In 1990 a Mordvin scholar released an alarming forecast about the fate awaiting his people: provided that those adverse demographic trends that had established themselves over the course of the twentieth century continued, the last member of his million-strong nation would disappear by the year 2135. This statement was not the only one of its kind. During the final years of Soviet rule, the recently realized opportunity to speak out about the concerns of the non-Russian groups was being utilized speedily. Journalistic and scholarly reports on the various problems of Russia's minority groups, often painted in highly dramatic language, became common in both regional and central publications.

Scholars had already suggested the relationship of some Finno-Ugrian languages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the linguistic affinity of the Finno-Ugrian languages was proven only at the end of the eighteenth century by two Hungarian pioneers of comparative linguistics, János Sajnovics and Sámuel Gyarmathi. Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739-1804), professor of rhetoric and a great humanist, brought their ideas to Finland. He was strongly influenced by August Ludwig Schlözer, author of a comprehensive and critical survey of the history of the Finno-Ugrian peoples. Having studied Sajnovics' work in Göttingen, Porthan published an extensive account of it in a Finnish newspaper in 1779, demolishing previous ideas about the kinship between Finnish and Hebrew. Porthan urged Finnish scholars to investigate the Finno-Ugrian languages of Russia, of which very little was then known (some lists of words and short grammars were all that was available).

The northwestern flank of the Slavic expanse of settlement, the territory of today's Russian Karelia, constitutes an age-old site of Slavic-Baltic-Finnic contact. The Karelians and Vepsians, two Finno-Ugrian groups, are a part of the indigenous population of Karelia. The settlements of the former are found mainly in the western half of the present-day Karelian Republic. The Vepsians live on the southwestern coastal strip of Lake Onega, south of the capital of the republic, Petrozavodsk. Vepsian settlements are also found outside Karelia, in Vologda and Leningrad provinces. For several centuries, the Russians have formed a majority of the inhabitants both near Lake Onega and on the west coast of the White Sea. In contrast to the Karelians, Vepsians and Russians, Finns can be considered newcomers to Karelia.

The administrative division of late imperial Russia made few concessions to minority populations, who often found themselves divided among several provinces. The Bolshevik ascendancy to power changed the situation; Vladimir Lenin's “federal compromise” marked a breakthrough from the tsarist unitary practice to a system of governance which, at least on paper, made allowance for the ethnocultural diversity of the population. The chief designers of the Bolshevik nationality policy believed that a federal arrangement would offer a framework for controlling undesirable national sentiments during the transitional stage when class identities would gradually replace ethnic attachments. However, it turned out that for non-Russian groups the national-territorial autonomous units were not simply empty containers, free of cultural and emotional meaning, in which their political socialization would occur. These units became an integral part of their national identity; ethnicity obtained “legal” territorial roots and the various territorial units began to function as vessels of ethnic consciousness.

The Mordvins are the largest and the southernmost Finno-Ugrian nationality in Russia. Their titular autonomous unit, the Mordovian Republic, is located in the southern part of the Volga-Viatka economic region, on the border between the forest and forest-steppe zones. The ethnic composition of today's Mordovia is mixed. According to the 1989 census Russians constituted 60.8% of the population, Mordvins stood in second place with 32.5% and Tatars ranked third with 4.9%.

The so-called “national,” or ethnopolitical questions, whose existence has long been denied in Russia, is a significant issue in the Udmurt Republic. The Soviet propaganda machine long advanced the theme of friendship among all the peoples of the multinational USSR until glasnost', when this notion began to be questioned by society. In the minority areas ethnic questions finally emerged at the end of the 1980s and since then have occupied a prominent place in the mass media, in Udmurtia and elsewhere. This article highlights the polemic character of the debate on ethnic issues in Udmurtia, which is located in the Volga-Urals region, against a background of the particular local historical and demographic factors.

During the second half of 1991, the final stage of the disintegration of the Soviet Union brought momentous political changes to the citizenry of the country. From the beginning of the post-Soviet period, the new Russian government commenced economic reforms which resulted in the freeing of retail prices, the devaluation of the ruble, and the disastrous depreciation of household savings. In daily life across the state, these events represented a turning point for Russian citizens, including those in the Komi Republic.

On 26 February 1925, the Soviet government, or the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, passed a resolution that, in effect, ensured the continuation of the separate development of the southern and the northern Komi, that is, the Komi-Permiaks and the Komi-Zyrians. In more detail, the Presidium decided,

In the administrative usage of the Soviet Union, the category “minor peoples of the North” embraced 26 ethnic groups of the North and the Far East. According to 1989 data, the populations of these groups ranged from 179 to 34,190 and together totaled 181,500. In addition to being small in numbers, the common denominators of the groups include a northern location and dependence on such sources of livelihood as hunting, reindeer herding, and fishing. Furthermore, some of these peoples remain nomadic or semi-nomadic.

The Selkups, a linguistic community known as Ostyak Samoyeds until the middle of the twentieth century, currently exist in two separate territorial groups in the regions of west-central and northwestern Siberia. In all, 3,612 people identified themselves as Selkups in the last Soviet census of 1989. Since there is great divergence in dialects among the various groups, some specialists suggest classifying them as three different languages: Northern, Central, and Southern Selkup. Here the Selkups of Tomsk province, who speak the central and southern dialects, will be referred to collectively as Southern Selkups.

Britons and Iranians do not wax poetic when they discover that “one, two, three” sound vaguely similar in English and Persian. Finns and Hungarians at times do. When I speak of “Finno-Ugrian cooperation,” I am referring to a linguistic label that joins peoples whose languages are so distantly related that in most world contexts it would evoke no feelings of kinship. Similarities in folk culture may largely boil down to worldwide commonalities in peasant cultures at comparable technological stages. The racial features of Estonians and Mari may be quite disparate. Limited mutual intelligibility occurs only within the Finnic group in the narrow sense (Finns, Karelians, Vepsians, Estonians), the Permic group (Udmurts and Komi), and the Mordvin group (Moksha and Erzia). Yet, despite this almost abstract foundation, the existence of a feeling of kinship is very real. Myths may have no basis in fact, but belief in myths does occur. Before denigrating the beliefs of indigenous and recently modernized peoples as nineteenth-century relics, the observer might ask whether the maintenance of these beliefs might serve some functional twenty-first-century purpose.