Haiti: Stop the Destruction of a Nation

Seth Donnelly

Image: Emory Douglas.

“As the people of Haiti continually attest, we women in the Grandans are clear that since the coup d’etat of February 29, 2004, this has been the plan to wipe out the Haitian people and our country. We call on all women’s organizations, popular organizations, students and all to stand against this system that generates the high cost of living, misery, corruption and rape that are destroying our lives…”

– From a press release on March 17th, 2023, by Haitian women’s and popular organizations in the Grandans Department of Haiti.

As the current crisis in Haiti has metastasized into one of the worst human rights disasters in the Americas, Haitian activists in the popular movement and in diaspora are increasingly charging the US government– the key force behind the 2004 coup and subsequent occupation of Haiti– with genocide, as reflected in the above quote. They recognize that the ongoing, systematic destruction of the Haitian people as a sovereign nation is not some “random” work of “gangs’, but instead the deliberate outcome of the efforts by the US and “Core Group” powers– in collaboration with members of the Haitian oligarchy– to prevent the vast majority of Haitians from exercising genuine self-determination and popular democracy.

Ever since the Haitian people successfully overthrew slavery and colonialism in 1804, they have been subjected to interventions and policies by the French and US governments– from devastating “debt” collection to brutal military occupation, from coups to neocolonial puppet dictatorships– designed to destroy their existence as sovereign people, as an independent nation. There is extensive evidence to prove the genocidal nature of these historical interventions, including the brutality of the US invasion and occupation of Haiti between 1915-1934. The subsequent US-backed dictatorship of “Papa Doc” Duvalier who ruled Haiti from 1957–1971. Tens of thousands of Haitians were tortured, murdered, and disappeared while even more perished through the structural genocide of impoverishment, malnutrition, death by preventable disease, and extreme exploitation. As journalist Nathalie Baptiste stated:

“Papa Doc presided over the murders of an estimated 30,000 people. Thousands of others simply disappeared or were imprisoned at the notorious Fort Dimanche, a prison known for torture, mutilation and death.”

After “Papa Doc” Duvalier died in 1971, even The New York Times conceded that this US-backed dictator– who had been maintained in power and showered with millions of dollars by the US government– left this legacy in Haiti:

“The Tontons [Papa Doc’s private deathsquad system], sunglass‐wearing thugs whose fanatical loyal ty to Duvalier was rewarded with virtual licenses to torture and kill, murdered thousands of their fellow Haitians. Often they slit the throats of their victims and left them tied to chairs or hanging in market places for days as “examples” of what could happen to anti Duvalierists…By 1971, more than 13 years after he assumed power, little had changed for the great majority. Almost 90 per cent of the people were illiterate and were plagued by yaws, tuberculosis and malnutrition. Per capita income for Haiti’s 4.5‐million people was about $75 a year, compared with the Latin‐American average of about $400.” [emphasis mine]

It is documented that the notorious Tonton Macoutes received training by the US military.

Between 1971 and 1986, the US government maintained and funded the dictatorship of “Baby Doc” Duvalier, perpetuating the same system of terror and exploitation considered a “favorable investment climate” for US corporations.

Openly admitting the US domination of Haiti, Forbes magazine noted on September 22nd, 2022, that “Haiti has been a ward of the US government and international agencies for decades.” And what have been the consequences?

Compare these basic life indicators in Haiti to those in revolutionary Cuba, which broke free from US control in 1959. According to UN data compiled by the Macrotrends, Haiti’s infant mortality rate in 1959 was a staggering 192 deaths per 1000 live births. Despite advances in global health and vaccines over the past 70 years, leading to a dramatic, global reduction in infant mortality, the infant mortality rate in Haiti today remains one of the highest in the world, at 48 deaths per 1000 live births. In stark contrast, as David Blumenthal, former President of the Commonwealth Club, noted in 2016: “Since its 1959 revolution, Cuba’s infant mortality rate has fallen from 37.3 to 4.3 per 1000 live births—a rate equivalent to Australia’s and lower than the United States’ (5.8).” How is that in Haiti today, under US/ UN occupation, the infant mortality remains twelves times higher than that of revolutionary Cuba? This disparity between the countries cannot be explained by the pre-existing 1959 disparity ratio in which Haiti’s infant mortality was only approximately five times higher than that of Cuba. In other words, the disparity ratio in deaths between the two countries has more than doubled following Cuba’s revolution while Haiti has remained firmly under US domination during the ensuing decades to the present.

A similar picture of disparity emerges when it comes to indicators of acute hunger and malnutrition in Haiti and Cuba. According to data by the World Food Programme, “A total of 4.9 million Haitians – nearly half the population – do not have enough to eat, and 1.8 million are facing emergency levels of food insecurity.” [emph.mine] In contrast, regarding Cuba, the World Food Programme states: “Over the last 50 years, comprehensive social protection programmes have largely eradicated poverty and hunger.”

It is impossible to understand these disparities without taking into account and centering the significance of genocidal interventions by the US and French governments in reaction to the Haitian revolution of 1804 and the recolonization of Haiti by the US in the 20th century.

