The Russian people (русские, russkiye ) are an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries.
The English term Russians is used to refer to the citizens of Russia, regardless of their ethnicity (see demographics of Russia for information on other ethnic groups inhabiting Russia); in Russian, the demonym Russian is translated as rossiyanin (россиянин, plural rossiyane ), while the ethnic Russians, again, are referred to as russkiye (sg. русский, russkiy ). According to the 2002 census, ethnic Russians make up about 80% of the population of Russia
Origins
- See the article about the old legend Lech, Czech and Rus .
- See the article about the Primary Chronicle .
- See the article about the Rus' (people) .
The modern Russian ethnicity is formed from two groups (Northern and Southern) made up in past of Kriviches, Ilmen Slavs, Radimichs, Vyatiches and Severians East Slavic tribes. Genetic studies show that modern Russians do not differ significantly from Poles or Ukrainians. Russians in northern European Russia, however, also share moderate genetic similarities with Finno-Ugric peoples,, who lived in modern north central European Russia and who were partly assimilated by the Slavs as the Slavs migrated northeastwards. Among those peoples were Merya and Muromian.
Outside archaeological remains, little is known about the predecessors to Russians in general prior to 859 AD, the year from which the account in the Primary Chronicle starts. It's thought that by 600 AD, the Slavs had split linguistically into southern, western, and eastern branches. Eastern one was settled between the Western Bug and the Dnieper River in what is now Ukraine; from the 1st century AD through almost the millennium they have been spreading peacefully northward to the Baltic lands assimilating indigents and forming the Dregovich, Radimich and Vyatich Slavic tribes on the Baltic substratum, therefore having language features such as vowel reduction. Later, both Belarusians and South Russians formed themselves on this ethnic linguistic ground.
Another group of Slavs moved since the 6th century from Pomerania to northeast of the Baltic Sea, where they encountered the Varangians of the Rus' Khaganate and established the important regional center of Novgorod. This is possibly why Russians are known in Baltic-Finnic languages as Venedes, a name derived for West Slavs. The same Slavic ethnic population also settled the present-day Tver Oblast and the region of Beloozero. With the Finno-Ugric substratum they formed Kriviches and Ilmen Slavs.
Emergence of Russian ethnicity
According to some modern ethnologists, ethnic Russians originated from the earlier Rus' people and gradually evolved into a separate ethnicity from the western Rus peoples, who became known as the modern-day Belarusians and Ukrainians. Early ancestors of the Russians were East Slavic tribes migrating to the East European Plain in the early Middle Ages. Most prominent Slavic tribes in the area of what is now European Russia included Vyatichs, Krivichs, Radimichs, Severians and Ilmen Slavs. By the 11th century, East Slavs assimilated the Finno-Ugric tribes Merya and Muroma and the Baltic tribe Eastern Galindae that used to inhabit the same area with them (now Central Russia).
Ethnic Russians used to be referred to as Great Russians (as opposed to the ethnonyms White Russian and Little Russian) and began to be recognized as a distinct ethnic group in the 15th century. At that time, during the consolidation of the Russian Tsardom as a regional power, they were referred to as Moscovites. Between the 12th and 16th century, Russians known as Pomors migrated to Northern Russia and settled the White Sea coasts. As a result of these migrations and Russian conquests, following the liberation from the Mongol Golden Horde domination during the 15th and 16th century, Russians settled the Volga, Urals and Northern Caucasus regions. Between the 17th and 19th century, migrants settled eastwards in the vast, sparsely inhabited areas of Siberia and the Russian Far East. The Cossack movement played a significant role in these territorial expansions and migrations.
Population
Russians are the most numerous ethnic group in Europe and one of the largest in the world with a population of about 140 million people worldwide. Roughly 100 million ethnic Russians live in Russia and about 17 million more live in the neighboring countries. A relatively significant number of Russians, around 3 million, live elsewhere in the world, mostly in the Americas and Western Europe, but also in other places of Eastern Europe, Asia and elsewhere.
Culture
Main article: Russian cultureRussian culture started from that of East Slavs, with their pagan beliefs and specific way of life in the wooden areas of Eastern Europe. Early on, the culture of Russian ancestors was much influenced by neighbouring Finno-Ugric tribes and by nomadic, mainly Turkic, peoples of the Pontic steppe. The Scandinavian Vikings, or Varangians , also took part in the forming of Russian identity and state in the early Kievan Rus' period of the late 1st millennium AD. Rus' had accepted the Orthodox Christianity from the East Roman Empire in 988, and this largely defined the Russian culture of next millenium as the synthesis of Slavic and Byzantine cultures. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russia remained the largest Orthodox nation in the world and claimed succession to the Byzantine legacy in the form of the Third Rome idea. At different points of its history, the country also was strongly influenced by the European Culture, and since Peter the Great reforms Russian culture largely developed in the context of the Western culture. For most of the 20th century, the Communist ideology shaped the culture of the Soviet Union, where Russia, or Russian SFSR, was the largest and leading part.
Russian culture is extremely various and unique in many aspects. It has a rich history and can boast a long tradition of excellence in every aspect of arts, especially when it comes to literature and philosophy, classical music and ballet, architecture and painting, cinema and animation, which all had considerable influence on the world culture.
Russian literature is known for such notable writers as Aleksandr Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Russians also gave the classical music world some very famous composers, including Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and his contemporaries, the Mighty Handful, including Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In the 20th century Russian music was credited with such influential composers as Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinski. And many more famous Russian persons are associated with differrent aspects of culture.
Language
Main article: Russian languageRussian ( русский язык , transliteration: Russkiy yazyk , ) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of three (or, according to some authorities, four) living members of the East Slavic languages, the others being Belarusian and Ukrainian.
Written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century onwards, and while Russian preserves much of East Slavonic grammar and a Common Slavonic word base, modern Russian exhibits a large stock of borrowed international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. Due to the status of the Soviet Union as a super power, Russian had great political importance in the 20th century, and is still one of the official languages of the United Nations.
Russian has palatal secondary articulation of consonants, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found in almost all consonant phonemes and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language. Another important aspect is the reduction, or drawling, of unstressed vowels, not entirely unlike a similar process present in most forms of English. Stress in Russian is generally quite unpredictable and can be placed on almost any syllable, one of the most difficult aspects for foreign language learners.
Religion
Main article: Religion in RussiaAround 63% of the Russia's population identify themselves with Orthodox Christianity most of whom belong to the Russian Orthodox Church, which played a vital role in the development of Russian national identity. In other countries Russian faithful usually belong to the local Orthodox congregations which either have a direct conne
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