Mixed Marriages in Late Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Century: Comparing Russia and Norway

Abstract

This article compares interethnic and interreligious marriages in Russia and Norway during the decades around 1900. State churches dominated religious life in both countries with over 90 percent of the population but both were losing influence during the period we focus on—rapidly in Russia after the 1917 Revolution. The part on Norway employs nominative and aggregate census material which from 1865 asked questions about religious affiliation, while the Russian case study utilizes the database of church microdata being built for Ekaterinburg—a railway hub and an industrial city in the Middle Urals, in Asia—in addition to census aggregates. Our main conclusion is that religion was a stronger regulator of intermarriage than ethnicity. Religious intermarriage was unusual in Ekaterinburg, even if official regulations were softened by the State over time—the exception is during World War I, when there was a deficit of young, Russian men at home and influx of refugees and Austro-Hungarian Prisoners of War (mostly Catholics and Lutherans). The situation was also affected by the 1917 Revolution creating equal rights for all religious denominations. The relatively few religious intermarriages in Norway were mostly between members of different Protestant congregations—nonmembers being the only group who often outmarried. We conclude that representatives of ethnic minorities and new religions seldom outmarry when religion was important for maintaining their identity. © 2020 The Author(s).The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: The URAPP database was built and researched with financial support from the Russian Science Foundation grant, (Project Number 16-18-10105). Additional transcription of the church records and their analyses, record linkage, family reconstruction as well as the final stage of preparing the article were sponsored by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, (Project Number 19-29-07154). Elizaveta Zabolotnykh's work was funded by Insitute of History and Archeology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, for the project "Historical continuity and transformation processes in the context of anthropo-natural interactions" (State registration number AAAA-A19-119080590022-9, 2019-2021)