Country: Russia

Group: Mari

Date Finalized: 04/06/2022

Name: jihui kuang (lead), Kate Edwards,Mason McNeel, Anthony Un

Content Warning: n/a

Approximate Time Period: 1800s – current

The Mari are Finns who live near the Volga river and the Kama River in present-day Russia. The Russian government included Mari in the 2010 national census, estimating the population of Mari at 547605. Unlike most ethnic minorities in Russia, the Mari did not convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. (Minority Rights, 2015).

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Soviet government suppressed Mari’s rights as an ethnic minority, including banning teaching the Mari language in schools (Pereltsvaig, 2011; Minority Rights Group, 2020). Despite the Russian government’s official recognition of the Mari people they are still unable to use their own language in public and lack proper language learning opportunities (IHF, 2006). In addition to a language crisis, Mari faces a religious crisis in Russia. The Mari have tried to maintain their ethnic identity during which time the Orthodox Church has attempted to convert them from the indigenous religion of Shamanistic animist beliefs to Christianity (Minority Rights Group, 2020). The Russian government made great efforts to complete its policy of cultural assimilaltion, such as transferring Russians to areas inhabited by the Mari people and arresting Mari intellectuals as political enemies of the Soviet Union. The Russian government has jailed Religious activists like Vitaly Tanakov for publishing about indigenous Mari practices (Sanukov 1996). In recent years, the international community has criticized the current Russian government for its policy of destroying the culture of the Mari people and leading to the decline of the utilization rate of the Mari language (IHF, 2006). In 2005, Mari accused the Russian government of suppressing Mari cultural identity and attacking activists (Minority Rights Group, 2020).

Sources

  1. International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF). (2006). Russian Federation: The human rights situation of the Mari minority of the Republic of Mari El: A study of the titular nationality of one of Russia’s ethnic regions. https://www.refworld.org/docid/46963b060.html
  2. Ksenofont Sanukov. (1996). Stalinist Terror in the Mari Republic: The Attack on  “Finno-Ugrian Bourgeois Nationalism.” The Slavonic and East European Review, 74(4), 658–682. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212237
  3. Minority Rights Group. (2020, December). Mari. Minority Rights Group. https:// minorityrights.org/minorities/mari/
  4. Pereltsvaig, A. (2011, January 11). On the Mari language and Mari schools. Languages Of The World. https://www.languagesoftheworld.info/language-policy/on-the-mari-language-and-mari-schools.html