The article examines how the programmes of population censuses conducted in Russia between 1897 and 1937 reflected the dynamics of perceptions of major ethnocultural identities. Among the various forms of cultural identity in Russia, the most significant were linguistic, religious, and ethnic. However, the relative importance of these categories shift ed across different periods, as state priorities in promoting one or several of them evolved. The censuses of 1897, 1920, 1926, and 1937 vividly reveal transformations in this hierarchy of identities. Special attention is devoted to the incorporation of the category of national (ethnic) identity into census practices. In the Russian Empire of the modern era, an elite discourse emerged that proposed diverse interpretations of the nature of the ethnic (national): defining Russianness through its attributes — Orthodoxy and loyalty to the throne; defining Russianness through culture; and defining Russianness through notions of “race”, “stock”, or “blood”. For the broader Russian population, however, a presumption operated: Russian meant Orthodox and loyal to the throne (with the tacit implication of the Russian language). The study demonstrates that, in Soviet Russia, the significance of ethnic identity increased, facilitated both by the principle of national self-determination adopted by the new regime and by the administrative divisions, which were closely tied to nationality. It is therefore no coincidence that the 1920 census included, for the first time, a question on ethnic affiliation, framed as “narodnost” (“ethnic group”), which in the 1926 census was replaced with the term “nationality”. The analysis of the censuses conducted between 1897 and 1937 shows that the fundamental factors of ethnic identity in Russia — although not officially recognized in every period — were language and religion. The connection between language and ethnicity appears almost self-evident. The link between ethnicity and religion is less straightforward, yet despite the repression of religion it persisted, albeit muted; over time, however, in the structuring of identities (primary/derivative), religion and ethnicity exchanged their positions .

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.