Russia. A History

The sheer vastness of the land mass also had a profound impact. It not only ensured access to land, but encouraged an incessant migration that made governance and control extremely difficult. The scale and continuity of such migration led V. O. Kliuchevskii, the doyen of pre-revolutionary historians, to make internal ‘colonization’ a key factor in Russian history, even explaining the shift the political centre from Kiev to the northeast. No doubt, population movement in this immense expanse made labour (not land) the scarce resource, and that significantly complicated the task of governing, taxing, and conscripting. These problems steadily intensified since the seventeenth century, as the state steadily expanded its borders to include new regions—first in the east (Siberia) in the seventeenth century, then in the south and west in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (incorporating border territories from Finland to the Caucasus to Central Asia). As the Empire grew, indeed exponentially (from 1,554 square kilometres in 1328 to 14.1 million in 1646, then to 21.8 million in 1914), even extraordinary demographic growth (far higher and longer than in Western Europe) could do little to increase population density. As a result, by 1913 the inhabitants per square kilometre in Russia were just 7.5 (compared to 182 in Great Britain, 124 in Germany, and 74 in France).

That population was not only dispersed but increasingly diverse: expansion brought an increasing proportion of non-Russians into the Empire. The non-Russians were hardly new; some small ethnic minorities were already incorporated in Muscovite Rus’ by the sixteenth century; already by 1719 ethnic Russians comprised only 70.7 per cent of the population (with Ukrainians representing another 12.9 per cent, along with various other groups). That was but a prelude to the rapid growth of non-Russian minorities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1914 Russian had decreased from a majority to the largest minority (44.6 per cent) of the Empire; other major groups included Ukrainians (18.1 per cent), Belorussians (4.0 per cent), Poles (6.5 per cent), Jews (4.2 per cent), Tatars (1.8 per cent), and a kaleidoscopic array of many others—Estonians, Chuvash, Kalmyks, Bashkirs, Finns, Latvians, Germans, Kazakhs, Armenians, Azeris, Uabeks, Lithuanians, Georgians, Moldavians, and numerous tiny ethnic groups. The 1917 Revolution initially reduced the quotient of non-Russians, but the re-acquisition of old territories (for example, in the South Caucasus and Central Asia) and absorption of new territories in 1939 and 1945 replenished the number of non-Russians. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians comprised a bare majority (50.8 per cent) of the USSR. In the post-Soviet era ethnic Russians again constituted a dominant, but shrinking contingent; by the early twenty-first century they comprised only 79.8 per cent of the Russian Federation (2002 census). In short, the ‘Russian’ Empire was multinational, at times reducing ethnic Russians to the status of ‘largest minority’. Not without cause did the term rossiiskii—‘Russian’, a Latin derivative used to refer to statehood, not ethnicity—come to dominate discourse in the Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras: rossiiskii became a political, not ethnic, identity.

Not only ethnicity but another key aspect of culture—religion—has figured prominently in shaping Russia and its identity. On the one hand, ‘Russian’ seems coterminous with ‘Eastern Orthodoxy’—perhaps not in a real sense since the symbolic conversion of élites in 988, but certainly since the ‘Christianization’ of the popular classes in the late medieval and early modern periods. One key difference between Russia and the West has been the role of religion: in contrast to the dechristianization that beset Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Russian Orthodoxy retained a firm grasp on popular culture, with observance rates several times higher than in the West. Even Stalin’s anti-religious campaign in the 1930s proved futile; the Church recovered its presence, despite persecution, in the remaining years of the Soviet regime and experienced a major upsurge in post-Soviet Russia. But this multi-ethnic land is also multi-confessional, with an array of other Christian and non-Christian subjects. The non-Orthodox became increasingly numerous and assertive in the Imperial period, especially from the mid-nineteenth century, and survived the Stalinist and post-Stalinist anti-religious campaigns to comprise a significant element in post-Soviet Russia, with approximately one-sixth of the population professing Islam in addition to many other, if smaller, religious communities.