ABSTRACT
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia gained its independence but lost both its superpower status and much of the empire over which it had ruled for centuries. As an independent state, Russia faced the challenges not only of build ing a democratic government and a market economy, but also of constructing a new national identity for its citizens. At the time of the last Soviet census, in 1989, ethnic Russians made up barely 50 percent of the population of the Soviet Union. By the time independent Russia held its first census in 2002, more than 80 percent of the country’s population identified themselves in that way.
