Of the 747,000 Udmurts (1989 census), formerly called Votiaks, approximately 497,000 live in the Udmurt Republic, north of Tatarstan, but many live in Bashkortostan. Their language belongs to the Finno-Ugric family and is mutually semiintelligible with Komi, further north. Most are Caucasian, with a remarkable number of redheads, but Asian features also occur.
Southern Udmurts were subjected to the Bolgar Empire from 1000 C.E. on, and later to the Kazan Khanate. After annexing the multinational Viatka Republic (1489), Moscow laid formal claim to all Udmurt lands but controlled only the north. The south was occupied after the destruction of Kazan (1552), yet massive uprisings continued up to 1615. Most Udmurts were forcibly baptized in the mid-1700s, but spectacular anti-animist trials flared as late as 1894 - 1896, and 7 percent of Udmurts declared themselves animist in the 1897 census. An Udmurt-language calendar started in 1904 and the first newspaper in 1913.
An Udmurt national congress convened in 1918. A Votiak Autonomous Oblast was formed in 1920 and upgraded to Udmurt Autonomous Republic in 1934. Native-language schooling developed rapidly, but as early as 1931 a trumped-up anti-Soviet "Finno-Ugric plot" decimated the elites. Udmurtia itself became the site of numerous slave labor camps. All Udmurt textbooks were ordered destroyed around 1970.
Udmurtia (population 1.6 million), on the borderline of forest and steppe, is dominated by its capital, Izhkar (Izhevsk in Russian; population 600,000), a major center of Soviet military industry. Russian immigration reduced the Udmurts from 52 percent of the Republic population in 1926 to 31 percent in 1989. Russian passersby chastised those few who dared to speak Udmurt in city streets.
Within the Republic 76 percent of Udmurts consider the ancestral language their main one. Liberalization enabled an Udmurt cultural society to form in 1989. Later called Demen (Together), it spawned an activist youth organization, Shundy (The sun). Udmurtia's Russian-dominated Supreme Soviet proclaimed Russian and Udmurt coequal state languages, but implementation has been limited. In 1991 an Udmurt National Congress established a permanent Udmurt Kenesh (Council). Udmurtlanguage schooling began to develop slowly.
Bibliography
Lallukka, Seppo. (1982). The East Finnic Minorities in the Soviet Union: An Appraisal of Erosive Trends. Helsinki: Annales Academiae Scientarum Fennicae.
Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.
—REIN TAAGEPERA
