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Russians

Origins

See the article about the old legend Lech, Czech and Rus.

See the article about the Primary Chronicle.

See the article about the Rus' (people).

The modern Russian ethnicity is formed from two groups (Northern and Southern) made up in past of Kriviches, Ilmen Slavs, Radimichs, Vyatiches and Severians East Slavic tribes. Genetic studies show that modern Russians do not differ significantly from Poles or Ukrainians. Russians in northern European Russia, however, also share moderate genetic similarities with Finno-Ugric peoples,, who lived in modern north central European Russia and who were partly assimilated by the Slavs as the Slavs migrated northeastwards. Among those peoples were Merya and Muromian.
Outside archaeological remains, little is known about the predecessors to Russians in general prior to 859 AD, the year from which the account in the Primary Chronicle starts. It's thought that by 600 AD, the Slavs had split linguistically into southern, western, and eastern branches. Eastern one was settled between the Western Bug and the Dnieper River in what is now Ukraine; from the 1st century AD through almost the millennium they have been spreading peacefully northward to the Baltic lands assimilating indigents and forming the Dregovich, Radimich and Vyatich Slavic tribes on the Baltic substratum, therefore having language features such as vowel reduction. Later, both Belarusians and South Russians formed themselves on this ethnic linguistic ground. Pivtorak. Formation and dialectal differenciaton of the Old Rus language. 1988

Another group of Slavs moved since the 6th century from Pomerania to northeast of the Baltic Sea, where they encountered the Varangians of the Rus' Khaganate and established the important regional center of Novgorod. This is possibly why Russians are known in Baltic-Finnic languages as Venedes, a name derived for West Slavs. The same Slavic ethnic population also settled the present-day Tver Oblast and the region of Beloozero. With the Finno-Ugric substratum they formed Kriviches and Ilmen Slavs.

Emergence of Russian ethnicity

According to some modern ethnologists, ethnic Russians originated from the earlier Rus' people and gradually evolved into a separate ethnicity from the western Rus peoples, who became known as the modern-day Belarusians and Ukrainians. Early ancestors of the Russians were East Slavic tribes migrating to the East European Plain in the early Middle Ages. Most prominent Slavic tribes in the area of what is now European Russia included Vyatichs, Krivichs, Radimichs, Severians and Ilmen Slavs. By the 11th century, East Slavs assimilated the Finno-Ugric tribes Merya and Muroma and the Baltic tribe Eastern Galindae that used to inhabit the same area with them (now Central Russia).

Ethnic Russians used to be referred to as Great Russians (as opposed to the ethnonyms White Russian and Little Russian) and began to be recognized as a distinct ethnic group in the 15th century. At that time, during the consolidation of the Russian Tsardom as a regional power, they were referred to as Moscovites. Between the 12th and 16th century, Russians known as Pomors migrated to Northern Russia and settled the White Sea coasts. As a result of these migrations and Russian conquests, following the liberation from the Mongol Golden Horde domination during the 15th and 16th century, Russians settled the Volga, Urals and Northern Caucasus regions. Between the 17th and 19th century, migrants settled eastwards in the vast, sparsely inhabited areas of Siberia and the Russian Far East. The Cossack movement played a significant role in these territorial expansions and migrations.

Population

Russians are the most numerous ethnic group in Europe and one of the largest in the world with a population of about 140 million people worldwide. Roughly 100 million ethnic Russians live in Russia and about 17 million more live in the neighboring countries. A relatively significant number of Russians, around 3 million, live elsewhere in the world, mostly in the Americas and Western Europe, but also in other places of Eastern Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

Culture

Russian art is influential and considered by many to be unique. There are many important Russian painters in history. Russian humour gains much of its wit from the great flexibility and richness of the Russian language. Russian literature was greatly influential to world literature. Notable Russian writers include Aleksandr Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Russians also gave the classical music world some very famous composers, including Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and his contemporaries, the Mighty Handful, including Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In the 20th century Russian music was credited with such influential composers as Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinski.

