SUMMARY:

The article presents a longue durée history of two Buryat villages jointly populated by two hybrid groups: the Karyms and the Semeiskie. The former are descendants of baptized Buryats and Russians, and the latter are Russian Old Believers also heavily intermixed with Buryats. The prerevolutionary nationalizing empire, the Soviet regime of ethnicity-based nations, and the post-Soviet increasingly racialized and religion-centered social imaginary provided different settings and languages for expressing the hybrid identities of the Karyms and the Semeiskie. Throughout all these periods, the self-identifications of the two groups did not fully coincide with categorizations by local authorities and the government and experts in the metropole.