The Russians were formed from East Slavic tribes, and their cultural ancestry is based in
Kievan Rus'.
Genetically, the majority of Russians are very similar to their East Slavic counterparts,[47] unlike Northern Russians, who belong to the Northern European Baltic gene pool. The Russian word for the Russians is derived from the
people of Rus' and the territory of Rus'. The Russians share many historical and cultural traits with other European peoples, and especially with other East Slavic ethnic groups, specifically
Belarusians and
Ukrainians.
The standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is "Russians" in English.[49] There are two
Russian words which are commonly translated into English as "Russians". One is "русские" (russkiye), which in modern Russia most often means "ethnic Russians". Another is "россияне" (rossiyane), which denotes "
Russian citizens", regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation.[50]
The name of the Russians derives from the early medieval
Rus' people, a group of
Norse merchants and warriors who relocated from across the
Baltic Sea and founded a state centred on
Novgorod that later became Kievan Rus'.[51]
From the early nineteenth century, several politically charged theories of Russian nationality were developed, among them, the ideas of a single "
all-Russian nation" encompassing the
East Slavic peoples, or a "triune nation" of three brotherly "
Great Russian", "
Little Russian", and "
White Russian" peoples. Today some consider this as a colonial expression of Russian supremacy.[52][53] The common view of East Slavs today is of separate
Belarusian, Russian, and
Ukrainian nations.[citation needed]
The ancestors of modern Russians are the
Slavic tribes, whose original home is thought by some scholars to have been the wooded areas of the
Pinsk Marshes, one of the largest
wetlands in Europe.[54] The East Slavs gradually settled Western Russia with
Moscow included in two waves: one moving from
Kiev toward present-day
Suzdal and
Murom and another from
Polotsk toward
Novgorod and
Rostov.[55] Prior to the Slavic migration in the 6-7th centuries, the Suzdal-Murom and Novgorod-Rostov areas were populated by
Finnic peoples,[56] including the
Merya,[57] the
Muromians,[58] and the
Meshchera.[59]
From the 7th century onwards, the East Slavs slowly assimilated the native Finnic peoples,[60] so that by year 1100, the majority of the population in Western Russia was Slavic-speaking.[55][56] Recent genetic studies confirm the presence of a Finnic substrate in modern Russian population.[61]
Outside archaeological remains, little is known about the predecessors to Russians in general prior to 859 AD, when the Primary Chronicle starts its records.[62] By 600 AD, the
Slavs are believed to have split linguistically into
southern,
western, and eastern branches.[citation needed]
The Rus' state was established in northern Russia in the year 862,[63] which was ruled by the
Varangians.[64]Staraya Ladoga and
Novgorod became the first major cities of the new union of immigrants from
Scandinavia with the Slavs and
Finns.[65] In 882, the prince
Oleg seized
Kiev, thereby uniting the northern and southern lands of the
East Slavs under one authority. The state
adopted Christianity from the
Byzantine Empire in 988.
Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state as a result of in-fighting between members of the princely family that ruled it collectively.[66]
After the 13th century,
Moscow became a political and cultural center. Moscow has become a center for the
unification of Russian lands.[67] By the end of the 15th century, Moscow united the northeastern and northwestern Russian principalities, overthrew the "Mongol yoke" in 1480,[68] and would be transformed into the
Tsardom of Russia after
Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547.[69]
In 1721, Tsar
Peter the Great renamed his state as the
Russian Empire, hoping to associate it with historical and cultural achievements of ancient Rus' – in contrast to his policies oriented towards Western Europe. The state now extended from the eastern borders of the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to the
Pacific Ocean, and became a
great power; and one of the most powerful states in Europe after the
victory over Napoleon. Peasant revolts were common, and all were fiercely suppressed. The Emperor
Alexander IIabolishedRussian serfdom in 1861, but the peasants fared poorly and revolutionary pressures grew. In the following decades, reform efforts such as the
Stolypin reforms of 1906–1914, the
constitution of 1906, and the
State Duma (1906–1917) attempted to open and liberalize the economy and political system, but the Emperors refused to relinquish
autocratic rule and resisted sharing their power.
