In the “diversity studies” curricula used in various levels of professional training in some Western countries, distinctions are made between an individual’s primary, or innate, characteristics such as age, gender, and ethnic or racial identity; and secondary, or changeable, characteristics, such as marital status, geographic location, occupation, and education. Religion, or religious belief, is assigned to the secondary category. A “diversity wheel” is sometimes used to illustrate the layering of these primary and secondary identities (sometimes with “personality” at the center, seemingly an American touch). A consistently patterned alignment of particular layers of identity is associated with greater conformism and reinforcing social cleavages, while more variegated patterns signify greater individual choice and social diversity.
The articles in this issue of the Russian Social Science Review explore some of the dimensions of diversity in the Russian Federation. Ethnic Russians make up approximately 80 percent of the country’s population, while various Turkic ethnicities (the largest group being Tatars) constitute a sizeable minority approaching 10 percent. In geopolitical terms, the territorial organization of the federation includes 83 federal subjects (85 if we count Crimea and Sevastopol), of which 22 republics and numerous subsidiary units have titular ethnic identifiers—among them, Chechnya and Tatarstan, Muslim-majority republics in the North Caucasus and Volga regions, respectively. In recent years, Moscow has been moving to reinforce central control and linguistic Russification even as it seeks to promote the opposite tendencies in the West.
Our first selection, “A Reconsideration of Russia’s Federal Settlement” by political scientist Andrei Starodubtsev, traces efforts by the Chechen republic’s president Ramzan Kadyrov, a vociferous Putin supporter, to test the boundaries of his republic’s autonomy vis-à-vis Moscow with respect to the management of regional security and the protection of local religious and ethnic traditions such as polygamy and the wearing of hijabs. In “The Civilization Measure ‘Krymnash,’” political scientist Sergei Nikoliuk takes off from the issue of Belarus’s push-pull relationship with its much larger near neighbor to reflect on deeper questions of East Slavic/Orthodox identity as contrasted with Western Christian norms. (“Krymnash,” meaning Crimea Is Ours, became a popular hashtage after Russia took the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.) Next, in “Ethnic-Cultural Identities of Kazan Residents,” sociologist Guzel I. Makarova examines patterns of (primary) ethnic identity in relation to the (secondary) religious, linguistic, marital, and geographic characteristics of Russian and Tatar residents of the Tatar republic’s capital city. Sociologist Iuliia Sinelina presents data on religiosity among Orthodox Christians and Muslims over time in 33 locations in the Russian Federation. Finally, sociologist Svetlana Ryzhova perhaps brings us closest to including personality as a factor in her study of trust and ethnic tolerance among different age groups in Moscow—an exceptionally diverse, relatively prosperous, and privileged capital city.
—P.A.K.