The Fiasco of Ethnonationalism in “Finno-Ugric” Republics of the Russian Federation: Outcomes of the 2021 Population Census as an Evidence of the Crisis of Ethnic Elites

Abstract

The article analyzes the results of the 2021 population census (officially called the 2020 All-Russian Population Census), which showed a very significant decrease in the number of Finno-Ugric peoples of the Russian Federation. It may be noted that the two previous post-Soviet censuses had already recorded this clearly defined negative trend, but the data for 2021 indicates that the rate of decline in the number of titular groups in the republics, which since the early 1990s began to be called “Finno-Ugric,” is increasing. Those commenting on the results of the latest campaign, on the one hand, are trying to present the results as a “cultural catastrophe” and declare a “failure” of the model of ethnopolitics adopted in the country; on the other hand, they are trying to accuse the census organizers of gross mistakes that distorted its results. However, the logic of the ethnocultural development of the Finno-Ugric peoples and the ethnocultural orientations of young people, identified as a result of many years of sociological surveys, indicates that the census quite correctly showed the dynamics of changes occurring among the Russian Finno-Ugric peoples, and these processes can be assessed as a “humanitarian catastrophe” only from the standpoints of ethnonationalism, which are very strong in the “Finno-Ugric territories” due to the very nature of regional ethnocultural and ethnopolitical management.