Discerning Colours in Greyness: Defying Essentialist Representation of Latvian Russian Speakers in Surveys and Public Narrative

This paper is a call for a methodological expansion in studies of the Russian-speaking community in the former Soviet spaces and beyond. The article critically reflects on the dominant quantitative approaches to studying Russian-speaking identities in Latvia and emphasises the need to engage with more qualitative and refined methods – those that allow space for agency in respondents’ self-identification. A growing concern about the Russian-speaking minority in the Baltic states, in-creases the need for academic and public explorations of the sense of ‘self’ and belonging amongst the local Russophone community. Despite a growing number of studies that point to conceiving representatives of the Russophone community as complex and heterogeneous, the public polling system and the political elite discourse are failing to account for multiplicity and situatedness of self-identification, tending to reconstruct an ethnicised and homogenised identity of local Russian speakers as lagging in progressive European values, as benighted, as a ‘grey zone’ of indifference. The author uses this tension between the complex self-making of Russian speakers and their essentialist reconstruction through the polling system and media as an entry point to invite social scientists working in the field to approach the ‘grey zones’ in East European studies not as monochrome, but as rich in meaning and encompassing ambiguity, thus offering new insights into the Russian speaking diaspora, empirically and/or analytically.