Russian Nationalism

Should Russia become part of the West, or follow an Eastern path? This has been a centuries-old discussion among Russian intellectuals. For Westernizers in Russia, the " West " symbolized progress, freedom, democracy, civil society, normality, and a nation-state. Their opponents saw the West as representing moral decadence in the beginning and later capitalist exploitation. This paper attempts to lay out the foundations and the evolution of the 200-year-old discussion of Russia's place in the world. It briefly examines the period of Muscovite Russia, where the foundations of the authoritarian state tradition were laid and further strengthened. The paper then focuses on the period of Peter the Great's reign, in which educated Russians became increasingly acquainted with Western European culture and started having doubts about Russia's status in the face of perceived European superiority. Trying to summarize how the international and internal developments of the 1800s and 1900s have affected the debate about Russia's place between East and West, the paper then examines the current state of discussions in Russia under Putin's leadership and finally attempts to make predictions for the future.

Множественная идентичность как исследовательская проблема. Рец. на: Климентій К. Федевич, Климентій І. Федевич. За Віру, Царя і Кобзаря. Малоросійські монархісти і український національний рух (1905–1917 роки) / пер. з рос. Катерина Демчук. Київ: Критика, 2017. 308 с.

The Empire Strikes Back. Russian National Cinema After 2005The paper provides critical analysis of the latest wave of Russian national cinema (2005-2013), considered one of key instruments of Vladimir Putin’s nation-building cultural policy. The analysis, focused mostly on historical film and war film, reveals the concept of an ‘imperial nation’ as the main concept underlying this policy. The new Russian nation-concept is calculated to binding elements from two former Russian imperial traditions: tradition of the Russian Empire and the Soviet tradition, thus trying to overcome the identity crisis in contemporary Russia. Imperium kontratakuje. Rosyjskie kino narodowe po 2005 rokuArtykuł zajmuje się krytyczną analizą filmów najnowszej fali rosyjskiego kina narodowego (2005-2013), uważanej tu za jedno z kluczowych narzędzi polityki kulturalnej Władimira Putina obliczonej na budowanie narodu. Autorzy artykułu skupiają się przede wszystkim na filmie historycznym i wojennym, odsłaniając p...

As events have unfolded in Ukraine, many theories as to why Russia has acted so aggressively have been bandied about.  My area of interest is in deciphering the Russian “strategic culture” – a combination of political and security elements that can serve to explain the actions of a nation in a geopolitical context. 
The strategic culture creates a strategic image, a notion of the state that informs its decisions and relationships within the international system. The construction of this image involves input from actors within the state, as well as external actors.  Internally, there are many aspects to Russian political culture that can be examined, but my primary area of interest is in Russian nationalism and its effects on Russian foreign policy.  Regarding external actors, it is my contention that Russia has been treated as the “loser” of the Cold War and that the West has continually treated them as a second-rate power, regardless of their vast wealth, powerful military, cultural heritage and their sheer size.  This treatment is evident in several key areas: the economic response by the West to the problems of the former Soviet Bloc states, the expansion of NATO, and now our potential meddling in the Ukraine.  The paper and presentation will help to make clear the interactions between these elements, and help Western audiences understand why the combination has expressed itself as an aggressive foreign policy.

Even a century after the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps, Russian contemporary sources offer a wealth of material on the Ballets Russes and particularly on Nijinsky's 1913 choreography that are rarely even read let alone discussed in detail. Consequently, the interpretations ignore outright the importance of the historical context of Imperial Russia to this work and, specifically, the contemporary Russian dance discourse has been overshadowed by the authoritative voices of Western critics and rather selective reminiscences emphasising the scandalous premiere. This paper will give an overview of some of these little-known Russian sources and their generally positive reception of Nijinsky's work in order to argue that these informed Russian spectators perceived Sacre in a manner that contests how this work has been represented in dance history

Cтоит ли классифицировать природу «системы Путина», ввиду ее недавней радикализации, как современное проявление фашизма, как это недавно сделали некоторые — в том числе и русские — обозреватели? У этих явно антипутинских комментаторов — напр., А. Мотыль, В. Иноземцев, М. Снеговая и др. — прослеживается своего рода утилитарное отношение и избирательный подход к набору свойств исторического фашизма для как можно более эффектного разоблачения бесспорно террористического, агрессивного и репрессивного характера сегодняшнего российского режима. Типичной ценой применения термина «фашистский» к путинскому режиму в результате этого «сбора вишни» является, однако, чрезмерно широкая дефиниция общего понятия «фашизм». Такого рода инклюзивные определения сути фашизма, как правило, приводят к имплицитному утверждению о существовании десятков независимых «фашистских» режимов в истории человечества — а не только в Германии Гитлера, Италии Муссолини, России Путина. Еще одним последствием такой преднамеренной инфляции этого ключевого исторического понятия является открытие вопроса о том, как же тогда обозначить комбинацию тех характеристик итальянской ПНФ, немецкой НСДАП, румынской «Железной гвардии», венгерской Партии скрещенных стрел, испанской Фаланги и др., которую в сравнительном обществоведении иногда называют «фашистским минимумом» или «ядром».