Ethnic Russians historically migrated within the areas of the former
Russian Empire and
Soviet Union, though they were sometimes encouraged to re-settle in borderland areas by the Tsarist and later Soviet government.[71] Sometimes ethnic Russian communities, such as the
Lipovans who settled in the
Danube delta or the
Doukhobors in
Canada, emigrated as religious dissidents fleeing the central authority.[72]
According to the
2021 Russian census, the number of ethnic Russians in the
Russian Federation decreased by nearly 5.43 million, from roughly 111 million people in 2010 to approximately 105.5 million in 2021.[75]
The main ones are the Northern and Southern Russian groups. At the same time, the proposal of the ethnographer
Dmitry Zelenin in his major work of 1927 Russian (East Slavic) Ethnography to consider them as separate East Slavic peoples[77] did not find support in scientific circles.[citation needed]
Russia's Arctic coastline had been explored and settled by
Pomors, Russian settlers from
Novgorod.[78]
Cossacks inhabited sparsely populated areas in the
Don,
Terek, and
Ural river basins, and played an important role in the historical and cultural development of parts of Russia.[79]
In accordance with the 2008 research results of Russian and Estonian geneticists, two groups of the Russians are distinguished: the northern and southern populations.[80][81]
The Central and Southern Russians, to which the majority of Russian populations belong, according to
Y chromosome R1a, are included in the general "East European"
gene cluster with the rest
East and
West Slavs (Poles, Czechs and Slovaks), as well as the non-Slavic
Hungarians and
Aromanians.[82][80][83] Genetically, East Slavs are quite similar to West Slavs; such genetic similarity is somewhat unusual for genetics with such a wide settlement of the Slavs, especially the Russians.[84] The high unity of the
autosomal markers of the East Slavic populations and their significant differences from the neighboring Finnic, Turkic and Caucasian peoples were revealed.[80][82]
Consequently, the already existing biologo-genetic studies have made all hypotheses about the mixing of the Russians with non-Slavic ethnic groups or their "non-Slavism" obsolete or pseudoscientific. At the same time, the long-standing identification of the Northern Russian and Southern Russian ethnographic groups by ethnologists was confirmed. The previous conclusions of physical anthropologists,[86] historians and linguists (see, in particular, the works of the academician
Valentin Yanin) about the proximity of the ancient
Novgorod Slavs and their language not to the East, but to west
Baltic Slavs. As can be seen from
genetic resources, the contemporary Northern Russians also are genetically close of all Slavic peoples only to the Poles and similar to the Balts. However, this does not mean the northern Russians origin from the Balts or the Poles, more likely, that all the peoples of the Nordic gene pool are descendants of
Paleo-European population, which has remained around
Baltic Sea.[80][85]
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Russian literature split into Soviet and
white émigré parts. In the 1930s,
Socialist realism became the predominant trend in Russia. Its leading figure was
Maxim Gorky, who laid the foundations of this style.[109]Mikhail Bulgakov was one of the leading writers of the Soviet era.[110]Nikolay Ostrovsky's novel
How the Steel Was Tempered has been among the most successful works of Russian literature. Influential émigré writers include
Vladimir Nabokov.[111] Some writers dared to oppose Soviet ideology, such as Nobel Prize-winning novelist
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote about life in the Gulag camps.[112]
Non-religious Russians may associate themselves with the Orthodox faith for cultural reasons. Some Russian people are
Old Believers: a relatively small
schismatic group of the Russian Orthodoxy that rejected the liturgical reforms introduced in the 17th century. Other schisms from Orthodoxy include
Doukhobors which in the 18th century rejected secular government, the Russian Orthodox priests, icons, all church ritual, the Bible as the supreme source of divine revelation and the divinity of Jesus, and later emigrated into Canada. An even earlier sect were
Molokans which formed in 1550 and rejected Czar's
divine right to rule, icons, the
Trinity as outlined by the
Nicene Creed, Orthodox
fasts, military service, and practices including
water baptism.[citation needed]
Since the fall of the
Soviet Union various new religious movements have sprung up and gathered a following among ethnic Russians. The most prominent of these are
Rodnovery, the revival of the Slavic native religion also common to other
Slavic nations.[188]
^"РУССКИЕ И РОССИЯНЕ". pravoslavie.ru. Archived from the original on 1 December 2015. Retrieved 12 January 2020.{{
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^Paszkiewicz, H.K. (1963). The Making of the Russian Nation. Darton, Longman & Todd. p. 262.
