Brief Introduction of Russian Ethnic Group
The Russian nationality with the traits of the white race
The Russian nationality is one of the minority nationalities in China. According to the statistics of the fourth census in 1990, there were totally 13,504 people of Russian nationality. They mainly scattered live in Yili, Tacheng, Aletai, Urumqi and other places in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, some others are scattered in the northern part of Heilongjiang province and the eastern part of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
The Russian nationality moved to our country from Russia around the 18th century. At the beginning, they were mainly made up of prisoners of war, fugitive soldiers, farmers that made a living and the missionaries of the Orthodox Eastern Church, and so on. In the 19th century, around the Russian October Revolution, more Russians entered our country; there were still some immigrants in succession until the 1930s. At that time, they were called as “Guichun nationality”. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, they gained equal national rights, and were formally renamed as the Russian nationality.
The Russian nationality has its own language and written words. Their language belongs to the Eastern Slav language branch, Slav language group, Indo-European. They use Russian. In the social contact outside the families, they universally use Chinese and Chinese written words.
The Orthodox Eastern Church (also named as the Greek Orthodox Church) is the traditional belief of the Russian nationality. But because of the close contact and intermarriage with other nationalities, this religious belief has become faint gradually.
Among the Russian nationality people living in towns, intellectuals account for a rather large proportion; teachers, doctors, engineers, technical workers and cadres are the main occupations that they are engaged in. The Russian nationality people that live in the rural areas and pastoral areas are also mostly knowledge type farmers and herdsmen, they are generally good at garden culture, the raising of poultries and livestock and beekeeping, etc.
