Russians — the general name for the inhabitants of Russia, the Russian superethnos. A superethnos manifests in history as a mosaic wholeness. It is a community of many peoples, expressed in the dominance of a shared ideology and behavioral stereotypes. According to the passionarity theory of ethnogenesis, there are around a dozen superethnoses on the planet, including Western Europe, Russia (Russians), China, India, the united Muslim world, the United States, and Latin America.
The nature of the superethnos phenomenon
The anthroposphere has a complex hierarchical structure in which a number of levels can be distinguished: superethnoses, ethnoses, subethnoses, convictions, and consortiums.
The top level is superethnoses, which unite a set of ethnoses and represent a geographic-social entity, for which the term civilization is also used, emphasizing the cultural unity of its constituent parts.
Lev Gumilyov wrote about the superethnos: "Like an ethnos, a superethnos, through its representatives, sets itself apart from all other superethnoses, but, unlike an ethnos, a superethnos is not capable of divergence. A superethnos is defined not by size, not by power, but exclusively by the degree of interethnic closeness."
Is it convenient to be Russian?
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After the collapse of the USSR, the national republics, krais, and oblasts raised their status under the Russian Constitution. Only for the Russian oblasts did it stay the same. Inequality of the multinational Russian people is already built into the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Thus, Article 5 of the Constitution states that the republics within the Russian Federation are states. It turns out there are several states within the Russian state. Does this help remove the Russian question in Russia? No!
The national policy pursued in tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation was aimed at putting the Russian people in a subordinate position compared to others. The current state of affairs in the Non-Black-Earth Region is a continuation of the situation that developed in the last decades of Soviet rule. After all the resources had been drained from central Russia, a program to develop the Non-Black-Earth Region was finally adopted, but it too failed. The Russian question never became a normal factor of state policy. And right now, frankly, I don't know how to react to it. Because this question can provoke a negative attitude among representatives of Russia's other peoples. But they don't want to understand: if things are bad for the Russian people, they will be bad for all the other peoples of our country too. |
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Interesting facts
- In the Russian Federation, anyone can officially register themselves "as Russian." More than 80 percent of Russia's population do just that.
- The name "Moscow" comes from the Meryan word "moska" — hemp. The oldest form of the city's name was "Moskov," as recorded in chronicles and other sources; only much later did it come to sound like "Moskva." Hemp was cultivated for household purposes: it yielded fiber, and from that fiber people made clothing, sacks, and other items. Interestingly, the predecessors of the Meryans in the Moscow area — the Dyakovo tribes (named after the village of Dyakovo in Kolomenskoye, where their first hillfort was discovered), who settled the Moskva River floodplain as early as the start of the first millennium AD — also cultivated neat fields of hemp.
- At the same time, there is reason to believe that the name "Moscow" derives from the Proto-Slavic root "mosk-," whose meaning is tied to the concept of "moisture." This is supported by its use in other Slavic and European languages: in Slovak the common noun moskva means "damp grain bread" or "bread harvested from the fields in rainy weather"; in Lithuanian there is the verb mazgóti, "to wash, to rinse," and in Latvian the verb mazgāt, meaning "to wash." In modern Russian, this root survives in the word "promozglyy" — damp, raw (of weather).
- Abroad, "Russians" is usually used for all emigrants from the former USSR. This shows that "Russian" is not a nationality but a shared consciousness characteristic of this superethnos.