#mordvin

Ethnic Diversity in the Former Eastern Bloc, Part 1:

Selection of Women Representing Native Ethnic Groups from Eastern Europe and European Russia

From left to right. Row 1: a) Romanian b) Circassian - Russia c) Lezgin - Russia Row 2: a) Crimean Tatar - Ukraine b) Don Kalmyk - Russia c) Chuvash - Russia Row 3: a) Moldovan b) Circassian (Kabardian) - Russia c) Chechen - Russia Row 4: a) Bulgarian b) Bashkir - Russia c) Ingush - Russia Row 5: a) Moksha - Russia b) Lithuanian c) Nogay (Steppe Ukraine and Crimea) Row 6: a) Abazin -Russia b) Vepsian - Russia c) Ossetian - Russia Row 7: a) Ashkenazi Jew - Russia b) Kalmyk (Proper) - Russia c) Udmurt - Russia Row 8: a) Volga Tatar - Russia b) Kumyk - Russia c) Russian Row 9: a) Nenet - Russia b) Mari - Russia c) Armenians of Ukraine Row 10 a) Abkhaz - Russia b) Ukrainian c) Serbian

Source: "Les Origines de la Beauté" project by Natalia Ivanova

As someone who has studied estonian folklore and myths, it makes me really disappointed that our older myths and legends that were part of a wider finno-ugric cultural sphere are completely gone. Our folklore has been heavily influenced by our colonizers (russians, germans, swedes, etc), meanwhile our more isolated brethren have managed to keep more of their original, ancient culture alive. What makes me even more sad is that, eventually, we started changing our own stories to "prove" to the west that we had enough greco-roman culture (aka the myth that estonians were actually the descendants of greek sailors ??)

F. R. Kreutzwald's work was, for example, typical of 19th century estonian scholars, where folklore was altered to draw parallels to western myths and legends. The belief being that we needed to alter ourselves to prove to be worthy (?) enough to fit in with the rest of europe, thus leading to a widespread censoring and "whitewashing".

Modern day estonians do not qualify as indigenous anymore due to the extent of westernisation, and yet i can't help but wonder what could have been, looking at our relative nations in Russia. The ugric nations in Russia are oppressed and cleansed, just like we were centuries ago. Estonians lost our original heritage and thus survived. We gained the privilege of being western at the loss of what had made us finno-ugric.

I hope this was somewhat informative and not too grueling a read. I've had a lot of thoughts on this topic recently, and wanted to jot them down. If reading this elicited any emotion from you, that's great! As a conclusion, i would request that people recognize that indigenous people exist in more places than canada, america and australia. The Russian government uses the exact same type of ethnic cleansing as those western governments.

Here's some easy reading on the topic if you find yourselves interested (apologies for the wiki link but there truly isn't much information on this,, guess why :// )