^McKitterick, R. (15 June 1995). The New Cambridge Medieval History. Cambridge University Press. p. 497.
ISBN0521364477.
^Mongaĭt, A.L. (1959). Archeology in the U.S.S.R. Foreign Languages Publishing House. p. 335.
^Ed.
Timothy Reuter, The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume 3, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 494-497.
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^
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^The Primary Chronicle is a history of the Ancient Rus' from around 850 to 1110, originally compiled in
Kiev about 1113.
^Payne, Robert; Romanoff, Nikita (1 October 2002).
Ivan the Terrible. Cooper Square Press. p. 67.
ISBN978-1-4616-6108-5.
Archived from the original on 28 September 2023. Retrieved 2 September 2023.
"Russia's population nightmare is going to get even worse". The Economist. 4 March 2023. Archived from
the original on 10 April 2023. The decline was largest among ethnic Russians, whose number, the census of 2021 said, fell by 5.4m in 2010-21. Their share of the population fell from 78% to 72%.
^Teriukov, A.I. (2016).
"Поморы" [Pomors]. Большая российская энциклопедия/
Great Russian Encyclopedia Online (in Russian). Archived from
the original on 9 September 2022. Retrieved 14 January 2024.
^
ab"Russian".
University of Toronto.
Archived from the original on 12 August 2021. Retrieved 9 July 2021. Russian is the most widespread of the Slavic languages and the largest native language in Europe. Of great political importance, it is one of the official languages of the United Nations – making it a natural area of study for those interested in geopolitics.
^Wakata, Koichi.
"My Long Mission in Space".
JAXA.
Archived from the original on 11 March 2020. Retrieved 18 July 2021. The official languages on the ISS are English and Russian, and when I was speaking with the Flight Control Room at JAXA's Tsukuba Space Center during ISS systems and payload operations, I was required to speak in either English or Russian.
^"Official Languages". United Nations.
Archived from the original on 13 July 2021. Retrieved 16 July 2021. There are six official languages of the UN. These are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. The correct interpretation and translation of these six languages, in both spoken and written form, is very important to the work of the Organization, because this enables clear and concise communication on issues of global importance.
^Letopisi: Literature of Old Rus'. Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary. ed. by Oleg Tvorogov. Moscow: Prosvescheniye ("Enlightenment"), 1996. (
Russian: Летописи // Литература Древней Руси. Биобиблиографический словарь / под ред. О.В. Творогова. – М.: Просвещение, 1996.)
^Muckle, James (1984). "Nikolay Leskov: educational journalist and imaginative writer". New Zealand Slavonic Journal. Australia and New Zealand Slavists' Association: 81–110.
JSTOR40921231.
^Boyd, William (3 July 2004).
"A Chekhov lexicon". The Guardian.
Archived from the original on 29 March 2022. Retrieved 15 January 2022. ...Chekhov, whatever his standing as a playwright, is quite probably the best short-story writer ever.
^Adams, Matthew S. (2014). "Rejecting the American Model: Peter Kropotkin's Radical Communalism". History of Political Thought. 35 (1). Imprint Academic: 147–173.
JSTOR26227268.
^Brom, Libor (1988). "Dialectical Identity and Destiny: A General Introduction to Alexander Zinoviev's Theory of the Soviet Man". Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. 42 (1/2). Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association: 15–27.
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JSTOR1347433.
S2CID146768452.
^
abcExcerpted from Glenn E. Curtis (ed.) (1998).