The pattern of US domination was interrupted briefly when the grassroots, non-violent mass movement of the Haitian people later called Lavalas (meaning flood in Kreyol) successfully dismantled the US-backed Duvalier dictatorship in 1986. This created the conditions for the first truly fair and free elections in 1990, resulting in the landslide election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The US quickly moved to support the Haitian military and elite to violently overthrow this democracy within 8 months. During the following 3 years of military dictatorship, the US-funded Haitian military and US-funded paramilitary death squad known as FRAPH killed thousands of Haitians. FRAPH leader Emmanuel (Toto) Constant was on the CIA payroll during this reign of terror, threatening to restore the old order.

The democratic resistance by the Haitian people, joined by intensive international solidarity, pressured President Clinton to support President Aristide’s return, although Clinton tried to coerce Aristide into accepting destructive US-prescribed economic policies. Aristide and the Lavalas popular movement refused to follow Clinton’s prescription. The popular, democratic Fanmi Lavalas governments headed by President Aristide– in power at two intervals between 1994 and 2004– pursued development policies that were created and driven by the Haitian people for the benefit of the Haitian people. These policies involved refusing to privatize national resources, increasing the minimum wage, investing public funds in healthcare, education, and cooperatives, subsidizing access to vital resources, and much more. The achievements in poverty reduction and human rights during this decade of popular democracy were undeniable, explaining Aristide’s vast popularity with the Haitian people and the respect for Fanmi Lavalas by international humanitarian leaders such as the late Dr. Paul Farmer. Yet these achievements, just like the brief opening to democracy in 1990, would be destroyed in a second US-backed coup in 2004, waged against President Aristide and thousands of other democratically elected officials on all levels.

Following this coup, Haitians have once again experienced the systematic destruction of their democracy and the social-economic conditions that permit them to exist as a sovereign people, as an independent nation. Crimes against humanity have returned and are intensifying.

Today, there is not a single elected official left in the entire country since the ruling US-installed Haitian Tet Kale Party (PHTK) regime has failed to hold, nor is capable of holding, fair and free elections. On January 9th, 2023, the terms of the last ten remaining Senators in Haiti’s parliament expired, leaving Haitians with no Constitutional representation at any state level. This latest development only lays bare that Haitians have been deprived of meaningful, consistent representation since the 2004 coup, through political repression and US-sponsored fraudulent elections that brought the PHTK into power.

Immediately after the 2004 coup, there was a massive wave of violent repression, targeting officials and activists with Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular political party in the country. Thousands upon thousands of people were killed. In an investigative report published by the British medical journal The Lancet on August 31st, 2006, Athena R. Kolbe and Dr. Royce A. Hutson found that during the first 22-months of the U.S.-backed coup regime, 8,000 people were murdered in the greater Port-au Prince area alone. 35,000 women and girls were raped or sexually assaulted. The violence was politically motivated as part of the coup regime’s war on Haiti’s popular movement.

Subsequent US-sponsored “elections” cemented this political repression by excluding Fanmi Lavalas from participation, as in the 2010–2011 election— dominated by the US and personally manipulated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton– that resulted in the “victory” of PHTK godfather Michel Martelly. The next election in 2016 that put PHTK puppet Jovenel Moise in power was likewise based on blatant fraud. The result of this political repression is to deprive the Haitian people of political sovereignty.

Under the US/UN occupation, Haitians– particularly in impoverished neighborhoods that are bases of pro-democracy, pro-Lavalas activism– have been subjected to relentless massacres: first those perpetrated directly by UN occupation forces such as the 2005 massacre in Site Soley (Cite Soleil), and in more recent years those perpetrated by the US-funded/ trained Haitian National Police (HNP) and heavily weaponized paramilitaries, most notably the G9 Family and Allies, working with the PHTK dictatorship, such as the 2018 Lasalin massacre (see this video) and the 2019 massacres in the Tokyo and Site Vensan (Cite Vincent) neighborhoods. The Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic documented this pattern in its 2021 report “Killing with Impunity: State-Sanctioned Massacres in Haiti”. On May 21st, 2023, the National Human Rights Defense Network in Haiti released a detailed report on recent massacres in Bel Air and Cite Soleil, noting that from “2018 to the present, at least twelve (12) massacres and armed attacks have been carried out in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. In the first 10 cases, the survivors lodged a complaint with the judicial authorities against their aggressors, most of whom were notorious armed bandits and well-known state authorities” [emphasis mine].

The paramilitaries, an outgrowth of the PHTK regime, have also utilized other forms of terror to expand their power. Rape and kidnappings have proliferated along with the massacres under the US/UN occupation and the PHTK regime. The paramilitaries have taken over neighborhoods, burning down houses, and creating a massive internal refugee crisis. In October, 2022, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) released a report showing that the number of people displaced by “gang violence” in Port-au-Prince over the past five months had tripled. Between June and August of 2022 alone, the IOM documented that 96,000 people in Port-au-Prince had been forced into internal exile. Within my own relatively small number of close friends in Haiti, there have already been several deaths and widespread displacement.

