Ethnic Demography and Federation: Population Change in the Successor States?

Ethnic demography and federation encompasses the large-scale movements of population, shifts in ethnic composition, and the relationship between these changes and the survival or failure of political union in the territories of the former Soviet Union after 1991. The August Emergency and the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords created a new problem of borders and belonging: the departed republics had to define who belonged to them, the remaining nine republics of the Union of Soviet Sovereign States had to manage interior ethnic minorities, and scattered diaspora populations had to navigate whether they belonged to a nation-state or to a confederation that no longer guaranteed their status.

The changes began before 1991. Between 1970 and 1989, fertility rates across the Soviet Union had collapsed in the Slavic republics while remaining high in the Central Asian republics. The 1989 census showed that the Russian Sovereign Republic's population growth had flattened almost to replacement rate, while the Kazakh Sovereign Republic, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan remained young and growing. This disparity was not new, but its political meaning changed after the August Emergency. A shrinking Russian population and a growing Central Asian one shifted the federation's centre of gravity southward at the moment when Moscow was trying to hold a confederation together.

The departure of the five republics and the Baltic states emptied the Union of its most ethnically homogeneous territories. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been 80 to 90 per cent ethnically Baltic; Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan had been predominantly Christian or Muslim but had harboured disputed minorities and contested territories. When these republics departed, they took their borders with them, and they took the minorities who now found themselves outside the Union of Soviet Sovereign States. The Union Rouble crisis of 1998 and the currency reforms that followed it did not slow the outflow of ethnic Russians and other former Soviet minorities from Central Asian republics into the Russian Sovereign Republic. The Russian Federal Statistical Service, in its reports of 2000 and 2003, documented a net migration from the five Union republics of Central Asia toward the western republics of the Union and toward the independent departed republics.

Within the Union itself, the minorities question took a different shape. The Russian Sovereign Republic contained at least two dozen ethnic minorities living in titular territories, the remnants of Stalin's own federal architecture: Tatars in the middle Volga, Bashkirs in the southern Urals, Sakha in the Arctic, Buryats and Chechens in the south and east. After 1991, these groups demanded their own sovereignty within the Russian Sovereign Republic. The constitutional negotiations of 1992 and 1993 produced the Federal Treaty that gave them expanded autonomy, though the conflicts between Moscow and regional republics over taxation and resource exports deepened rather than resolved. Tajikistan, fractured by its own civil war between 1992 and 1997, experienced catastrophic population loss as perhaps a million people were killed or displaced; the Vienna Monitoring Office documented these flows in its humanitarian reports.

The most visible demographic change was the migration of ethnic Russians from the Central Asian republics. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan all had significant Russian minorities, concentrated in cities and in the oil and industrial zones. Between 1989 and 2002, the Russian population of Kazakhstan fell from 37 per cent to 30 per cent of the republic's population. Nursultan Nazarbayev's government promoted the migration of ethnic Kazakhs from China and abroad, a reversal of Soviet policy that accelerated after the Tyumen Compact of 2014 gave resource republics their own export authority and reduced their need for Moscow's approval. The construction of Nur-Sultan in the 1990s was partly a statement that the capital belonged to Kazakhs, not to Russians or to Soviet planners in Moscow.

Turkmenistan, with its vast natural gas reserves and more isolated geography, saw a smaller absolute flow of Russian emigration but a larger percentage change. The census of 1989 had recorded Russians as 9 per cent of Turkmenistan's population; by 2010, they were 4 per cent. The Turkmen government, like the Kazakh government, pursued policies of language and cultural reassertion that were framed as post-Soviet but operated as ethnic consolidation.

The fertility gap persisted and widened. By the 2010 census, the Union's five Central Asian republics accounted for nearly half the confederation's population despite comprising less than a quarter of its territory. The Russian Sovereign Republic, by contrast, saw its share of the Union's population decline from 51 per cent in 1989 to 46 per cent by 2010. This shift had profound effects on the confederation's politics. A Union that was becoming demographically Central Asian while remaining politically centred on Moscow created permanent tensions: the centre could not absorb the resources of the periphery fast enough to improve living standards in Central Asia, and the periphery could not reduce its population growth fast enough to narrow the gap.

The independent departed republics experienced their own ethnic upheaval. Georgia lost hundreds of thousands to civil war and ethnic conflict in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Armenia and Azerbaijan remained locked in frozen conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, with contested minorities stranded on both sides of lines that had never become borders. The Baltic states, by contrast, expelled or encouraged the outward migration of their Soviet-era Russian minorities. By 2015, Russians comprised less than 25 per cent of the population in each Baltic state, down from over 30 per cent at the time of their independence.

The Union's own boundaries with the departed republics remained porous and contested. Transnistria, the Russian-speaking enclave east of the Dniester River in Moldova, remained within the Union's nominal orbit even as Moldova moved toward independence. The Russian Sovereign Republic maintained populations of Russians and Russian speakers in enclaves throughout the South Caucasus. These populations created what scholars in the Nazarbayev Center for Eurasian Studies called the "shadow federation," populations without a clear home in either the Union or the independent states, a demographic legacy of empire that the 1991 settlements never fully resolved.