Ethnonyms and subgroups
A short history
Assimilation and the problems of diasporas
The Eastern Mari
The Mari represent one group of the Volga branch of the Finno-Ugrian peoples and not surprisingly thus, are one of the peoples native to the Volga-Urals region of Russia. Their ethnonym Mari translates as “human being” or “man”. The old ethnonym Cheremis, used by neighbouring peoples for the Mari, has gradually fallen out of favour and use.
The Mari can be further divided into three sub-ethnic groups based on geographic and cultural distinctions: mountain (Mari: kuryk; Rus: gornye), meadow (Mari: olyk; Rus: lugovye), and eastern (Mari: ervel; Rus: vostochnye) Mari. The mountain Mari live on the hilly right-bank of the Volga River in the south-western corner of the Republic of Mari El, and are closely related to those Mari living in the Vetluga River basin on the other side of the Volga. Meadow Mari are those inhabiting the flat lands on the left-bank of the Volga between the Vetluga and Viatka Rivers. The final group, the eastern Mari, live to the east of the Viatka in the Kama River basin and along its tributaries flowing down out of the Ural Mountains.
Linguistically, it is possible to distinguish between two main groups of dialects, the western (mountain) and meadow-eastern. Between these two groups differences can be found, which can cause difficulties among their speakers of understanding each other. The proportion of western-dialect speakers is not greater than 10 % of the total number of Mari speakers. There exists two written, literary forms of the language: mountain Mari, based upon the variant spoken near the city of Koz’modem’iansk, and meadow Mari, created from the local speech of the Morki-Sernur districts. Among the Finno-Ugrian languages, Mari was subjected to the strongest and most prolonged exposure to neighbouring Turkic languages (Tatar and Chuvash), while the influence of Russian has been a relatively new phenomenon, really only gaining a role in the 19th century.
Particularly in the Middle Ages, Mari were in close contact with the Turkic peoples: originally with the Volga Bulgars, then with the Kazan’ Tatars. The majority of the early Mari tribes remained loyal to the Tatars in the 16th century, when the Russian conquest of the Volga Basin began. Mari fought on the side of the Tatars right up until the fall of the Kazan’ Khanate in 1552. The history of the Mari’s subjugation by the Muscovite state is stormy: a series of uprisings, known collectively as the “Cheremis Wars”, extended well into the second half of the 16th century. These turbulent years in the Middle Volga region, the pressures from colonisation, and then the forced Christianisation campaign served as a trigger for many Mari to migrate to the east, especially to the lands of the Bashkirs. This migration resulted in the formation of the eastern Mari ethno-areal group, and had come to an end by the middle of the 18th century.
A succession of Tsarist administrations divided the areas of Mari settlement between a number of separate administrative districts, thus it is only from the early period of Soviet power that one can speak of the “collecting” of the Mari lands into a single unit, as the new government went about creating autonomous ethnic administrative territories. However, due to the wide geographic distribution of the Mari people, by no means did the majority of Mari find themselves living within the borders of the newly-created Mari Autonomous Province (Rus: Oblast’) in 1920, which in 1936 was elevated in status to the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). In the post-Soviet era, the ASSR was renamed the Republic of Mari El in 1992.
The signs of the ethnic awakening of the Mari people first began to appear in the final years of the Tsarist Empire. In 1917, these sentiments developed and were formally united with the foundation of Marii Ushem (The Union of Mari). However, as with similar movements and organisations across the Soviet Union, Marii Ushem was forcibly disbanded and its leaders repressed during the Stalinist period of terror in the 1930s. In the changing times of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Marii Ushem was reborn and was joined by scores of other ethnic Mari organisations playing a part in the overall revival of Mari culture. But as with many other minorities in Russia, and particularly with the Finno-Ugrians, such factors as the relative weakness of ethnic self-consciousness, the general economic crisis and lack of a civic culture, has meant that after the heady days of revival of the early 1990s, the Mari ethnic movement has begun to decline and to meet with setbacks.
Assimilation and the problems of diasporas
The process of urbanisation began to develop rather late among the Mari. However, urbanisation and the mobility that it brought with it has been a significant factor in the post-war period. The consequences of these processes are all the more pronounced when examining overall Mari demographic and linguistic dynamics. For example, the number of Mari-speakers has completely ceased to show signs of growth, meaning that the share of Mari for whom Mari is not native has been gradually increasing from decade to decade. As research has shown, russification has had an especially strong impact among youth and urban communities. More information on the demographic and linguistic situation is presented in the following figure and tables.
Soviet ethno-federalism resulted in the situation whereby most institutional support for minority cultures and languages was concentrated in the corresponding titular autonomous administrative units. Due to this, those peoples who found themselves outside of the borders of their titular regions, to a greater extent have felt the influence of assimilatory processes than their co-nationals in the corresponding autonomous ‘homelands’. In part, this has been the experience of the Mari. Yet with the Eastern Mari, a full picture of the situation is more complicated.
Of the total 671,000 Mari, almost half live outside of the titular republic of Mari El. And of this half, the majority, almost 200,000, are referred to as Eastern Mari. However even this group cannot be considered as a unified entity, but instead it can be subdivided into several ethno-areal groups, of which four main ones can be identified: Kama, Belaia, Ik-Siun’, and Ural Mari. In terms of area and population size, the largest of these groups is the Belaia, spread across the northern part of Bashkortostan. It is necessary, however, to note that even these above-mentioned areal subgroups are not unified, but are comprised of numerous scattered clusters (the areal distribution can be seen on the following map).
In tables 3 and 4 it is obvious that the Mari of Bashkortostan have maintained their language to about the same degree as their co-nationals in the Mari republic. In comparison to the Mari of both Mari El and Bashkortostan, those of Udmurtia and the Urals (Sverdlovsk and Perm’ provinces) have been assimilating more rapidly. At the same time the Mari of Bashkortostan have rather intense contacts with not only Russians, but also with neighbouring Turkic-speaking peoples (Tatars and Bashkirs), and also to a lesser degree with Udmurts. One possible explanation to why it is the Mari of Bashkortostan who, of all the Eastern Mari groups, have best been able to maintain their cultural traditions is that their immediate surrounding environment is especially ethnically diverse. This final point touches upon the issue of the Mari animist religion, which the Eastern Mari communities have preserved noticeably better than the Mari of the titular republic - the isolation of their communities and the lack of any one dominant ‘world’ religion in the region has provided the conditions for its maintenance.
