Ethno-cultural Differentiation in Household Production

Russia is a multi-ethnic country with more than two hundred different ‘officially recognized’ ethnic groups. Of these, twenty-seven have been given administrative recognition in the form of national republics, which together with non-ethnically based oblasts and krais (regions and territories) make up the Russian Federation. The Great Russians are numerically the most dominant group accounting for 80 per cent of the population. Next come the Tatars at 5.5 million, or 4 per cent of the total, and then Ukrainians, Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Chechens, Armenians, and other much less numerous groups. Soviet nationality policy did much to preserve ethnic identities in Russia, even though these were supposed to be transcended by a higher ‘Soviet socialist’ identity. When the USSR collapsed it did so along ethnic lines, and the post-Soviet Russian government was forced to accept ethnoterritorialism as an organizing principle of the new federal state (Smith, 1990, 1999). The major nationalities are not spatially discrete; many members of the most numerous nationalities live outside their republic and in only a minority of the national republics is the titular ethnic group the majority population. However, at lower scales, the picture is different and spatial segregation along ethnic lines can be marked, especially in rural areas. The southern steppe, describing an arc stretching from the Ukrainian border in the west to the regions beyond the River Volga in the east is, in fact, a veritable ethnic mosaic. Travellers who visited the southern and eastern steppe of European Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries commented upon the variety of national and religious groups of different descent settled in the area. Apart from the Russians who had come south during the protracted conquest of the steppe, people were to be found there of German, Swedish, Armenian, Bulgarian, Serbian,Walachian, Moldavian, Polish, Jewish, and Greek origin together with the descendants of the traditional steppe dwellers, the Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Kirghiz, Kalmyks, and Mordvinians. The ethnic diversity of the settlers in the steppe was matched by the diversity of their cultural mores and religions.