11 Facts About Russians

Russians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Eastern Europe, who share a common Russian ancestry, culture, and history.

Russians were formed from East Slavic tribes, and their cultural ancestry is based in Kievan Rus'.

Genetically, the majority of Russians are identical to their East and West Slavic counterparts; unlike northern Russians, who belong to the Northern European Baltic gene pool.

The Russian word for the Russians is derived from the people of Rus' and the territory of Rus'.

Name of the Russians derives from the early medieval Rus' people, a group of Norse merchants and warriors who relocated from across the Baltic Sea and founded a state centred on Novgorod that later became Kievan Rus'.

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Ancestors of modern Russians are the Slavic tribes, whose original home is thought by some scholars to have been the wooded areas of the Pinsk Marshes, one of the largest wetlands in Europe.

Ethnic Russians historically migrated in the area of former Russian Empire and Soviet Union, sometimes encouraged to re-settle in borderlands by the Tsarist and later Soviet government.

Significant numbers of Russians emigrated to Canada, Australia and the United States.

Many of these Russians had to move back to the Soviet Union after World War II.

Northern Russians, according to mDNA, Y chromosome and autosomal marker CCR5de132, are included in the "North European" gene cluster .

The previous conclusions of physical anthropologists, historians and linguists about the proximity of the ancient Novgorod Slavs and their language not to the East, but to west Baltic Slavs As can be seen from genetic resources, the contemporary Northern Russians are genetically close of all Slavic peoples only to the Poles and similar to the Balts.