Of course, the paramilitary violence has the political function of terrorizing impoverished communities like Bel Air, Cite Soleil, and Lasalin as well as rural areas that are bases of Lavalas resistance, making it all the more difficult for people to assemble and protest for fear of their lives and the lives of their loved ones. But the violence also has the economic function of depopulating these communities, thereby facilitating land grabs. Such brutal dispossession was evident in the early years of the PHTK dictatorship under President Martelly.

Moreover, the paramilitary violence is designed to force people to accept the structural genocide being imposed onto them by the PHTK regime, implementing the austerity dictates of the IMF and the US model of neoliberal “development”, something the Haitians have called the “death plan”. Like IMF-imposed “structural adjustment programs” throughout the Global South, the “death plan” involves these measures by the ruling regime backed by the US and the IMF:

+ Engaging in pervasive corruption and the massive looting of public funds.

+ Perpetuating land grabs and the dispossession of Haitian farmers, including by former PHTK President Jovenel Moise himself to enlarge his personal banana republic, as well as the plunder of Haiti’s vast natural resources (gold, petroleum, bauxite and more) by domestic oligarchs and foreign corporations. The “open” investment climate supported by the PHTK regime is noted in this 2018 US State Department Report on “doing business in Haiti”.

+ Underwriting the super-exploitation of Haitian workers like the Caracol Industrial Park initiative with the Clintons.

+ Eliminating government subsidies on staples such as fuel, consequently plunging even more people into misery.

Predictably, in the aftermath of an agreement with the IMF made in June, 2022, the PHTK regime proceeded to eliminate fuel subsidies in September, 2022, resulting in cost-push inflation ruthlessly punishing the poor majority. By March 2023, a record 4.9 million people were experiencing acute hunger, nearly half the population. Haiti’s food inflation is among the highest in the world, increasing by 48% between February 2022 and February 2023.

The Haitian people have consistently shown steadfast resistance to the US-backed coup and to the neo-colonial policies of the “death plan”. Witness the huge mobilizations right after the coup calling for the return of President Aristide, as captured by the documentary “We Must Kill the Bandits”. Witness the immense protests against Jovenel Moise despite lethal police repression. Witness the courage of activist students like Gregory Saint-Hilaire who organized on his campus and was assassinated by police on October 2nd, 2020. Witness the courage of journalists like Romelson Vilsaint who was shot in the head and killed by police on October 30th, 2022, for his activism. Witness the courage of so many survivors who are still willing to speak out in the face of ongoing terror. Witness the singular act of resistance by Karl Udson Azor on May 21st, 2023, a medical student who publicly took off his shirt and shoes and laid them alongside a Haitian flag on the steps of the Monument of the Heroes of Vèrtières in Cap-Haitien, erected to the last battle of Haitian independence. Azor handed out his money to passing strangers, then sat down, doused himself with gasoline, and burned himself to death in protest over the ongoing destruction of Haiti, as reported in the Haitian media.

In the face of this resistance to mounting genocide, the Haiti Action Committee put out a call for protests throughout the US and the world on May 18th, 2023, Haitian Flag Day. The actions were coordinated to raise international solidarity with the Haitian people and their struggle for national liberation against the US-installed PHTK dictatorship and ongoing US/ UN occupation.

Art by Emory Douglas

Emory Douglas, revolutionary artist and former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party, recently created this art in solidarity with the people of Haiti. His art was widely taken up by solidarity activists around the US and the world for May 18th Day of Action. At the top of his art, he chose the words: “Stop the Genocide”, based upon internationally recognized criteria. Similarly, the ongoing, systematic destruction of Haiti as a nation conforms to the criteria established in The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) by the United Nations.

Dozens of organizations within and beyond the US endorsed and participated in these actions. Protests inside of the US were held in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Pedro, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. Beyond the US, there were protests in London, Belize, and Guyana. All protests were unified in demanding that the US government and the Core Group:

+ Stop using US tax dollars to fund the brutal Haitian police and affiliated death squads such as the G-9 responsible for gross human rights violations.

+ Stop supporting the Ariel Henry dictatorship.

+ Stop attacking and deporting Haitian refugees. Within one year, the Biden Administration has violently deported more Haitians than the previous three US presidents combined.

+ No more foreign intervention in Haiti. Support the right of the Haitian people to establish their own transition government free from US and Core Group interference. Oppose the fiction– being perpetuated by the Biden Administration– that the Ariel Henry dictatorship is capable of organizing fair and free elections.

May 18th Protesters in Philadelphia holding up Emory Douglas’ art.

It is past time for the world to act in solidarity with the Haitian people. Haiti, historically and currently, continues to live up to the true meanings of revolution, liberation, and solidarity. The mobilizations on May 18th were another step towards this goal of intensifying international solidarity. As called for in the press release of the women’s and popular organizations of the Grandans, international solidarity is needed now to stop the genocide that is unfolding in Haiti, a genocide made in the USA, subsidized by US tax dollars, and aided and abetted by the “Core Group” and the UN. The array of attacks against Haiti’s grassroots movement for national liberation includes military interventions, fraudulent elections, phony economic assistance, media disinformation to maintain the status quo that benefits foreign multinationals and the Haitian oligarchy. Mobilizations are needed globally to condemn US and UN support for the Ariel Henry dictatorship and to end their policies that are destroying lives in Haiti. Solidarity actions including disruptive non-violent forms of resistance will need to be employed on greater and greater scales–in coordination with the decisive resistance on the ground in Haiti– until the Haitian people can complete their heroic revolution of 1804 and claim true victory once and for all.

