Ethnic dynamics and dilemmas of the Russian Republic

The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which contains 51.5% of the USSR's population, has emerged as a key factor in the political and economic ferment that is undermining the very existence of the Soviet Union. The election of Boris Yeltsin as RSFSR president in June 1991 marked a decisive step in the decline of Mikhail Gorbachev's primacy and a new stage in the process of reform and democratization, the consequences of which we are only beginning to see. Though the RSFSR's population is over 80% Russian and over 85% Slavic, the republic confronts almost as many problems of ethnic and regional self‐assertion as the USSR as a whole. The 21 million non‐Slavs who live in the RSFSR occupy strategic border regions and economically critical areas. Most of them are jealous of their territorial autonomy, even though the system of union and autonomous republics and two kinds of autonomous districts has in many respects become anachronistic and illogical. As in the Transcaucasian republics to the...