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half-Russian), the Transcaucasian republics (except theoil centre of Baku), and the new Baltic and Moldavianrepublics. White Russia, which is and always has beenoverwhelmingly White Russian, and the Ukraine, whichis in majority Ukrainian, are different in that the twopeoples are very closely allied to the Great Russians,with whom they form the eastern branch of the Slavs(see later, p. 222). Elsewhere, the numerous non-Russian peoples, mostly of Finnish or Tatar origins, inthe course of the centuries have become absorbed orincreasingly outnumbered, as the unresting sea ofRussians has seeped in and around or flooded over them.The linguistic map of the Russian S.F.S.R., outsideits central core of the old Muscovy, is a mosaic, but onecolour, the Russian, vastly predominates. The non-Russians, where they are compact, form islands or, forthe most part, islets, and it is only in the Caucasusmountain regions and in the mixed forest and woodedsteppe lands of the middle Volga - Kama - Urals thatthey are both numerous and contiguous to each other.Hence it took the Russians the first sixty years of thenineteenth century to reduce the Caucasian mountaineers—the equivalent of the North-West Frontier in India;and the great stretches of the middle Volga-Kama-Uralswere the scene of two to three centuries of intermittentstruggle between the Russian conquerors and colonistsand Finnish-Tatar peoples, that was not closed until thelast of the large-scale Bashkir risings in the revolt ofPugachov (1773-75; see pp. 163-164).The increasing and finally overwhelming numericalsuperiority of the Russians, which was also in most casesa qualitative superiority, made the problem of nationalitiesin the last hundred years radically different fromthat, for instance, in Austria-Hungary; additionally sosince in the Russian empire hardly any of the non-Russian peoples had independent states of their compatriotsacross the political frontier and only the Poleshad a living tradition of national independent statehood.The Russian empire, like the Soviet Union, was a multinationalcompound, but by 1900, even including thecompactly non-Russian fringes, two-thirds of its subjects