Lourié S.V. Refractions of the imperial complex in the identity of the imperial people “cement” people who settling the “taken region” or the “Russian-speaking population” with interethnic marriages. Severnye Arkhivy i Ekspeditsii (Northern Archives and Expeditions). 2021. Vol. 5. No. 2. Pp. 120-126.

Abstract

The article examines the phenomenon of the imperial people, which has some special qualities that allow it to integrate peoples and territories. Many researchers of the empire recognize the importance of the imperial people factor, but it is quite difficult to indicate its specific characteristics. It is concluded that the Russians, having moved to the outskirts of the empire, to some extent changed their behavior patterns and became what is sometimes called “other Russians”. They differ from the Russians from the indigenous territories and have the qualities of a “cement people” that holds together parts of the empire. The Russians identity turned out to be duplex. They are predominantly occupied with themselves in their autochthonous territories as one of the peoples of the Earth and can perceive themselves as an ethnic whole. But they absorb the contradictions between peoples on the outskirts of the empire and create a kind of new - imperial - integrity. Then they have not have only a special Russian national identity, but rather a messianic one, coupled with an imperial function. Russians as an imperial people understand themselves (and others too) as bricks of a single empire.We aim to cover this topic in this article we rely on data from sources about the Russian peasant colonization of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. We also use the statistics of interethnic marriages in the USSR, which were an important factor in the homogenization of the peoples of the Soviet empire.