Who are real Russians and what does a primordially Russian person look like?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Russia is a country on whose territory representatives of various ethnic groups have coexisted side by side for thousands of years. Some of them managed to retain their identity, while others, as a result of mixing, gradually lost their characteristic features and distinctive features. It is widely believed that the pure Russian ethnos no longer exists today. The Kramola portal cites a number of studies proving the opposite.

Typically Russian face

What does the Russian ethnos really look like? Did he manage to keep his blood pure, or did he completely dissolve, mingling with other peoples? Let's try to figure it out.

At the end of the 19th century, the anthropologist Anatoly Bogdanov, who was engaged in the study of the biological nature of man, wrote that the ubiquitous expressions about typically Russian beauty, a typically Russian face are not a reflection of some abstract concepts, but quite specific ideas about how a person of the Russian type looks like.

The anthropologist of our time Vasily Deryabin, based on the method of multivariate mathematical analysis of mixed characters, concluded that there is a significant unity of Russians throughout Russia, and it is extremely problematic to distinguish clear regional types with pronounced differences.

The anthropologist of the Soviet era Viktor Bunak focused on the fact that the Russian people are based on Slavic roots, although he did not deny the presence of some part of the Finno-Ugric, Baltic and Pontic blood. The scientist believed that the Russian population descended from the original type of Slavs, which arose at the junction of the Baltic anthropological zone with the Neopontic.

The overwhelming majority of anthropologists agree that typical Russians are Caucasian. Therefore, it is fundamentally wrong to believe that in every Russian there is a drop of Tatar blood. A vivid confirmation of this is the almost complete absence of epicanthus in Russians - an anthropological feature characteristic of the representatives of the Mongoloid race.

The Tatar trace is a myth

Geneticists, along with anthropologists studying the issue of the origin of races, came to the conclusion that among all Eurasian peoples, Russian is perhaps the most purebred. So, American geneticists, who conducted a large-scale experiment, came to the unequivocal conclusion that the population of the northwestern, central and southern parts of Russia is practically devoid of any traces of the blood of the Turkic peoples, the admixtures of which, according to the widespread but erroneous opinion, should have remained since the time of the mythical Tatar-Mongol invasion. Experts from the United States established that about 4500 years ago, on the territory of the Central Russian Plain, a boy was born who had a halogroup different from his father, classified today as R1a1. The incredible viability of this mutation determined its dominance over the next millennia over a large territory of Eastern Europe. Today, representatives of the halo group R1a1 are 70% of men in the European part of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, 57% - Poland, 40% - Czech Republic, Latvia, Slovakia and Lithuania, 18% - Sweden, Germany and Norway. Interestingly, even in India, 16% of men belong to this group, and among the representatives of the higher castes this figure reaches 47%.

Genetic progenitors

Today the assertion is widespread that the real Russians are no longer in Russia, that they have completely mixed with other peoples. However, according to Russian geneticist Oleg Balanovsky, practical DNA research completely refutes this myth. The scientist believes that the Russians are a monolithic people. The Russians got their resistance to assimilation from their genetic progenitors, the Slavic tribes, who managed to preserve their identity during the Great Migration. The research group led by Balanovsky found that the Russians had a characteristic higher degree of variability than, for example, the Germans, but less than the Italians.

Another important question, to which Balanovsky was looking for an answer, concerns how justified it is to regard the Finno-Ugric as the ancestors of modern Russians. The scientist notes that the study of the gene pool of the northern branch of the Russians testifies to the inadmissibility of interpreting the key features inherent in the Russian ethnos, as such, which they inherited exclusively from the assimilated Finno-Ugric peoples.

Today, geneticists have unequivocally established the presence of two genetic progenitors of the Russian ethnos: northern and southern, which became the basis for the formation of two groups of Russian populations. At the same time, talking about their specific age and origin is now extremely difficult.

Representatives of the northern group of Russians have a significant similarity in the male lineage Y-chromosome markers with the Baltic peoples, while the relationship with the Finno-Ugric peoples, although traced, is more distant. Traits transmitted along the female line through the mitochondria of DNA indicate the existence of a similarity in the gene pools of the inhabitants of the Russian North and Western / Central Europe.

The study of autosomal markers also makes it possible to reveal the closeness of the northern Russians with other European peoples and the maximum distance from the Finno-Ugric peoples. All these data¸, according to geneticists, give reason to believe that an ancient Paleo-European substrate has survived on the territory of the Russian North, which subsequently underwent significant changes as a result of the migration of the ancient Slavs.

At the same time, most of the Russian populations belong to the south-central group, which is part of a single genetic cluster with Belarusians, Poles and Ukrainians. The East Slavic populations are characterized by a high level of unity and are strikingly different from the representatives of the Turkic, North Caucasian and Finno-Ugric peoples living in the neighborhood. It is interesting that the territories dominated by the population with Russian genes almost completely coincide with the possessions that were part of the Russian Kingdom during the reign of Ivan the Terrible.

Where do purebred Russians live?

In order to find out in which territories the largest number of native Russians live, in addition to studying the genotype, it is necessary to conduct a number of additional studies. According to the latest census conducted in Russia, 80% of the respondents considered themselves to be Russians, that is, over 111 million people. By region, the largest concentration of Russians is observed in: Moscow region (excluding the capital) - 6, 2 million, Krasnodar region - 4.5 million, Rostov region - 3, 8 million, St. Petersburg - 3, 9 million, and in Moscow itself - 9.9 million. However, it would not be entirely correct to consider Moscow the city with the largest concentration of the native Russian population.

Doctor of Biological Sciences Elena Balanovskaya associates modern megacities with black holes, into which the gene pool of the Russian people is sucked in and disappears without a trace. In her opinion, the pure Russian gene pool has survived only in the indigenous rural populations of Central Russia and the Russian North.

Domestic scientists generally call the Russian North a real ethnographic reserve of Russian culture, where for many centuries an archaic way of life was preserved practically in an intact state and where the Russian gene pool was naturally conserved.

Russian ethnographers, having set themselves the goal of identifying the regions where the greatest concentration of the original Russian population was preserved, took as a basis the population, more than half of whose representatives entered into marriages with each other, and their children continued to remain within these populations. The total population of the ancestral regions within the Russian area was 30, 25 million people, and excluding cities - 8, 79 million. At the same time, the leading position among 22 regions went to the Nizhny Novgorod region, which accounted for 3, 52 original Russians.

Also, Russian scientists conducted a study concerning the places of residence of people with primordially Russian surnames. Having compiled a list of 15 thousand of the most common surnames among Russian, they compared them with the data for the regions. As a result, it turned out that the largest number of people with Russian surnames live in the Kuban.