zemskiy Sobor, the high aristocracy, the local Zemstva) have emerged from time to time, they have been repeatedly co-opted and controlled. Only the widely dispersed, deeply devoted, and secretive Old Believers have resisted control despite persecution since the seventeenth century.

The rise and expansion of the Russian state, in a context of hostile states and peoples, has been at enormous cost in wars and rebellions, famines and epidemics. The Tatar raids, the Time of Troubles (a period of dynastic conflict, 1598-1613), the Swedish War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, and world wars I and II brought great misery. For 150 years, the drafting of serfs for 25 years of military service was deeply mourned in every village. Peter I instituted a modest vehicle for military and civilian upward mobility, through the system of progressively earned ranks. A modern-day parallel was the nomenklatura, a system of specified ranks in the former USSR.

Autocratic, often capricious, political power has combined with other elements of Russian social culture to limit the extent and stability of social stratification. In earlier times, estates were constantly being dispersed because of falls from favor and the equal inheritance rights of all sons (as opposed to primogeniture). Although there were many merchant families, some of them extremely wealthy, trade was in general not highly valued and was prohibited for those of noble descent. Modest alternative avenues of social ascent (as defined in the Tables of Rank) were open even to Jews, who were otherwise a persecuted minority confined to the western Pale.

Serfdom, which began during the medieval period, reached its nadir in the eighteenth century when Aleksandr Radishchev's A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow disclosed appalling abuses. Conditions on the great estates, particularly for household serfs, were those of true slavery, although they were better for the land-working serfs, particularly those under the quitrent (obrok ) system (the other system being to work on shares). Because, as in other frontier lands, there was no serfdom in Siberia, it provided an escape and some relief—hence the continuing stream of fugitive serfs, who settled these regions and often became Cossacks.

From the 1930s in the former USSR, the collective farmer represented a dispossessed class lacking the internal passport needed for urban residence. Only collective-farm chairmen—party appointees after 1956—were in a position to control farm resources and incomes. Virtually the only area of collective-farm freedom was the de facto possession of small private plots that produced an extraordinary share of Russian foodstuffs, including meat, dairy products, and vegetables. This is increasingly the case today. Within this rural domain, incidentally, elements of customary law have persisted with remarkable vitality. Despite the partial privatization of land and various programs and projects, many Russian peasants are primarily interested in more effective production (e.g., by working together) than they are in private ownership of land as a matter of principle.

Russian industrialization has varied between periods of intensive development and those of prolonged stagnation. In the Kievan period, the cities, as archaeology shows, were centers of local and even international trade and of production through many sophisticated crafts. By the sixteenth century Muscovy's trade with England and other parts of Europe had stimulated technological development. But it was not until Peter I that a strategically oriented program of industrialization was initiated and pushed forward with considerable success. Its central and continuing weaknesses were the dependence on facilities granted to court favorites and on serf (i.e., slave) labor. Despite these weaknesses, there was, in the eighteenth century, phenomenal growth in many areas, the opening of mines and factories, and, among central and northern peasants, the growth of large cottage industries with an enormous inventory of goods such as wooden spoons for export to Asia via Kazan. By the nineteenth century steam power was used, especially in the growing textile industry; during the latter part of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries, Russia experienced the most rapid industrial growth in modern world history. In general, though, government efforts failed to help rising small entrepreneurs, and the subsidization of inefficient favorites went on. By the eve of World War I, Russia had become an industrial world power, comparable to France, Germany, and the other Western powers that had aided it with their capital.

Although permanent urbanization encompassed barely 10 percent of the Russian population in 1913, a great part of the central and northern Russian population was engaged in migratory industrial labor as well as crafts. This permitted very rapid economic growth in the 1920s. With the rise of German and Japanese militarism, Soviet industrialization took a strategic direction, stressing widely dispersed heavy industrial production, which has continued to dominate to this day. Vast numbers of workers were essential for the huge tasks, and forced labor was a basic recruitment mechanism from 1933 to 1957. In addition, between 1940 and 1957, the State Labor Reserves drafted millions of young people, whose barracks life greatly depressed family formation, induced cultural discontinuity, and encouraged alcoholism and violence.