Language

A group of Russian children, 1909. Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.

Russian ( (help·info), transliteration: , ) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of three (or, according to some authorities, four) living members of the East Slavic languages, the others being Belarusian and Ukrainian.

Written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century onwards, and while Russian preserves much of East Slavonic grammar and a Common Slavonic word base, modern Russian exhibits a large stock of borrowed international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. Due to the status of the Soviet Union as a super power, Russian had great political importance in the 20th century, and is still one of the official languages of the United Nations.

Russian has palatal secondary articulation of consonants, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found in almost all consonant phonemes and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language. Another important aspect is the reduction, or drawling, of unstressed vowels, not entirely unlike a similar process present in most forms of English. Stress in Russian is generally quite unpredictable and can be placed on almost any syllable, one of the most difficult aspects for foreign language learners.

Religion

Around 63% of the Russia's population identify themselves with Orthodox Christianity most of whom belong to the Russian Orthodox Church, which played a vital role in the development of Russian national identity. In other countries Russian faithful usually belong to the local Orthodox congregations which either have a direct connection (like the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, autonomous from the Moscow Patriarchate) or historical origin (like the Orthodox Church in America or a Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia) with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Even non-religious Russian people may associate themselves with 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.

Other world religions have negligible representation among ethnic Russians. The most prominent are Baptists with over 85,000 Russian adherents. Others are mostly Pentecostals, Evangelicals, Seventh-day Adventists, Lutherans and Jehovah's Witnesses.

For the last decades Slavianism (a Slavic Neopagan movement) seems to gain certain popularity and there are many web-sites dedicated to the study of the ancient Slavic religious traditions and thoughts.

Russians outside of Russia

Ethnic Russians historically migrated throughout the area of former Russian Empire and Soviet Union, sometimes encouraged to re-settle in borderlands by Tsarist and later Soviet government. On some occasions ethnic Russian communities such as Lipovans who settled in the Danube delta or Doukhobors in Canada immigrated as religious dissidents fleeing the central authority.

After the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War starting in 1917, many Russians were forced to leave their homeland fleeing the Bolshevik regime, and millions became refugees. Many white émigrés were participants in the White movement, although the term is broadly applied to anyone who may have left the country due to the change in regime.

Today the largest ethnic Russian diasporas outside of Russia live in former Soviet states such as Ukraine (about 8 million), Kazakhstan (about 4.5 million), Belarus (about 1.2 million), Latvia (about 700,000) with the most Russian settlement out of the Baltic States which includes Lithuania and Estonia, Uzbekistan (about 650,000) and Kyrgyzstan (about 600,000).

Over a million Russian Jews emigrated to Israel during and after the Refusenik movements; some brought ethnic Russian relatives along with them. Out of more than one million Russian-speaking immigrants in Israel, about 300,000 are not Jewish. There are also small Russian communities in the Balkans, Eastern and Central European nations such as Germany and Poland, as well Russians settled in China, Japan, South Korea, Latin America (i.e. Mexico and Brazil) and Australia. These communities may identify themselves either as Russians or citizens of these countries, or both, to varying degrees.

The governments and the majority public opinion in Estonia and Latvia, which has the largest share of ethnic Russians among the Baltic countries, hold the view that many of the ethnic Russians arrived in these countries as part of a Soviet-era colonization and deliberate Russification by changing the countries' ethnic balance. Among the many Russians who arrived during the Soviet era most came there for economic reasons, or in some cases, because they were ordered to move.

People who had arrived in Latvia and Estonia during the Soviet era, including their descendants born in these countries, mostly Russians, were provided only with an option to acquire naturalised citizenship which required passing a test demonstrating knowledge of the national language as well as knowledge of the country's history and customs. The language issue is still contentious, particularly in Latvia, where ethnic Russians have protested against plans to educate them in the national language instead of Russian. Since 1992, Estonia has naturalized some 137,000 residents of undefined citizenship, mainly ethnic Russians. 136,000, or 10 percent of the total population, remain without citizenship.

