New factors of population ethnic structure formation

Eugeny Soroko, Higher School of Economics, Moscow

The most significant changes in the population ethnic structure of Russia in the recent decades are the results of significant fertility decline, scale-down of ethnic emigration, and growing immigration of other peoples. Up to the present the main sources of ethnic structure formation were the demographic ones. They include differentiation of fertility and mortality rates by ethnicity, as well as diverse direction and age-sex profiles of migration. Russia is a multiethnic country with the 80-per-cent majority of the Russians. The total number of ethnicities accounted in the 2002 census exceeds 190. The following five parts may be distinguished among them: 1) Bashkirs, Tatars, Chechens, Mordvins, Chuvashs, and other peoples living on the territory of Russia during the centuries, many of them live compactly in the national republics: Dagestan, Tuva, etc.; 2) peoples of the ex-USSR countries: Ukrainians, Tadjiks, Azerbaijanians, etc.; 3) growing group of peoples intensively migrating to Russia: Turks, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc.; 4) the Germans and Jews; 5) a rather small part of ethnicities with the European origin: Serbs, Bulgarians, etc. Peoples and ethnic groups in Russia significantly vary by the demographic behavior. However in the era of demographic processes convergence in various ethnic groups and population replacement approaching to the zero rate quite new factors come to action. They may change both the direction and the degree of shifts of the population ethnic composition. The paper deals with the processes on the borders between the ethnicities – mixed marriages and assimilation. The attempts are made to estimate the measures of them – prevalence, sex asymmetry, ethnic preferences. The sources of this study are population censuses in the USSR and Russia, the 1994 microcensus, annual and monthly statistics of Rosstat (Federal agency of state statistics).