10.2 North and Central Eurasia: Peoples the Map Tried to Simplify

 Part II. Peoples the Map Tried to Simplify

Uneven Settlement, Uneven Futures

Population is distributed very unevenly across North and Central Eurasia. In Russia, most people live west of the Ural Mountains or along southern transportation corridors. Moscow and St. Petersburg dominate political, cultural, and economic life, while many smaller industrial towns face population loss. Siberian and Far Eastern cities can be substantial, but they are separated by enormous spaces.

Ukraine's population geography has been transformed by long-term low fertility, labor migration, the annexation of Crimea, and Russia's full-scale invasion beginning in 2022. Millions of people fled abroad or moved within the country. By early 2026, roughly 3.7 to 3.9 million people remained internally displaced, while millions more lived outside Ukraine (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2026a; 2026b). A population map drawn before the war is now an archaeological layer rather than a current description.

Central Asia is generally younger and growing more rapidly. Uzbekistan has more than 38 million people and the largest population in Central Asia. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan also have comparatively young populations. Kazakhstan combines a large territory with a much smaller population, concentrated in cities, agricultural regions, and resource corridors. These contrasts matter. Russia faces aging, labor shortages, and regional population decline. Central Asian states face the challenge of educating and employing large younger cohorts.

These patterns are connected through migration. Workers from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere have traveled to Russia and Kazakhstan for employment in construction, transportation, services, and industry. Their remittances support households and national economies. Russia receives labor; Central Asian communities receive income; both become vulnerable to recession, border controls, currency changes, discrimination, and political pressure. Migration is not a pipe carrying anonymous labor. It is a chain of households stretched across borders.

Russia Is Not One People

Russia is often imagined as a Slavic and Orthodox country. Most of its population is ethnically Russian, Russian is the dominant language, and Orthodox Christianity has become closely associated with state symbolism. None of this makes the country culturally uniform.

The Russian Federation includes more than twenty ethnic republics as well as territories, regions, and federal cities. Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Chuvash, Avars, Buryats, Sakha, Ossetians, Udmurts, Mari, Komi, and many other peoples possess distinct histories, languages, and homelands. Indigenous communities across Siberia and the Arctic include Nenets, Evenki, Chukchi, Khanty, Mansi, and others. Some populations are large and urban. Others are small and live across territories heavily affected by mining, oil and gas extraction, climate change, and state infrastructure.

The administrative map appears to recognize diversity, but recognition and power are not the same. The Soviet system created national republics, schools, alphabets, cultural institutions, and official categories. It also deported peoples, redrew boundaries, suppressed political autonomy, and later elevated Russian language and culture. The post-Soviet Russian state retained federal units while concentrating power in Moscow and reducing the practical independence of many regional governments.

The point is not that identities are pure and sealed from one another. A person may be Tatar, Russian-speaking, Muslim, urban, and a citizen of Russia without experiencing those categories as contradictions. Geography becomes interesting at the overlap.

Slavic, Turkic, Iranian, Caucasian, and Indigenous Worlds

The region's largest language family is Indo-European, which includes Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Romanian, Armenian, Tajik, and many other languages. Yet even this list contains branches with very different histories. Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian are East Slavic languages. Romanian, spoken in Moldova and Romania, is a Romance language. Armenian forms its own branch. Tajik is closely related to Persian.

Turkic languages stretch across a vast zone and include Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Azerbaijani, Tatar, Bashkir, Sakha, and others. Their speakers are not one people. Language kinship does not erase differences in state history, religion, economy, local identity, or political interest.

The Caucasus contains extraordinary linguistic density. Georgian belongs to the Kartvelian language family and uses a distinctive script. Armenian and Azerbaijani communities occupy landscapes shaped by Christianity, Islam, imperial rivalry, displacement, and war. In the North Caucasus, languages from several families survive across relatively small territories. A mountain valley can protect a language community, but it can also isolate it politically and economically.