Selma James at a May 18th Protest in London organized by Global Women’s Strike.

Conflict, Migration, and Demography in Russia and Its Border Regions

John P. Ruehl

For centuries, Russian authorities have modified their approach to managing the country’s large, diverse population, held together by an ethnic Russian core. The war in Ukraine has again altered the Kremlin’s strategy of managing its complex domestic demographics.

Despite the absence of a clear definition of “ethnic group,” the term generally refers to people with a common history, culture, and ancestry. Russians are widely considered the largest ethnic group in Europe, and historically they have lived in a multiethnic state where they formed a majority of the population. Within the country’s vast territory, imperial Russia and later Soviet authorities often encouraged internal migration to help populate barren regions for economic exploitation, typically resulting in cooperation and assimilation between ethnic and social groups.

But cultural fusion has not always been possible nor desired, and conflicts and forced population transfers have occurred both internally and in Russia’s border regions for centuries. Since the Soviet collapse, the Kremlin has attempted to enforce a sense of patriotism among its diverse citizenry by synthesizing Russia’s ethnic and national identities, while weakening the links between the two in other post-Soviet states.

Early Russia to Tsardom

The Russian identity begins with the Slavs, a diverse collection of tribal societies with common linguistic, religious, and other cultural ties who settled across Eastern and southeast Europe in the 5th Century AD. The first Slavic-majority state was the Kievan Rus, declared in 882 and centered around Kyiv. Its Viking and Finnic minorities steadily Slavicized through intermarriage and cultural assimilation, and the Rus adopted Orthodox Christianity from the neighboring Byzantine Empire in 988. But the Slavic-majority state soon became weakened by internal political divisions and in 1240 was destroyed by the expanding Mongol Empire. This left Moscow, a small city on the Rus’ periphery, subservient to the Mongol yoke.

After the Grand Duchy of Moscow, or Muscovy, was established in 1263, the young Russian state, defined largely by its Eastern Slavic and Orthodox heritage, expanded across its sparsely populated territories in the west and north over the next two and a half centuries. It steadily absorbed other Slavic and Orthodox communities, as well as several others, into the developing Russian identity.

By the 15th century, expansion into what is now southern Russia and Ukraine brought the Duchy into significant contact with Cossacks. Typically a mix of runaway serfs, hunters, bandits, mercenaries, and fugitives from Eastern Europe, Cossacks lived in militarized yet lightly organized settlements across border regions in Russia’s south and east. Their diverse ethnic origins and semi-nomadic societies prevented Cossack groups from developing a strong national identity. Many, however, belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church and spoke “in dialects of Russian.”

Following the establishment of the Tsardom of Russia under Ivan the Terrible in 1533, Cossack groups became essential to wider Russian military campaigns against regional Tatar groups. While Tatar origins are often debated, they have generally been portrayed as descendants of Turkic nomadic tribes who invaded Eurasia with the Mongol Empire and remained there after the empire dissolved in 1368.

The Russian state also sought to reunify what it saw as “Russian lands,” namely the Orthodox and Eastern Slavic populations in modern-day Belarus and Ukraine, including the Cossacks living in these lands. In 1654, Russia signed the Pereiaslav Agreement, facilitating the absorption of parts of eastern Ukraine, and in 1686 it gained additional former territories of the Kievan Rus. Education, intermarriage, and government service also instigated the “Russification” of Ukrainian nobility. However, there was significant tension between the relatively autonomous Cossacks and the organized states that sought their assistance and incorporation, including Russia. Cossack groups launched several rebellions against Russia in the 1600s and 1700s, which often spurred Russian serfs and other minority groups to join. Cossack military campaigns against Russia, sometimes in coordination with other states, were also common.

But Russian authorities could offer Cossacks something other states could not—an open frontier. In return for military service, Cossacks enjoyed vastly reduced taxes, freedom of movement, and significant autonomy. Cossack groups steadily helped conquer smaller, often warring Finnic, Turkic, Ugric, and Tatar tribes across Siberia and into Alaska, establishing many settlements that later became major cities. Russian expansion was often brutal, but agreements with local elites permitted conquered communities to retain elements of their culture and assimilate into the empire by accepting Tsarist rule. Russians and Cossacks would also adapt to local cultures, and intermarriage between groups was common.

Russian Empire

Following the establishment of the Russian Empire in 1721, Cossack groups steadily became integrated into Russian military command and proved integral to Russian campaigns to expel local Muslim populations to Russia’s south and west. Between 1784 and 1790, 300,000 Crimean Tatars (out of a population of roughly 1 million) left or were forced to leave the peninsula. Hundreds of thousands of Circassians also left or were forced to leave the mountainous Caucasus region in the 1800s.

