Is Today’s South of Russia Polyethnic?

The current intensification of transformation processes in Russian society against the backdrop of significantly increased global turbulence calls for a focus on spatial development, which, in turn, requires a more detailed and sound vision of the ethnodemographic specifics of the territory. Based on a multiscale analysis of data from the 2021 All-Russian Population Census, the paper highlights the features of the ethnic structure of the South of Russia (Southern and North Caucasian federal districts), the most mosaic macroregion of Russia in ethnogeographic terms. It is shown that the idea of the South of Russia as a polyethnic territory, rooted in the scholarly discourse, is generally justified (the share of ethnic Russians in the population as recorded by the census is 60.4%, with the average for Russia being 71.7%), but it should be conceptually adjusted for the regional and municipal taxonomic levels. Thus, out of 15 federal subjects localized in the South of Russia, 7 has the share of the numerically prevailing ethnic group exceeding 75%, which means that they are predominantly monoethnic (these regions occupy 61% of the territory of the South of Russia, concentrating 67% of its population and 73% of the GRP). The situation is similar in the macroregion’s 239 (out of 332) municipal units (urban okrugs, municipal districts, and municipal okrugs), including such important urban centers as Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, Volgograd, Stavropol, and Sevastopol. The territorial, residential and economic structure of the South of Russia is biased in favor of regions and municipalities with a clear ethnic coloring (including ethnic Russian in fove federal subjects and half of the municipalities), which allows us to view the Southern Russian macroregion as an asymmetric combination of mono- and polyethnic territories.