Russian Nationalism

Analyses of Russian nationalism have often paid attention to the coexistence, or continuous balancing, of ethnic and civic forms of nationalism (Shevel 2011). The Communist ideology, which formed the basis for the October Revolution, deemed national borders to be a means of controlling the working class and proposed a borderless world as the ultimate aim of the revolution. For practical political purposes, however, Lenin admitted the right of national self-determination, and later Stalin introduced his new nationalist politics, crystallized in the phrase “nationalist in form, socialist in content,” combining Soviet propaganda and culture. Despite this, internationalism, both within the Soviet Union and in the global context, was one of the core ideals of the Soviet Union, and official rhetoric buttressed its multicultural nature (Hirsch 2005). However, the nationalist politics of the Soviet Union contained very similar features to that of the previous Russian imperialism. Although the Soviet power granted some privileges to the national elites of the various republics, Moscow still kept the national republics under strict control, and beyond the rhetoric of a “multinational Soviet Union,” processes of Russification were implemented.

The collapse of the Soviet Union quickly launched discussions in Russian society about what the new national identity should be like, and what post-Soviet patriotism should be based on. For example, in 1996, President Boris Yeltsin made a call to Russian society to develop a new definition of the “Russian idea.” Despite the huge amount of material and number of publications that this call produced, no generally agreed-upon definition of the “Russian idea” was found.

As in Soviet times, the political elite of the Russian Federation now subscribes to the idea of civic nationalism. At the beginning of the 1990s, President Yeltsin introduced a new term, “rossiskii” (Russian), which denoted Russia as a state, instead of the term “russkii,” which refers precisely to Russian ethnicity. Criticism of the new term as artificial has revealed the prevalence of an ethnically colored understanding of the nation. Ironically, the essentialist understanding of national, or rather ethnic, identities was for a large part inaugurated during the period of Soviet internationalism by celebrating the “friendship of nations” and equality of the Soviet nations. The Soviet “institutionalization of ethnicity” (Hutchinson and Tolz 2015: 26) included, for example, a paragraph about “nationality” (here meaning ethnicity)³ in Soviet passports.

The simultaneous interplay and contest between ethnic and civic Russian nationalisms have continued, or even been reinforced, during the last decade (Shevel 2011). In the 2010s, President Putin has taken on the role of championing the civic (and imperialist) understanding of Russia, while in the nationalist opposition the lobby that promotes ethnic nationalism has continued to gain weight. A new phenomenon is the link between the nationalist and democratic opposition, personified in the popular anticorruption campaigner and one of the leading figures of the national-democratic opposition, Alexey Navalny. The difference between the state and oppositional nationalisms culminates, for example, in attitudes toward Chechnya and the Eurasian Union. The slogan “stop feeding the Caucasus,” popularized by Navalny, reveals an urge to create a Russian ethnic state, even if it means relinquishing the status of a multinational empire. Such views are criticized as unpatriotic and detrimental for Russia by President Putin, who also promotes the idea of the Eurasian Union, which would bring ex-Soviet states into closer cooperation and consolidate the influence of Russia in this area. The Eurasian Union is rather unpopular in Russian society, where antimigrant or even xenophobic attitudes have proliferated in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the main reason for the opposition to the Eurasian Union is the fear that it would facilitate migration from central Asian countries (Laruelle 2015: 95). Paradoxically, sometimes imperialist ambitions may protect ethnic minorities, as multiethnicity can be regarded as one of the prerequisites of an empire in contrast to a nation state.

Although the concepts of ethnic and civic nationalism have been widely criticized as both simplistic and judgmental (Kymlicka 2001; Brubaker 2004), they are useful tools in analyzing different forms of Russian nationalism. However, these concepts are based on methodological nationalism, which ignores the multiplicity of overlapping identifications and attachments. These may be transnational affiliations, for example, where one identifies oneself as part of a transnational religious community such as a “Pagan nation,” or even a racist identification such as positioning a “white race” above national differences. Local attachments can also offer more meaningful frames of identification for people than nationality or citizenship. In her analysis of the concept of “motherland” (Rodina)⁴ among activists and officials organizing various “patriotic” activities in the Siberian city of Omsk, Anne le Huerou (2015) also came to the conclusion that for a significant proportion of her informants, Rodina referred first to something about the local area or the intimate circle of people around them. Thereby patriotism could also be seen as a pyramid, which started from intense affection for and responsibility toward one’s nearest community and extended to the level of the state. As one of le Huerou’s interviewees argued: “If it is only the country, it is too abstract or too vague, as it was in the case with the Soviet Union” (le Huerou 2015: 38).