Central Asian identity is similarly layered. Kazakh and Kyrgyz histories include strong pastoral traditions. Uzbek history is closely associated with oasis cities and settled agriculture, although that distinction should never be made absolute. Tajik identity connects Central Asia to the Persian-speaking world. Turkmen identity developed through tribal, pastoral, oasis, imperial, and Soviet experiences. The map contains categories, but people contain biographies.

Russian as Bridge, Ladder, and Burden

Russian remains a major lingua franca across much of the region. It can connect people who do not share another language, provide access to education and employment, and link migrant communities. In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Russian remains especially visible in cities, administration, commerce, and media. In other places, its role has declined or become more politically contested.

It is easy to make one of two errors. The first is to treat Russian as nothing but an imperial weapon. The second is to treat its spread as a neutral convenience. It has been both more complicated and more consequential.

Tsarist Russification and later Soviet language policies placed Russian in schools, administration, military service, higher education, and public life. Policies varied across time and place. Early Soviet authorities sometimes promoted non-Russian languages and national institutions through korenizatsiya, or indigenization. Under Stalin and later leaders, Russian increasingly became the language of advancement and all-union identity. Local languages often remained officially recognized while Russian carried greater prestige and opportunity.

Since 1991, independent states have promoted national languages, changed scripts, renamed streets, and revised school curricula. Kazakhstan has planned a gradual shift of Kazakh from Cyrillic toward a Latin alphabet. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan adopted Latin-based scripts, though older and Russian-language materials remain. Ukraine's de-Russification accelerated after the full-scale invasion. Street names and monuments have become contested terrain because public space tells people whose history is ordinary and whose is an interruption (Gnatiuk & Melnychuk, 2023).

Where students sometimes get confused is in assuming that language choice automatically reveals political loyalty. Many Ukrainians who speak Russian have defended Ukraine. Many Central Asians use Russian without wishing to be governed by Moscow. A shared language can outlive the empire that spread it.

Religion After Official Atheism

Orthodox Christianity is historically important in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, and parts of the wider region. Armenia and Georgia possess ancient Christian traditions that predate the conversion of Kievan Rus. Islam is central across much of Central Asia, Azerbaijan, the North Caucasus, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and other areas. Buddhism is important among Buryats, Kalmyks, Tuvans, and some other communities. Jewish histories run through cities, market towns, migration networks, persecution, and the former Pale of Settlement.

Soviet rule did not simply remove religion. The state closed or repurposed churches, mosques, synagogues, monasteries, and religious schools; persecuted clergy; promoted atheism; and placed surviving institutions under supervision. Belief and practice did not disappear. They moved into households, family rituals, sacred sites, funerals, seasonal celebrations, and forms of identity that did not always require formal doctrine.

After 1991, religious buildings reopened and new ones appeared. Pilgrimage, public ritual, religious education, and political symbolism returned. Yet the "revival of religion" means different things. A person may identify as Orthodox or Muslim culturally while rarely attending services. Governments may sponsor religion as heritage while controlling independent religious organization. Russia's state has drawn Orthodox symbolism close to nationalism and military power. Central Asian governments often celebrate Islamic heritage while regulating religious practice they consider politically threatening.

Islam in Central Asia also carries older local traditions. Shrine visitation, Sufi lineages, family customs, and pre-Islamic practices have blended in different ways. The question "What religion is this country?" is usually less revealing than "How is religion lived, regulated, remembered, and displayed here?"

The Apartment Block and the Bazaar

If the region's monumental landscapes are cathedrals, mosques, palaces, war memorials, and government towers, its ordinary twentieth-century landscape is the apartment block.

Soviet cities were built through standardized housing districts called mikrorayons, or microdistricts. Apartment buildings, schools, transit stops, clinics, shops, courtyards, and playgrounds were planned as parts of a neighborhood unit. The result could be efficient, walkable, and socially mixed. It could also be monotonous, poorly maintained, and built with little regard for local climate or architectural tradition.

After 1991, these spaces changed unevenly. Apartments were privatized. Ground floors became shops. Cars filled courtyards designed for fewer vehicles. New luxury towers rose beside aging prefabricated blocks. Informal markets and kiosks occupied leftover spaces. Public infrastructure often deteriorated before some cities began reinvestment.

