Abstract

This article traces the principal stages in the formation of the supra-ethnic meta-identifications “the Soviet people” (sovetskiy narod) and “the Russian civic nation” (rossiiskaya grazhdanskaya natsiya), drawing on the population censuses of the USSR in the second half of the twentieth century and those of Post-Soviet Russia. Its central premise is that the census not only records social reality but also plays a significant role in producing it. Accordingly, the study considers the ways in which these political concepts were fashioned and/ or constructed and how they related to cultural forms of identification. The expression “the Soviet people,” already in circulation in the 1920s–1930 s, entered official discourse in Stalin’s address of 6 November 1944 and received its definitive codification in the USSR Constitution adopted on 7 October 1977, which defined the Soviet people as “a new type of historical community of people”. The project at stake was the creation of a civic-political identity within which ethnic identities would not conflict with the state, and ideally would be subsumed into the identity of “the Soviet people”, “the Soviet person”. At the same time, the censuses of 1959, 1970, 1979, and 1989 consolidated a categorization of the population on an ethno-cultural principle and the identities associated with it — ethnic and linguistic (ethno-nations). Russian ethnic identity constituted an exception: the politico-administrative order effectively rendered Russians a de-ethnicized substratum intended to serve as the foundation of the Soviet people (a politiconation). The authors conclude that the erosion of a union-wide identity alongside the strengthening of ethnic identities was not a consequence but a cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse. In the Post-Soviet period, state policy turned toward the construction of a Russian civic nation. In order to resolve the tension between “ethnic” and “civic” frames, the formula “a multi-peopled Russian nation” (mnogonarodnaya rossiyskaya natsiya; V.A. Tishkov) was proposed. This approach found expression in the censuses of 2002, 2010, and 2021, which present Russian citizenship and the Russian language as the foundational elements of Russian identity.