Problems caused by Ethnic Minorities

• Tsarist Russia was a multi-national Empire inhabited by over 100 different ethnic groups. Although the Slavs in Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia comprised 2/3s of the population, the remaining peoples were a mixture of many different nationalities, languages, religions and cultural traditions.
• Finns, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians lived in the north of European Russia, with distinctive national cultures.Much of the land in the Baltic area was owned by Lutheran Germans and this added an ethnic twist to the peasant/landowner divide. To the west was the home of the Catholic Poles and many of the Empire's Jews, The south and south-west were the Ukrainians, who considered themselves a distinctive nation
• Continual Imperial expansion in Asia in the second half of the 19th century helped to increase the Muslim population to 10 million by 1900