In both instances, most displaced Muslims settled in the nearby Ottoman Empire, paving the way for Russian settlers to move in. Yet population transfers in primarily Muslim lands were not universally carried out. In the Caucasus, Russian authorities created alliances with some local communities between the 16th and 18th centuries, who were wary of Ottoman and Persian influences in the region. Russian authorities also sought to use the empire’s Muslim minorities to expand into other Muslim regions. Tatar communities who accepted Tsarist rule, for example, were used as cultural emissaries in Central Asia, building relationships with the local populations as the Russian Empire spread further into this region in the 1700s and 1800s. Additionally, many “noble Russian families were of Tatar descent and there was frequent intermarriage between the Russians and Tatars.”

Lacking the population to hold territory as Russia’s empire continued to expand, Catherine the Great’s second manifesto in 1763 invited European settlers to Russia. Without requiring citizenship and enticed by tax breaks, loans, land grants, and religious freedom, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Germany, the Balkans, and other parts of Europe moved to the sprawling empire and its new territories over the next few decades, often maintaining their distinct cultures.

However, the rise of nationalism in Europe in the 1800s began to threaten the loose national identity that Russian authorities had nurtured for centuries. Following the emancipation of Russian serfs in 1861, integration problems also arose as the Russian government began giving land only to citizens and began to more forcefully promote Russification. This included introducing conscription and other obligations for non-Russians, expanding the use of the Russian language among ethnic groups, and identifying “potential Russians” in the European part of the empire. Violence against the Jewish population meant that roughly 2 million Jews also left the empire between 1881 and 1914. But because the Russian Empire required a larger population to sustain industrialization and its enormous territory, a net migration of 4.5 million people arrived in Russia from 1860 to 1917. Immigration and territorial expansion meanwhile meant that ethnic Russians went from roughly 77 percent of the population at the time of the establishment of the Russian Empire to roughly 44 percent at the time of the 1897 census.

In addition, Russification policies caused tension with some minority communities and were one of the major causes of the Russian Revolution in 1905. Ethnic violence among minority groups also broke out across the empire, such as the Armenian-Tatar massacres from 1905 to 1907.

World Wars and the Soviet Union

Ethnic tensions persisted even after Russia became embroiled in World War I in 1914. Disputes between Russian authorities and local populations in Central Asia, including over the unfair distribution of land to Russians and Ukrainians, conscription in the Russian army, and other issues, resulted in the 1916 Central Asian Revolt. Thousands of Slavic settlers were killed, while reprisal attacks, famine, and disease saw 100,000 to 270,000 deaths of mostly Kazakhs and Kyrgyz afterward. Ethnic tensions persisted throughout the empire, and many countries and ethnic groups declared their independence from Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The ensuing Russian civil war saw the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, in 1922. Though Soviet forces were able to recapture much of the Russian Empire’s territories by the early 1920s, Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland gained their independence, while resistance to Soviet rule continued throughout the 1920s in Central Asia.

After consolidating power, Soviet authorities kickstarted a more calculated and ruthless management of the country’s sprawling, multiethnic society. Smaller clan and region-based identities were homogenized in accordance with Soviet nation-building policies, and “by the end of the 1920s people who had not really thought in national terms before the World War [I] found that they now had a national language, a national culture, national histories and national political structures—in short, they had become members of a nation.” Internal borders were established based on ethnic identity under a policy known as national delimitation, followed by Korenizatsiya, or “indigenization,” where minority nations and populations were given significant autonomy as well as power in the national government.

Eventually, 15 major Soviet republics emerged. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the largest, was further divided into autonomous ethnic minority territories. Both inside the RSFSR and the Soviet Union, Russian cultural dominance was reduced considerably. However, in the 1930s, Soviet political leader Joseph Stalin reversed much of this process to harness Russian nationalism and consolidate power against separatist-inclined republics and regions. While the specter of “Great Russian chauvinism” was carefully repressed in the Soviet Union until its collapse, power began to be recentralized in Moscow and the “petty bourgeois nationalism” of smaller ethnic groups was also curtailed.

Beginning in the 1930s, Stalin also began large-scale forced population transfers of entire ethnic groups, which continued during World War II. Mass rail transit systems allowed Soviet authorities to deport more than 3 million people between 1936 and 1952 belonging to 20 social and ethnic groups. Several were largely removed from their “ancestral homelands,” including the Volga Germans, Kalmyks, Karachai, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetians. And whether true or not, many minority groups—among them Chechens, Ingush, and Cossacks—were accused of working with Nazi Germany during the war. Like others, they were sent to Siberia and Central Asia to labor camps or “special settlements,” where hundreds of thousands perished.

