Eastern European people
Eastern European people are a pan-ethnic group, or multi-ethnic regional grouping, and the inhabitants of Eastern Europe. East or Eastern Europeans can usually trace back full or partial heritage to Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and other nations bordering with or otherwise ethnoculturally related to the region.
Inhabited mainly by East Slavic ethnicities, in its strictest geographical terms Moldova is the sole majority-Romance ethnic nation in the region; with significant numbers of Moldovans and Romanians also native to other areas of Eastern Europe, such as in the Western Ukrainian borderland province Chernivtsi Oblast and parts of Russia.
There are also many descriptions of Eastern Europeans which include ancestry from nations in Central Europe, and countries of the South Slavs, particularly in diasporic identification. There is a large Eastern European diaspora, with significant concentrations in the United Kingdom, China, North America, as well as Oceania.
Other subgroups of Europeans include Northwestern European people and Southern European people.
Background
Eastern Europeans have been discussed academically, researched and reported on as a pan-ethnic group, which is most usually based on full or partial ancestry to Eastern Europe. Historian Andrew Wilson, who specializes in the region, has defined East Europeans as the East Slavs; Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and separately; Moldovans.Although this definition is accurate and specific, it represents the pan-ethnic grouping in the strictest geographical terms, and is frequently not adhered to in the international identification of and referencing to Eastern Europeans. The classification is extended, at times, to people from bordering and nearby areas, such as Central and Southeastern Europe, which occurs most frequently from Anglo-centric and English-speaking perspectives, as well as in reference to diaspora populations.
The group can be broken down into further national subgroups such as Belarusians, Ukrainians and Moldovans. Despite their Central European location, nations, including Hungary and the Czech Republic, are sometimes used inclusively within parameters of heritage, when describing Eastern Europeans. This is particularly the case in diasporic terms. Due to Slavic ethnic and cultural similarities, Yugoslavians have also occasionally been included in identification or reporting, despite Southeastern Europe's distinct ethnocultural history.
History
In 1964, the Assembly of Captive European Nations published material suggesting how, in the aftermath of World War II, the "Eastern European people were sealed off from the West and held down by Soviet-patterned police apparatuses". The attitudes of Eastern Europeans and their relationship to the state, government and society underwent transformation during the mid-20th century. During the 1980s, the poorer half of Eastern European populations earned an average of 30 percent of national income. Russia's richest one percent earned 3.5 percent of national income.In 1989, historian Thaddeus Gromada claimed that non-Russian Eastern European people generally had more affinity with Western European culture than Russian culture. Political scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes have argued that this form of Western cultural aspiration drove the revolutions of 1989 and acted as a shared mission for the group. For his conduct during this period, politician Julian Knight has written that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev deserves credit for understanding how the Cold War was impoverishing both Russians and other Eastern Europeans, and for helping to facilitate its end. Historian Dan Stone has suggested President George H. W. Bush's self-imposed distancing from European politics during this time "inadvertently gave the Eastern European people the space they needed to carry out their revolutions".
During the economic reforms of the 1990s, as the region partially fell away from the economic sphere of Russia, Eastern Europeans suffered financially with, at first, growing costs and less disposable income. In the 21st-century, the process of EU enlargement has occasionally exposed cultural differences in between Western and Eastern Europeans, with the Soviet history of the region influencing the latter's political worldviews.
In 2019, a Pew Research Center survey found that between 58 and 65 percent of Eastern Europeans felt positively about living standards, education and national pride in the post-Communist era. In the same year, it was reported that the group were living close to ten years longer on average, since 1990, with longevity recorded as much as 10 percent higher for some. In 2020, it was reported how the European Union's policy of free movement had enabled or encouraged millions of Eastern Europeans to return home from Germany, and other large European economies, after job losses created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Academic research
A 2013 study at Bucharest University proposed how a culture where Eastern European people seem under interrogation, for all political and cultural decisions taken by them, has developed due to the cultural conflict caused by public transition from communism to democracy.In a 2018 Feminist Media Studies journal piece, University of Vienna Research Fellow Katharina Wiedlack criticized Western cultural perceptions, which she argued can frame Eastern Europeans as unthinking, unoriginal or possessing lower morality. A 2019 Roskilde University study was critical of discriminatory Danish media representations of Eastern European people, which it described as portraying them as a racially inferior working-class, prone to criminality, who's 'otherness' was to be subsumed by integration into a "Danish 'whiteness'".