The bazaar provides a different but connected urban form. Markets in Tashkent, Samarkand, Bishkek, Dushanbe, Almaty, Baku, and elsewhere are not relics outside modernity. They are systems of wholesale distribution, household employment, credit, migration, and social information. Chinese goods, Turkish clothing, local produce, Russian-language bargaining, mobile payments, and family networks can all occupy the same aisle.

One of the errors tourism encourages is to photograph the blue tile of Samarkand and crop out the bus stop, apartment block, wedding hall, and shopping district nearby. The tile matters. So does the life around it.

Food as Environmental and Imperial Evidence

Food reveals the region's environments with unusual honesty. Rye and wheat breads, buckwheat, potatoes, cabbage, mushrooms, dairy, preserved fish, soups, dumplings, grilled meats, rice dishes, flatbreads, tea, fermented foods, and dried fruits reflect climate, agriculture, mobility, trade, and scarcity.

Borsh provides a useful warning against national simplification. Variations appear across Ukraine and neighboring countries, but the dish has become especially important to Ukrainian cultural identity. UNESCO recognized the culture of Ukrainian borsh cooking as intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding in 2022, during a war in which cultural ownership itself had become politically charged (UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2022). A bowl of soup can carry beets, family memory, migration, and an argument about who has the right to name a tradition.

In Central Asia, plov or osh combines rice, meat, carrots, onions, oil, spices, and local variation. It may be prepared for weddings, funerals, holidays, guests, or neighborhood gatherings. Its geography reaches from irrigated rice and livestock to trade routes that carried spices and cooking methods. Bread is treated with particular respect in many households. Tea may arrive with every conversation. Hospitality is not decorative culture. It organizes social obligation.

Pastoral landscapes produce their own food geographies: fermented mare's milk, dried curds, meat, and dairy products suited to mobility and seasonal conditions. Soviet supply chains introduced other foods and standardized tastes across the union. Korean communities deported to Central Asia adapted kimchi traditions to available ingredients, helping produce dishes such as morkovcha, a seasoned carrot salad now found widely across the former Soviet world. Forced migration created suffering, but people carried flavor through it.

Cities That Gather the Region

Moscow functions as a national capital, financial center, migration destination, transportation hub, and stage on which the Russian state displays power. Its wealth and infrastructure contrast sharply with many provincial towns. St. Petersburg looks toward the Baltic and carries imperial architecture, revolutionary history, and a cultural identity distinct from Moscow's.

Kyiv is a capital of an independent Ukraine and a city claimed symbolically in Russian imperial narratives. Since 2022, it has also become a landscape of air defenses, memorials, damaged infrastructure, reconstruction, and daily adaptation. The claim that Kyiv is historically important to Russia does not erase Ukrainian sovereignty. Shared history is not a deed of ownership.

Tashkent is Central Asia's largest city and a major center of government, industry, education, and transport. Much of it was rebuilt after the 1966 earthquake, producing broad avenues and Soviet modernist landscapes alongside older neighborhoods and newer development. Almaty remains Kazakhstan's largest city and cultural center even after the capital moved north, first to Astana in 1997. Astana's monumental architecture announces state ambition on the steppe, but a capital can be moved more quickly than a country's economic gravity.

Tbilisi, Yerevan, and Baku reveal different Caucasian trajectories. Tbilisi climbs along the Kura River and carries Georgian, Persian, Russian, Armenian, and Soviet layers. Yerevan's pink volcanic stone and planned avenues frame a city transformed by refugees, migration, technology investment, and national memory. Baku's oil wealth produced an early industrial boom, Soviet expansion, and a newer skyline designed to project global modernity.

Cities gather the region's contradictions. They concentrate opportunity while draining smaller places. They preserve imperial architecture while renaming streets. They depend on migrant labor while subjecting migrants to suspicion. They are where the old geographic order is most visible and where its replacement is being improvised.

The region's cultural diversity did not survive outside politics. It survived inside systems that classified, moved, rewarded, and sometimes punished entire populations. To understand why language, monuments, borders, and memory remain so charged, we must turn to the empires that tried to organize them.