Ethnic Russians in former Soviet Union states

Although not among the largest immigrant groups, significant numbers of Russians emigrated to Canada, Australia, the United States and Brazil. Brighton Beach, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, is an example of a large community of recent Russian immigrants. Another one is in Sunny Isles Beach, a northern suburb of Miami and "Little Moscow" in Hollywood of the Los Angeles area.

At the same time, many ethnic Russians from former Soviet territories have emigrated to Russia itself since the 1990s. Many of them became refugees from a number of states of Central Asia and Caucasus (as well as from the separatist Chechen Republic), forced to flee during political unrest and hostilities towards Russians.

There are also the million-plus ethnic Germans, descendants of 16th to 18th century German settlement under the Russian empire from Belarus, the Ukraine and Central Asia in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Many have left Russia and other former Soviet states for Germany since the 1990s but aren't considered culturally German, as they have been "Russified".

Both the European Union and the Council of Europe, as well as the Russian government, expressed their concern during the 1990s about minority rights in several countries, most notably Latvia. In Moldova, the Russian-dominated Transnistria region broke away from government control amid fears the country would soon reunite with Romania. In June 2006 Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the plan to introduce national policy aiming at encouraging ethnic Russians to immigrate to Russia.

Russian Chinese

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, many Russians who were identified with the White army moved to China — most of them settling in Harbin and Shanghai. By the 1930s Harbin had 100,000 Russians. Many of these Russians had to move back to the Soviet Union after World War II. Today, a large group of people in northern China can still speak Russian as a second language.
Russians (eluosizu) are one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China (as the Russ), and there are approximately 15,600 Russian Chinese living mostly in northern Xinjiang, and also in Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang. See also Harbin Russians and China Far East Railway.

Notable achievements

Various Russians have greatly contributed to the world of music, sports, science, technology and arts. Notable Russian scientists include Dmitri Mendeleev, Alexander Popov (one of inventors of radio), Nikolai Lobachevsky, Ivan Pavlov, Alexander Lodygin, Pavel Yablochkov, Nikolai Zhukovsky, Alexander Prokhorov and Nikolay Basov (co-inventors of laser), Georgiy Gamov, Vladimir Zworykin, Nikolai Semyonov, Aleksandr Butlerov, Andrei Sakharov, Sergey Korolyov and Mstislav Keldysh (creators of the Soviet space program), Aleksandr Lyapunov, Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky, Nikolay Bogolyubov, Andrei Kolmogorov, Andrei Tupolev, Yuri Denisyuk (the first practicable method of holography), Mikhail Lomonosov, Vladimir Vernadsky, Pyotr Kapitsa, Igor Sikorsky, etc.

The first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, was Russian, and the first artificial satellite to be put into outer space, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Soviet Union and was developed mainly by Sergey Korolyov who had a Russian father (his mother was Ukrainian).
Russian Literature representatives like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin, and many more, reached a high status in world literature. In the field of the novel, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in particular were important figures, and have remained internationally renowned. Some scholars have described one or the other as the greatest novelist ever.
Russian composers who reached a high status in the world of music include Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Prokofiev, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Russian people had a crucial part in the victory over Nazi Germany at World War II. During the war, the Soviet Union lost around 27 million citizens (Russians having the highest percentage there), about half of all World War II casualties and the vast majority of Allied casualties. According to the British historian Richard Overy, the Eastern Front contained more combat than all the other European fronts combined. The German army suffered 80% to 93% of all of its total WW2 combat casualties on the Eastern Front. Overy also wrote that it was on the Eastern Front that the war was won or lost, for if the Red Army had not succeeded against all odds in halting the Germans in 1941 and then inflicting the first major defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943, it is difficult to see how the western democracies, Britain and the US, could have expelled Germany from its new empire.

References and notes

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