Russians of the near abroad in the focus of Russian sociology: the evolution of research approaches and angles (1990s – 2020s)

The article examines main directions of sociological research on the Russian population of the near Abroad, establishes quantitative, thematic dynamics, territorial priorities of publications devoted to this problem complex. A shift in publication activity has been revealed from large forms (author’s and collective monographs, collections of articles) that dominated in the 1990s to scientific periodicals, the quantitative peak of which occurred in the second half of the 2000s. Of the leading Russian sociological publications “Sociological Studies” paid maximum attention to the problems of foreign Russians. The professional community, initially consisting of researchers from Moscow academic structures, gradually expanded to include specialists from St. Petersburg and the post-Soviet countries themselves. Since the late 2000s, the activity of researchers from Russian regions has been growing significantly. In the context of content, there was a gradual thematic detailing of research, a shift to more specific angles and narrow groups of the analyzed Russian population. Geographically, the interest of ethnosociologists was extremely unevenly distributed – three quarters of all publications were devoted to Russians from four post-Soviet countries (Kazakhstan, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine). At the same time, the Russian communities of the South Caucasus, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan practically fell out of the research focus, despite the fact that their adaptation to the new conditions of functioning was quite difficult.