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^Norris, Gregory (1980). Stanley, Sadie (ed.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition. London: Macmillan. p. 707.
ISBN978-0-333-23111-1.
^Higgins, Charlotte (22 November 2000).
"Perfect isn't good enough". The Guardian.
Archived from the original on 8 April 2022. Retrieved 7 July 2021. Thirty years ago Gidon Kremer was rated as one of the world's outstanding violinists. Then he really started making waves...
^Scaruffi, Piero.
"Ganelin Trio".
Archived from the original on 9 July 2021. Retrieved 7 July 2021. The Ganelin Trio was the greatest ensemble of free-jazz in continental Europe, namely in Russia. Like other European improvisers, pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin, woodwind player Vladimir Chekasin and percussionist Vladimir Tarasov too found a common ground between
free-jazz and
Dadaism. Their shows were as much music as they were provocative antics.
^Pellegrinelli, Lara (6 February 2008).
"DDT: Notes from Russia's Rock Underground". National Public Radio.
Archived from the original on 31 March 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2021. For the Russian band DDT, it was hard enough being a rock group under the Soviet regime. The band, which formed in 1981, gave secret concerts in apartments, bomb shelters, and even kindergarten classrooms to avoid the attention of authorities... Later, the policies of perestroika allowed bands to perform out in the open. DDT went on to become one of Russia's most popular acts...
^"Eldar Ryazanov And His Films". Radio Free Europe. 30 November 2015.
Archived from the original on 31 March 2022. Retrieved 27 May 2021. Eldar Ryazanov, a Russian film director whose iconic comedies captured the flavor of life and love in the Soviet Union while deftly skewering the absurdities of the communist system... His films ridiculed Soviet bureaucracy and trained a clear eye on the predicaments and peculiarities of daily life during the communist era, but the light touch of his satire helped him dodge government censorship.
^Prokhorova, Elena, "The Man Who Made Them Laugh: Leonid Gaidai, the King of Soviet Comedy", in Beumers, Birgit (2008) A History of Russian Cinema, Berg Publishers,
ISBN978-1845202156, pp. 519–542
^Birgit Beumers. A History of Russian Cinema. Berg Publishers (2009).
ISBN978-1-84520-215-6. p. 143.
^Rem Koolhaas, James Westcott, Stephan Petermann (2017). Elements of Architecture.
Taschen. p. 102.
ISBN978-3-8365-5614-9.{{
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link)
^Jarzombek, Mark M.; Prakash, Vikramaditya; Ching, Frank (2010). A Global History of Architecture 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons. p. 544.
ISBN978-0470402573.
^There is no official census of religion in Russia, and estimates are based on surveys only. In August 2012,
ARENAArchived 12 June 2018 at the
Wayback Machine determined that about 46.8% of Russians are Christians (including Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and non-denominational), which is slightly less than an absolute 50%+ majority. However, later that year the
Levada CenterArchived 31 December 2012 at the
Wayback Machine determined that 76% of Russians are Christians, and in June 2013 the
Public Opinion FoundationArchived 15 April 2020 at the
Wayback Machine determined that 65% of Russians are Christians. These findings are in line with
PewArchived 10 May 2020 at the
Wayback Machine's 2010 survey, which determined that 73.3% of Russians are Christians, with
VTSIOMArchived 29 September 2020 at the
Wayback Machine's 2010 survey (~77% Christian), and with
Ipsos MORIArchived 17 January 2013 at the
Wayback Machine's 2011 survey (69%).
Sankina, S. L. (2000). Этническая история средневекового населения Новгородской земли [Ethnic history of the medieval population of the Novgorod land] (in Russian). Saint Petersburg.
ISBN5-86007-210-4.{{
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Zelenin, Dmitry K. (1991) [1927].
Восточнославянская этнография [Russian (East Slavic) Ethnography] (in Russian). Translated by K.D. Tsivina. Moscow:
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the original on 1 August 2021. Retrieved 2 August 2021. [First published in German as Russische (Ostslawische) Volkskunde (Berlin; Leipzig, 1927).]{{
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