Slavic migration to Central Asia also increased during WWII, as populations sought to avoid the encroaching German army. Additionally, the redistribution of industrial capacity to Central Asia during WWII, as well as urbanization, further changed the ethnic layout of the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s death in 1953 largely ended massive, forced population transfers, and most groups were able to return to their ancestral homelands over the next few years. But Soviet authorities maintained the Stalin-era borders to divide and weaken ethnic groups. By avoiding the creation of homogenous republics, they could more easily suppress separatism and compel ethnic groups to require the assistance of the Kremlin to manage their territorial disputes. Soviet authorities also sought to continue redistributing the labor force, and in the years following WWII until the mid-1970s, 2.7 million Russians left the RSFSR to Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, and Central Asia. However, by the 1970s this trend reversed, and 2.5 million Soviet citizens flocked to the RSFSR from 1975 to 1991.

While Russians (and their culture) enjoyed a privileged position of “first among equals” in the Soviet Union, overt Russification policies were mostly abandoned in favor of “Sovietization,” which instead promoted a non-ethnic national identity. By the 1960s, Soviet sociologists advocated for the existence of a Soviet people “with a shared identity based on common territory, state, economic system, culture, and the goal of building communism.” Yet despite a rise in interethnic marriages, traditional ethnic and cultural ties, as well as grievances, proved difficult to dislodge. Tied by a common east Slavic and Orthodox heritage, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians dominated the Soviet Union’s political structures. Ethnic solidarity could also affect foreign policy—Central Asian soldiers, for example, were initially used during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, but due to fraternization with local Afghans, were largely replaced by Slavic troops in 1980.

The synchronization of Russian cultural identity with that of the Soviet one meant Soviet culture steadily lost its appeal among the non-Russian population, while many Russians also grew disenfranchised by the 1980s. And by 1989, the ethnic Russian majority of the Soviet Union had fallen to roughly 51 percent. Growing avenues for ethnic nationalism among minority groups as a result of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, as well as ethnic Russian frustration with these policies, played an essential role in the Soviet collapse in 1991.

Russian Federation

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the 15 republics became independent countries. Millions of ethnic Russians returned to the Russian Federation in the 1990s from across the former Soviet Union, in addition to non-Russians who sought to live and work in Russia. Initially from European former Soviet states, migrant groups have increasingly arrived from former Soviet states in the Caucasus region and Central Asia in recent years.

Government authority was decentralized away from Moscow to Russia’s other regions throughout the 1990s. And like other post-Soviet states, Russia was afflicted by demands for greater autonomy from ethnic and social groups, as well as outright secession movements. In Chechnya, Russian troops were forced to secede from the region in 1996 following their defeat in the first Chechen war.

Upon his rise to power in 1999 as acting President Vladimir Putin began reestablishing centralized, top-down rule over Russia. His path to the presidency coincided with the launch of the second Chechen war that brought the region back under Russian control in the 2000s. And while Cossack groups were permitted to reemerge as distinct cultural entities in the 1990s, Putin took more formal steps to reintegrate them into national military command, including using them in Chechen counterinsurgency operations.

Russian officials also became increasingly critical of Western-style multiculturalism. Though cultural and political rights were afforded to non-Russians and Putin warned against promoting Russian ethno-nationalism, the Kremlin has supported the need to build a patriotic identity within Russia through a civic identity of common values and traditions—notably the widespread adoption of the Russian language. Non-Russians would be welcomed in the Russian Federation, but it was ethnic Russians that would “cement this civilization.” The ethnic Russian population has declined slightly since 1989, the year of the last Soviet census. Ethnic Russians composed roughly 81.5 percent of Russia’s population in 1989, 79.8 percent in 2002, and 77.7 percent in 2010. The 2021 census showed a remarkable drop to 71.7 percent, though this can largely be explained by “the declining importance of ethnicity as an identifier in ethnically homogeneous areas, such as the predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts of central Russia”, and the rising number of ethnic Russians declining to declare their nationality.

To complement the country’s political and cultural restructuring, the Kremlin merged several territories in the 2000s, and with the addition of Crimea in 2014, Russia boasted 85 federal subjects. Forty-six are ethnic-Russian dominated oblasts, with 22 republics that are home to an ethnic minority. Additionally, there are four autonomous okrugs or districts (with significant ethnic minority populations), nine krais (similar to oblasts), three federal cities, and one Jewish autonomous oblast.

Ethnicity and 21st Century Post-Soviet Conflicts

Russia’s relatively successful efforts to foment patriotism among its multiethnic population and reforge a powerful, centralized state since 2000 contrasts to some other post-Soviet states. Ethnic rivalries within them have been exploited by the Kremlin to challenge their stability and sovereignty. Alongside using ethnic Russians living outside Russia to achieve these aims, Russia’s own ethnic and social minorities have been primary participants in various conflicts and disputes abroad.

