The "Russification" of ethnic minorities in the USSR.

Among the avowed social policies of the Soviet Union are modernization and industrialization, which may be combined under the label of Sovietization, and the spread of Russian language and culture within the USSR, which may be termed Russianization. But there is also a third process at work in which non-Russians lose their ethnic identity in favor of identification with Russian culture. This process, which may be called "Russification," can be measured by the number of non-Russians who declare Russian to be their first language in the census. The authors use correlation analysis and principal components analysis to identify the factors that promote or hinder the Russification process.