Languages and religions of the Russian Empire, 1897

All 89 guberniyas and oblasts of the 1897 census on their 1897 boundaries, painted by the largest native language or religion. Counts are the census's own; languages are grouped, and the census names are kept in the legend (“Little Russian” = Ukrainian; “Tatar” also covered today's Azerbaijanis). Grey: the Grand Duchy of Finland and the Bukhara and Khiva protectorates, which the census did not count.

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Region namesValues on map

Click a district for its group mix and population.

Population (1897)· 125.6M

Russian (“Great Russian”)44.3%
Ukrainian (“Little Russian”)17.8%
Polish5.8%
Belarusian4.7%
Yiddish (“Jewish”)4.0%
Kazakh (“Kirgiz-Kaisak”)3.3%
Tatar (incl. Azerbaijani)3.1%
Finnic & other Finno-Ugric2.8%
Uzbek, Sart, Turkmen & Kyrgyz2.5%
Lithuanian & Latvian2.5%
Bashkir & Chuvash1.7%
German1.4%
Other1.1%
Georgian (incl. Mingrelian, Svan)1.1%
Armenian0.9%
Moldovan (Romanian)0.9%
North Caucasian peoples0.9%
Tajik, Persian, Ossetian, Kurdish0.6%
Kalmyk & Buryat0.4%
Yakut & other Siberian peoples0.3%

Source: First General Census of the Russian Empire, 1897 (ed. N. A. Troinitsky), via Sablin, Kuchinskiy et al., “Transcultural Empire” GIS, heiDATA, CC BY 4.0

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