From 1989 to the early 1990s, for example, two Georgian separatist territories populated by ethnic minorities, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, waged wars against Georgian forces. Russia provided Abkhazians and South Ossetians with considerable military and economic aid, which increased after Georgia began drifting toward the West following the 2003 Rose Revolution. As Abkhazia and South Ossetia gained increasing autonomy from Georgia, tensions culminated in the 2008 Russo-Georgia War. In addition to aiding the ethnic separatists, the Russian military employed Cossack and Chechen militant groups against the Georgian armed forces in 2008. In the aftermath, the remaining ethnic Georgian populations were largely expelled from Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Both Cossacks and Chechens were also utilized by Russia during the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the launch of the proxy war in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine. Russian-speaking Ukrainians (including Ukrainian Cossacks), ethnic Russians in the south and east Ukraine, as well as those from across the former Soviet Union and beyond, filled the ranks of the pro-Russian separatist groups. These militants maintained a proxy conflict for Russia in Donetsk and Luhansk until the official Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, and continue to take part in Russia’s ongoing “special military operation.” Additionally, Russia has used non-ethnic Russian minorities within Russia to fight at the frontline of the conflict, and they are reportedly dying at higher rates in Ukraine than their Slavic counterparts.

After reigniting conflicts in Georgia and launching one in Ukraine, Russia has also taken steps to annex their separatist territories. In the years before Russia’s 2008 campaign in Georgia, the Kremlin steadily gave Russian passports to Abkhazians and South Ossetians, a tactic now known as passportization. The need to protect Russian citizens helped Russia justify the war and allowed it to more easily absorb these territories by granting them freedom of movement to Russia. Days after the war had concluded, the Kremlin recognized Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s independence in August 2008, and in 2022, South Ossetian leader Anatoly Bibilov declared the region’s intention to join Russia, its “historical homeland.”

And following Ukraine’s lurch to the West in 2014, significant passportization took place in Ukraine. Days before the February 24, 2022, Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin recognized the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, likely in anticipation of future calls to join Russia. These two regions were annexed by Russia in September 2022, joining Russia as republics, while two oblasts (Kherson and Zaporozhye) were also annexed from Ukraine by Russia. Russian forces, however, have been unable to establish complete control over all of the claimed territories.

But the Kremlin also sees the Ukrainian war as an opportunity to “integrate” the country’s population with its own amid Russia’s declining population. For centuries, Russian strategists have believed that Ukrainians, viewed as a subcategory of the Russian ethnic identity, could help Russify parts of the country where ethnic Russians do not form a dominant majority. In 2014, more than 1 million Ukrainians fled the country’s southeast to Russia, mostly just across the border. However, in keeping with the Kremlin’s desire to populate other regions, Ukrainian refugees began moving to the Volga Basin, the Ural Mountains, the Far East, and other areas. Since the outbreak of full conflict in 2022, millions of Ukrainians have fled to Russia or been forcibly removed, and have been resettled across the country. Thus, while the war in Ukraine is central to Putin’s foreign policy ambitions, encouraging Ukrainian immigration to Russia is also an important domestic imperative.

Other regions across the former Soviet Union remain vulnerable to Russian attempts to use ethnicity to destabilize them. Since a 1992 ceasefire, Moldova’s separatist region of Transnistria, populated largely by Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, has been under the control of separatist authorities. Additionally, the Soviet 14th Army, which was stationed in Transnistria, was inherited by Russia after the Soviet collapse. Today, its remnants form Russia’s part of the trilateral peacekeeping force (with Moldovan and Transnistrian soldiers) and the Operational Group of Russian Forces (OGRF), which guards old Soviet arms depots in the separatist region. Cultivating pro-Russian sentiment among Transnistria’s Slavic majority, could quickly reignite the conflict. Russian military figures stated in April 2022 that the “second phase” of Russia’s military campaign would annex enough of Ukraine to connect it to Transnistria, though this appears unfeasible for the foreseeable future.

After annexing Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin’s declaration that it would protect ethnic Russians everywhere resonated with many of the millions of Russians scattered mostly in former Soviet states. In Central Asia and the Baltic states, where they are most numerous, ethnic Russians have faced restrictions on the use of the Russian language and other forms of cultural expression since the Soviet collapse, making exploitation easier. Kazakhstan’s roughly 3.5 million Russians make up roughly 18 percent of the total population. Most ethnic Russians migrated primarily to northern Kazakhstan beginning in the 19th century and during the Soviet period, and have significant economic and political power. In Estonia and Latvia, ethnic Russians largely migrated during the Soviet period, and today form roughly 25 percent of the populations in both these countries. In addition to higher rates of unemployment, hundreds of thousands of Russians remain stateless persons in the Baltic states, as their citizenship (and those of their descendants) was denied after the Soviet collapse. Russia has leveraged these realities to help inflame social unrest, such as Estonia’s 2007 Bronze Night incident, as well as wield indirect political representation through Estonia’s Center party and Latvia’s Harmony party. Significant passportization among Russians in the Baltic states has also taken place in the last few years.

Millions of ethnic Russians living in former Soviet states left for Russia in the 1990s and 2000s, reducing the Kremlin’s influence over these countries. However, the Baltic states have seen more Russians immigrate than emigrate in recent years, while more than 200,000 Russians avoiding conscription during the ongoing war fled to Kazakhstan in September 2022. How the Kremlin exploits these changing circumstances remains to be seen. And as in Transnistria, Ukrainian and Belarusian communities in these countries also look to Russia for protection, particularly, in defending the use of the Russian language in their societies.

