Problems of ethnic and cultural identity of the Ukrainian population of Western Siberia (early 20th and early 21st centuries)

The reason that for the interest to the problem of ethnic and cultural identity of Ukrainian migrants to Siberia in the early 20th and 21st centuries is their acute perception of self-identity - the topic currently discussed by Russian scholars. The study of ethnic and cultural identity is closely related to the problem of criteria for ethnic self-awareness. In recent years, anthropologists and philosophers have proposed to distinguish between self-identity as internal feeling of self-awareness, as opposed to external information about oneself. Evidence on Ukrainian migrants to Siberia is used for analyzing the processes related to ethnic and cultural identification in two groups - migrants who arrived during the Stolypin’s reforms and contemporary immigrants from Kazakhstan. Using field evidence, the author comes to conclusion about the floating or situational identity of the Stolypin’s migrants to Western Siberia, which also included some intermediate Russian-Ukrainian variants (“khakhly”). This situation becomes especially pronounced when they are compared with the Southern Russian migrants, whom the Ukrainians distinguished as different cultural community (“katsapy”). However, in the eyes of the Siberian old-timers, both of these groups constituted a single group with the collective nickname of “khakhly.” This situation explains inconsistencies in the Soviet Censuses in 1959, 1970, 1979, and 1989, caused by the situational or floating identity of Ukrainian residents, and not by slow processes of assimilation or “Russification.” The immigrants from Kazakhstan, who have been arriving to Siberia for the past thirty years, demonstrate a pronounced Ukrainian identity, which is caused by living in another cultural and religious environment in their former places of residence.