Peoples and Populations
ETHNO-HISTORY

Maps of ethnic and language groups
Census
Peoples and Populations: a table
Population of the USSR by language groups
Bibliography

MAPS

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CENSUS

Nothing like a reliable census of those who lived in Russia was taken until 1897. All earlier figures are guesses, sometimes scientific, sometimes fanciful. By the end of the reign of Peter I, cadastral surveys allowed more reliable estimates.

W. H. Parker, Historical Geography of Russia (1968) accepted these estimates:

1200      7,500,000
1400     10,000,000
1600     12,000,000
1725     15,500,000

These estimates are based on population growth and decline, as well as territorial expansion and contraction. The population of Russia in the time of Peter I was about 40% that of France.

Mironov,1:Table 1.1 measures population growth in the Russian Empire, 1646-1914

<>1719:The Russians who constituted the central social structure of Petrine Russia have been numbered according to the following breakdown:

TABLE??:

1843:Population of Saint Petersburg,
by social estate [soslovie, etc.]

[SOURCE = Rashin:277-8]

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TABLE??:

1846:1869; Population Growth in Saint Petersburg

[SOURCE = SemPP,ed.,ggr-xtx slovar,4:450]

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*1858:1st new.nsx.xtx G/KMB/1858:Pop

*1858:Russian population in the 50 provinces of the Empire (excluding Finland), 72,600,000

*1863:Russian population = 61,175,900 [Rashin,25]

G/KMB/1869:Population of Saint P

885:3rd new.nsx.xtx

*1900:Russian Population by Class (expressed as percentage)

NB! Only nos. 1, 2, 5a, 6, & 7a represent formal Imperial Russian social estates [sosloviia]

[Source:Pdct:139]

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Demographic TABLE
MAJOR NATIONAL GROUPINGS
UNDER RUSSIAN & SOVIET RULE
IN RECENT TIMES

The left column numbers the peoples in rough numerical order of their bulk within the full census of the Soviet Union.  Then comes the English name of the peoples themselves.

The third column indicates the language group within which the people's language is classified.

CE = Northeastern Caucasus
CS = South Caucasus
CW = Northwestern Caucasus
GW = High West Germanic
II = Indo-Iranian
IN = North Iranian
Sm = Semitic
SB = Balto-Slavic or Slavonic
SE = East Slavic or Slavonic
SS = South Slavic or Slavonic
SW = West Slavic or Slavonic
RI = Romance, Italic or East Romance
UF = Finno-Ugric
UM = Ural-Altaic, Mongolian
UT = Ural-Altaic, Turkic

Column four indicates the English name for the "national" language of the people indicated.  Column five identifies SOME of the central locations where the indicated people are concentrated. It must be noted in this connection that the modern world has resulted in national groups distributing themselves over broader and yet broader territories.  National "minority" identity probably does originally result from people's having a shared experience of geographic proximity over a certain period of time.  Modernization, however, has meant mobility.  Especially in big cities the world over, great multicultural centers arose.  In the cities listed in column five below, "native" populations are sometimes in a minority.   In our time over 3/4 of the population of Riga, Latvia, is Russian.  Half the population of Kazakhstan is Russian.  One-third the population of Uzbekistan is Russian.  Column five works best in conjunction with the Geographic TABLE.

Column six lists predominant religious affiliation:

Bdd = Buddhist
BL = Buddhist-Lammite
Jd = Judaic
MH = Moslem/Islamic (Shii)
MU = Moslem/Islamic (Sunni)
OC = Uniate (Orthodox liturgy, Catholic hierarchy)
OE = Eastern Orthodox
OR = Russian Orthodox
PL = Protestant (Lutheran)
PM = Protestant (Mennonite)
RC = Roman Catholic

Mironov,1:Table 1.2 measures the proportion of Ethnic Russian by Region in 1897
Mironov,1:Table 1.3 measures the ethnic population of the Russian Empire, 1719-1914

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UNDER CONSTRUCTION:

TABLE:
POPULATION of LANGUAGE GROUPS in 1983
(in millions)
in USSR, Western Europe, and North America

THIS TABLE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION
[Source: 8x11:nsx "World Language Census---1983"]

Bibliography

*--Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917
*--James W. Warhola, Politicized Ethnicity in the Russian Federation: Dilemmas of State Formation

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