Predictions

Russia’s ability to use ethnicity for domestic stability and as a foreign policy tool is not without risk. Nurturing ethnic Russian nationalism is unnerving to minority groups and has occasionally led to the eruption of ethnic violence, such as in the city of Kondopoga in 2006 and in Stavropol in 2007. Historical persecution has led to significant emigration even in modern times, which occurred among Russian Germans and Russian Jews in the 1990s. Giving minority groups greater rights could meanwhile instigate secession attempts, while failed attempts to merge additional federal subjects in 2020 demonstrate the limits of Russia’s federal authority.

Russia’s birth rate has rebounded from a record low of 1.25 children per woman in 2000 and was expected to reach 1.8 children per woman by 2020. But it is still below replacement level and there has been a significant population decline in Russia for years. While the population grew slightly during the 2010s, it is again shrinking. Minority groups often have higher birthrates than ethnic Russians, and though no ethnic minority groups equate to greater than 5 percent of Russia’s total population, its various Muslim minorities amount to 10 to 15 percent of the population. Radical Islam came to partly define the Chechen independence movement in the 1990s, and many volunteer Muslim-Russians from across the country arrived to fight against Russian forces. The Kremlin is fearful of a similar situation in the future with its growing Muslim population.

The Kremlin will also have to contend with managing the delicate alliances it has with its minority groups. Clashes were reported in Ukraine between Chechen soldiers and those belonging to the Buryat minority group in 2022, while tension between Cossack groups and Russian nationalists has been evident since 2014. Russia will also inherit ethnic disputes as it seeks to expand its territory. More than 260,000 Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea after the Soviet collapse, reviving historical animosity between them and local Cossack communities. Russia’s war in Ukraine also risks solidifying anti-Russian sentiment in much of Ukraine’s population.

Regardless of these threats, the Kremlin continues to push ahead with its vision to remake Russian society and disrupt its border regions. Russian officials increasingly define Russianness in cultural terms, inviting minority groups to be absorbed more effectively. Highlighting the importance of revered “Russian” leaders, such as Joseph Stalin (Georgian) and Catherine the Great (German) showcase the important leadership roles that non-Slavs have played in Russian history. Russia has also shown initiative in using other elements of minority cultures to expand its influence abroad. Russia has been an observer state of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Countries (OIC) since 2005, and Putin has promoted the idea of the “similarity of the Russian and ‘Islamic’ approaches to many international issues.” Chechen military personnel have been used in Russia’s military campaign in Syria, while Tatar minorities are often responsible for Russian diplomatic and cultural outreach to Central Asia.

The Kremlin has, however, suppressed minority languages in Russia. This policy forms part of its efforts to promote Russian movies, television, social media, literature, and other media forms to Russify other countries. In 1939, for example, more than 80 percent of all Belarus inhabitants spoke Belarusian at home. By 1989, that had fallen to 65 percent, and by 2009, almost 70 percent of Belarusians spoke Russian at home. In 2017, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko expressed open alarm over this linguistic evolution, declaring that “[i]f we lose our ability to speak Belarusian, we will cease to be a nation.” But Lukashenko’s need to defeat the widespread protests against him after the 2020 election only deepened his reliance on Russia. The use of Belarusian territory to assist in the invasion of Ukraine and Lukashenko’s cooperation with Putin will now completely isolate Belarus from the West, increasing its dependence on Russia further. The potential for even greater political, economic, and military integration between Russia and Belarus, formalized through the Union State, will only be further augmented by Belarus’ steady adoption of the Russian language.

But the Kremlin’s campaign in Ukraine will remain its most pressing imperative, and it has focused on efforts to alter and weaken Ukraine’s demographics. For example, the war has prompted millions of Ukrainian citizens to leave the country, and the longer they are away, the less likely they are to return. Reports on the forced transfer of Ukrainian minors from Ukraine to Russia have also been apparent since the beginning of the war, and roughly 20,000 Ukrainian children are estimated to have been sent to Russia, according to Ukrainian authorities. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for both Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian commissioner for children’s rights, in connection with the affair. It is unlikely that either of them will ever be prosecuted, while Russia has stated that the population transfers are part of a humanitarian response to young Ukrainians made orphans by the war. Reducing Ukraine’s population by creating refugees and bolstering Russia’s by transferring orphans further demonstrate the demographic aspect to the conflict.

With centuries of experience in using ethnicity and conflict to redraw borders, the Kremlin has aimed to reconceptualize Ukrainian statehood. Reinforcing the notion that Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians are “one people” may help Russia expand its territory through conflict, and reverse its declining population by assimilating millions of potential Russians into the country. Whether this will be worth the consequences of sanctions and isolation from the West for the Kremlin will remain up for debate for the foreseeable future. A clear Russian defeat, however, would have disastrous implications for Russia’s territorial integrity, and would likely inspire greater calls for separatism in Russia not only from ethnic minorities, but also ethnic Russian communities dissatisfied with living under Moscow’s thumb. Thus, like Ukraine, Russia’s fate will depend on the outcome of the war and its ability to consolidate its diverse population once hostilities decline.