Generally, the new cities built standardized housing—apartment blocks with central play areas for children. But housing rarely approached real needs, nor did it provide the desired privacy. In 1984 in Kemerovo, about 40 percent of the population lived in apartment blocks, another 40 percent resided in traditional wooden houses without running water or plumbing but with electricity, and the remainder were in dormitories.

The class of intellectuals, despite attrition through oppression, censorship, and internal conflicts, has been of great significance in modern times. With its origins mainly in the educational reforms of the eighteenth century, and drastically enlarged through the intellectual explosion and political tensions of the nineteenth century, the intelligentsia, defined partly by intellectual and partly by political criteria, became a decisive factor in the revolutions of the twentieth century and remains peculiarly powerful in the chaotic scene of the early 1990s.

Economy

In 1985 the Russian Republic had about 83.8 million persons of working age (men reckoned from 16 to 59 years of age; women from 16 to 54). The number employed as workers and service personnel was about 63 million, whereas collective farmers numbered 4.5 million. Fifty-two percent of this civilian employment was female. Eighty-one percent of the working-age population was working. Nonworkers, unemployed, and people working exclusively in the private sector composed the remainder—or somewhat more, since a fair proportion of older men were still employed. The total labor force, including that concerned with private agricultural plots, was divided as follows: industry and construction, 42 percent; agriculture and forestry, 14 percent; transport and communications, 10 percent; trade and food services, 8 percent; health, physical education, social security, and science, 18 percent: governmental administration, 3 percent; housing and miscellaneous, 5 percent.

Economic returns included pay and entitlements, which depended on the place of employment, party status, and other determinants. In 1985 pay averaged 210 rubles per month, running highest in water transport (287 rubles) and lowest in "cultural work" (123 rubles). Service in remote areas, such as the Arctic, led to large bonuses; all Siberians get "northern percentages" (but prices are higher in Siberia). Entitlements covered housing, health care, day care, vacation sites, and even the right to purchase luxuries such as Volga cars, but these benefits were all but absent for the "unorganized" population, which included children not attending nurseries and schools, the unemployed, and the retired, particularly in rural areas.

The state and cooperative retail trade, including food services, provide only a partial picture of consumption; the unofficial shadow economy is not measured in the official statistics, although it involves a large part of the economy; nor are the large price differences for various social groups included. Official figures for 1985 indicate that 51 percent of the total volume of sales was for foodstuffs, including 5 percent on meat and fowl and 3 percent on bologna. Dairy products took about 3 percent; fats, 2.4 percent; eggs, almost 2 percent. Bread, heavily subsidized, accounted for 2.6 percent; vegetables and fruits, for 3.5 percent. Potatoes continue to be a mainstay of the diet, and most families seem to have a supply of them. Of nonfood items, clothes, footwear, and cloth were the largest component at 21.4 percent. Consumer durables (i.e., cars, furniture, carpets, bicycles, and motorcycles) came to 8.4 percent, whereas soap, detergents, and perfume took 1.6 percent. Printed matter—Russians are avid readers—was 1.4 percent. All else came to 15.7 percent.

These statistics reflect the austere way of life of the majority of the Russian population. Only occasionally can an average Russian enjoy traditional foods such as pirozhk i (meator cabbage-filled turnovers) or go to the circus, enjoy tapes or concerts, or travel freely by car or motorcycle to escape overcrowded housing. This context gives rise to high rates of alcoholism and family violence.