Diaspora
Large numbers of Eastern Europeans have emigrated from the region between the 18th and 21st centuries, driven by many factors, including wars, discrimination and opportunity. Significant proportions of such people, and their descendents, constitute the modern populations of Eastern European Americans and Eastern European Canadians in the North American continent, and Eastern European Australians in Oceania.Europe
Since the opening up of EU accession in the early 21st-century, millions of Eastern Europeans have migrated to other parts of Europe, especially to Central, Western, and Northern Europe; gaining access to the job markets of large economies in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in particular.Russell Deacon has written of the tension created in the mid-2000s, from Eastern Europeans emigrating to Welsh-speaking areas of Wales, with pressure group Cymuned lobbying the Welsh government to prioritize housing for locals, as a reactionary response.
By 2014, a Guardian society-piece by John Harris, outlined multiple years of apparent social problems created by large numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe which included reports of mafias, intra-ethnic conflicts, murders, as well as positive elements such as the revival of town centres. In 2015, most Eastern Europeans living in Suffolk were young working-age adults.
In 2018, British media reported growing concern for East European UK-residents affected by Brexit.
North America
19th-century
Eastern Europeans arrived in large numbers to the United States during the 1880s and 1890s, settling in industry towns and cities, such as Cleveland, Ohio. Implications of the War Measures Act in 1914, which authorized the designation of "aliens of enemy nationality", included Eastern European Canadians born or resident in Canada. Continuing into the 1920s, Eastern European Canadians faced persecution, along with African Canadians, during economic recession and post-World War I unrest. In the US from 1900, the majority of immigration into the US consisted of people arriving from Southern Europe, and large numbers of Eastern Europeans. This post-war period enabled Eastern European people to become significant percentages of US populations, in places such as the Pittsburg, Kansas mining community, nicknamed as the "Little Balkans".World War II
After the outbreak of World War II, Eastern European citizens of Canada received training at Camp X, many going on to serve their adoptive country in the Special Operations Executive. In the US, however, Americans of Eastern European heritage faced government-enforced restrictions. Speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Russ Feingold acknowledged how "Eastern European Americans were unfairly arrested, detained, interned, or relocated" in a 2003 address.In both Canada and the United States, in the post-WWII period, politically active Eastern European people were forced to tread a careful line of diplomacy in both North American nations; demonstrating loyalty to their countries, while advocating for interventional policy which might aid people in their ancestral homelands.
Social breakthrough
Eastern Europeans in Canada were shown to be underrepresented in professional occupations by a 1961 census. Cultural assimilation of Eastern Europeans was increasingly common in mid-20th-century North America. Professor Marc Shell has written regarding the Canadian government's enforcement of the anglicisation of names.In the US, Eastern Europeans were also gradually being accepted into mainstream American culture. Historian David Halberstam, speaking in a New England Board of Higher Education interview, discussed how access to white society became plausible for the group. Perhaps respresenting this social change best, the US Census Bureau found that the Eastern European born in this time period were indistinguishable, in education results, with British Americans. Eastern European Americans were found to have also outperformed US citizens of solely British heritage in the completion of bachelor's degrees.
The median household income in 2017 for Americans of Polish descent is estimated by the U.S. Census as $73,452, with no statistically significant differences from other Slavic-American groups, Czech, Slovak, and Ukrainian. The median household income for those of Russian ancestry has been reported as higher on the U.S. Census, at $80,554.
| Ethnicity | Household Income | College degrees |
| Russian | $80,554 | 60.4 |
| Polish | $73,452 | 42.5 |
| Czech | $71,663 | 45.4 |
| Serbian | $79,135 | 46.0 |
| Slovak | $73,093 | 44.8 |
| Ukrainian | $75,674 | 52.2 |
| White non-Hispanic | $65,845 | 35.8 |
| Total US Population | $60,336 | 32.0 |
Late 20th-century
During the 1970s, the majority of Eastern Europeans resident in Canada lived in the country's main urban centers. The exception being those of Ukrainian heritage, who still mostly lived rurally. During this time, the Helsinki Accords were the cause of various political strife between the Ford administration and Eastern European people in the US. Whereas, writing in 1980, Dr Roy Norton suggested that the group were appreciative of the role Canada played in the U.S. Helsinki Commission, as well as the country's consistent criticizm of abuses to human rights in their ancestral lands.Academic studies
Academic reesearch has been utilized in the study of Eastern European diaspora in North American. Professor Cezara O. Crisan has suggested, based on 2019 research at Purdue University Northwest, that Eastern European Canadians are particularly likely to be politically and economically vested with the Eastern European nation that their heritage descends from.In 2008, a genetic research investigation consecutively tested over five hundred Eastern European US citizens, in order to identify human leukocyte antigen alleles. The research, which was based at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, contributed towards the creation of a hematopoietic stem cell register.