Southern Federal District: Current Trends in Ethnic and Demographic Dynamics

The article examines the shifts in the national structure of the population of the Southern Federal District and its regions in the 2010s and early 2020s. It was found that the ethnic and demographic dynamics of the district’s population during this period represented a complex combination of trends that developed in previous decades. The stabilization of the majority of Caucasian communities, which began in the 2000s, continued. There was a steady quantitative growth of a number of Central Asian ethnic groups, which gradually evolved from the stage of labor migration to the stage of integrated rooting in the southern Russian regions. The depopulation of a large group of communities of European origin, as well as the peoples of the Volga region and the Urals, accelerated due to assimilation and high natural decline. The protracted nature of this trend led to a multiple reduction in the size and serious deformation of the gender and age structure of these communities (evidence of the final stages of their demographic evolution). But in general, ethnic and demographic dynamics had almost no effect on the composition and ratio of the leading group of nationalities in the Southern District. It was found that the significant decrease in the number of large communities of the district recorded by the 2021 census (Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Greeks, Georgians, Koreans, Tatars, Gypsies, etc.) does not correspond to their real demographic dynamics in the 2010s. The reason for this decrease is a noticeable increase in the group of people with unidentified nationality, but to a greater extent it was underestimation during the census. The Southern Federal District retained a vast area of Russian ethnic dominance (a significant part of the Rostov and Volgograd regions and Krasnodar Krai). The share of the Russian population exceeded 90% here, and the level of ethnic mosaic of regional societies gradually decreased. Polyethnic areas (Astrakhan region, Republics of Adygea, Kalmykia, and the Crimea) with an increased index of ethnic mosaic of the population also remained in the Southern Federal District. But only Kalmykia was characterized by a steady decline in the Russian ethnic presence.