Kinship, Marriage, and Family

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the bilateral kindred was the basic Russian social unit among both peasants and aristocrats (such as the Aksakov family on the Ural frontier). This kindred was delimited in Russian kinship terminology by the exogamic units set by churchly canon: four "links" for consanguinai kin, two for affinal; only the archaic term dyadina (father's brother's wife, mother's brother's wife) extended further. The terminology is isolating, except that no distinction is made among consanguinal kin between male and female lines of descent; cousin terms derive from sibling terms; gender suffixes distinguish the sexes among the consanguinai kin of ascending generations and among affinal kin (except daughter's husband and son's wife); and the terms for daughter's husband and sister's husband are merged. Within the kindred, patterns of behavior other than exogamy were largely determined by the specific coresidence patterns of each household. The nuclear family, often supplemented by a grandmother or aunt, was particularly important in the south, but in the central regions patrilocally or fraternally extended families were common, and in the north the large extended family, often numbering more than twenty persons in the household, was typical. Within these households, whatever their size, parental, especially paternal, authority prevailed. To this day on the collective farms, and to a lesser extent in the cities, various joint household budgets persist. Christenings, reverence of icons, and parental blessings of various kinds strengthen human relations. A basic, endearing term for all types of kin is rodnoy or rodnaya (kinsman, kinswoman), from rod (clan). Until recently, at least, godparenthood (kum, kuma ), often by a relative, constituted a lifelong tie of central importance.

Although premarital sex and single parenthood were always common among Russian peasants and workers, marriage continues to be a major socioreligious act. Traditionally it was mainly an economic contract between the heads of two households, reinforced by the payment of the wedding costs by the groom's household and the provision of a substantial dowry by the mother of the bride. Both patrilocal and matrilocal marriage were practiced, although the former was preferred and more frequent. In matrilocal marriages, parents without sons adopted a son-in-law under a contract that stipulated that he support them for the remainder of their lives and give them a decent burial. Although marriages today are individual commitments, they are often associated with obligations to older female relatives. In Kemerovo, for example, families can gain prized housing rights by means of a coresident grandmother, real or adopted, who is thus protected and in turn helps with child care and household tasks. (This "structural babushka" may be a grandparent's sister or other older female relative.)

Sociopolitical Organization

In contrast to the abundance of pre-Revolutionary data, recent materials on Russian social structure are fragmentary. Clearly much has changed since 1985. It may be surmised, however, that traditional kin groups, informal networks, and elements of customary law have persisted to a considerable extent in areas least disturbed by migration (e.g., Ryazan and Tambov provinces). The pervasive social controls of the Communist party, designed to suppress alternative sources and processes of power, seem to have had major limitations and were often mitigated by kindred and friends acting in a "handshake all around" (krugovaya poruka )—that is, exchanging and sharing food and other commodities in informal networks.

Religion

The Christianization of Russia in a.d. 988 was a formal royal act that signified the continuing closeness of church and state. Even during Mongol domination, the church was exempt from taxation and enjoyed vast possessions. Through ritual, saintly example, and legal innovations, the church promoted such values as the cardinal importance of love, the respect due to parents, the obligation to give alms, and the abhorrence of suicide. Much of the customary law, including aspects of women's rights, came from the church. The veneration of icons (e.g., in the "red corner" in peasant homes) was adopted in various figurative ways by the Communist party for its own sacred imagery. Prayers and blessings by family elders on important occasions, religious processions, and fasting as a major expression of religious devotion became deeply embedded in peasant and worker culture. Christening and burial in consecrated ground have retained much of their significance, even though priests as ritualists were never very close to peasant or worker life. Such non-Christian practices as soothsaying on New Year's have persisted. Today over half of all Russians, particularly in Europe, appear to be active religious believers, their Orthodox dogma and ritual having changed very little. Weddings and other rituals still have a traditional character; Easter ritual trappings such as painted eggs and kulich cake are retained in a quasi-secular setting. The revitalization of Orthodoxy has gone hand in hand with the rapid growth of various Eastern religions, mysticisms, parapsychology, and belief in "paranormal phenomena" (some of the latter being regarded as "scientific").

See also Don Cossacks; Old Believers; Russian Peasants; Siberiaki

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DIMITRI SHIMKIN