ETHNOCULTURAL COMPLEXITY OF THE POPULATION OF CHUVASHIA ACCORDING TO THE 2020 CENSUS
Authors: Boyko Ivan I. 
Published: April 2024

The relevance of the study is determined by new approaches in the official accounting of the nationality of Russian citizens. A decreasing number of representatives of the main ethnic groups both in Russia and in its individual regions increases the attention paid to the problems of ethnocultural development and interethnic relations. The publication of the 2020 census materials caused a mixed reaction to its organization and individual results.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the census materials on the national composition of the population, an attempt to count citizens who have declared their difficult ethno–cultural choice. The reasons for the noticeable difference between the materials of sociological surveys and population census data are considered.

Materials and methods. The article analyzes the published data of the 2020 population census, in particular, the data contained in the fifth volume of the national census 2020 results “National composition and language proficiency” for Russia in general and for the Chuvash Republic in particular. In addition, the “Methodological explanations” to the census materials were studied, as well as a number of regulatory documents. According to the table “Population’s answers to the question “Your nationality”, information was calculated on the number of people who chose a difficult answer to the question of nationality.

Study results. The census materials showed that the number of individual ethnic groups of Chuvashia, representing the old-age population (except the Russians), decreased during the inter-census period. This process was determined not by the natural and mechanical movement of the population, but by the change of ethnic identity. The increase in the number and proportion of persons who did not indicate their ethnicity occurred both due to refusal to answer the question and due to a negative answer about specific nationality. In addition, in Chuvashia, the proportion of citizens whose information was obtained from administrative documents (gender and age) has increased significantly. The number of citizens who declared a complex ethnic identity was about 0.2% of those who named their ethnicity. This indicator lags far behind the data obtained in the course of sociological surveys.

Conclusions. It follows from the above materials that the residents of Chuvashia were more loyal to the issue of their nationality compared to the citizens of Russia. The choice of a complex variant of ethnicity was not massive, but it also differed from a similar process in Russia as a whole. For example, in the republic, more often than in the country, the Russians, the Tatars, the Mordvins and the Ukrainians chose a difficult variant of nationality. The opposite picture was typical for the Chuvash; the Tatars living in Russia and Chuvashia had the same indicators of ethnocultural complexity. For the majority of the population, the definition of their ethnic identity did not cause any particular difficulties, but at the same time, both difficulties and a desire to distance themselves from such self-determination were noted in this process.