The article reconstructs the history of the creation of Russia's literary canon in the second half of the nineteenth century, and more specifically – the phenomenon of Russian classic literature as codified in the high school curriculum of the time. The fact that teaching Russian literature was not abandoned in schools in the 1870s and that the writings published before about 1842 had acquired the status of "classics" owed to a very specific political constellation. The author argues that the turn toward classicism in education in the early 1870s by the newly appointed minister of public education, Dmitry Tolstoy, reflected the regime's determination to embrace and promote Russian nationalism while curtailing its democratic potential. This both opened up an opportunity for Russian literature to be included in the school curriculum and mandated the format of this inclusion as rigid lists of compulsory reading.

Honorable Mention, 2012 Early Slavic Studies Association Distinguished Scholarship Award
A pivotal period in Russian history, the "Time of Troubles" of the early 17th century has taken on new resonances in post-Soviet Russia. Current national narratives glorify the role of the Russian Orthodox Church during that torturous span of famine, war, and disintegration. But what was the actual history of the Church and of Orthodox Christian religion in crisis? For the first time, and just prior to the 400th anniversary of the end of the Time of Troubles, this book attempts to give a comprehensive picture of the topic on the basis of archival and other evidence. Beginning with Russia's posited status as "New Israel" and continuing to examine the business activities of monasteries, Gruber discovers the motivations behind key political and religious innovations of the period. New "voices" attributed to women and the people marked this as a unique epoch in the troubled history of one of the world's most enigmatic and influential countries. Both accessibly written and deeply scholarly, this book will appeal to a wide readership interested in history, religion, and culture.

During the past decade many observers have remarked on the resurgence of Russian imperialism, or rather neoimperialism. But little is discussed the question where this 'neo-empire' may be located in spatial, demographic or functional terms. Actually, it is nowhere to be seen on the world's political map. A map of this type just features the Russian Federation, or the globe's polity with the largest territory. The term 'empire' is not included in the polity's official name or mentioned in its constitution.

This article surveys nation-building efforts in post-Soviet Russia. There have been five main nation-building projects reflecting the dominant ways of imagining the ‘true’ Russian nation but each has been fraught with contradictions and therefore have been unable to easily guide state policies. At the same time, a solution to the Russian nation-building dilemma may be emerging. This solution does not resolve the contradictions associated with each of the nation-building agendas but instead legalises the ambiguous definition of the nation's boundaries in the 1999 law on compatriots and the 2010 amendments to it. The fuzzy definition of compatriots in the law allows Russia to pursue a variety of objectives and to target a variety of groups without solving the contradictions of existing nation-building discourses.

Знаменский A.A. Аляска в современной российской геополитической риторике.

Автор исследует сюжеты, связанные с историей Русской Аме-рики и ее последующей продажей США, как они представлены в российской популярной исторической беллетристике, и открывает окно в мир воображае-мой истории и географии, конструируемых современными российскими публи-кациями имперско-националистической направленности. Предпринимается по-пытка выявить источник интереса к теме российского присутствия в Северной Америке, анализируется содержание основной массы книг и статей, которые формируют представления российского общества об Аляске. Статья демонстри-рует, что эмоционально-политические всплески вокруг такой маргинальной и малопонятной темы, как Русская Америка, берут свое начало в самой природе нынешнего русского национализма, все еще крепко связанного с идеей импе-рии. Несмотря на то что часть русских националистов сегодня активно выступа-ет с резкой критикой геополитических амбиций политического руководства страны и своих проимперски настроенных коллег, историческая ностальгия по Российской и советской империи остается все еще сильной в современной по-литической жизни страны. Кроме того, пристальное внимание к истории рос-сийского присутствия на северо-западе североамериканского континента, по сравнению с такими сюжетами, как, скажем, экспансия России в Центральную Азию и на Дальний Восток в XIX в., очевидно, указывает на то, насколько зна-чимую роль антиамериканизм играет в развитии современного русского национализма.

The article explores the issue of Russian America and its sale to the United States as represented in Russian popular historical fiction that uncovers not so much the history of the Russian presence in North America but rather constitutes a window into the symbolic geography and history constructed by current Russian nationalist media. It seeks to identify the source of keen attention to the Russian presence in northwestern North America through the analysis of the print media that shape Russian understanding of Alaska. The major argu-ment of the article is that the rhetorical outbursts around such marginal and obscure topic as Russian America originated from the very nature of current Russian nationalism, which is still heavily entangled with the idea of empire. Although the imperial component has been increas-ingly undermined by dissent nationalists, who assail geopolitical and foreign policy schemes of their empire-oriented colleagues, it remains the dominant trend in current Russian national-ism. It is also argued that the disproportional attention to the history of Russian presence in northwestern North America compared, say, to the nineteenth-century Russian expansion to Central Asia and the Far East clearly points to the large role anti-Americanism plays in the development of current Russian nationalism.

Close examination and analysis of the Kremlin’s framing of Russia’s annexation of Crimea reveals that domestically it was presented in unprecedented national irredentist terminology, aiming at reunifying the Russian nation in one state. The Russian nation was largely described in ethno-lingual
or ethno-cultural terms, while the Russian state was all but explicitly declared as a nation–state of ethnic Russians. The official identity discourse was marked by the recasting and unprecedentedly strong reassertion of boundaries between the Russian and Ukrainian nations, legitimizing Russian
claims to Crimea. However, the changing references to the crisis in Eastern Ukraine illustrate how the Kremlin’s identity rhetoric is still mainly guided by considerations of political necessity, rather than dictated by some national
or ideological vision. Significantly, the focus of the Russian official identity discourse shifted from the state to the nation. This marks a decisive departure from Putin’s earlier largely statist rhetoric in the 2000s, and a new stage of maturation and official acclamation of national ethnicization trends launched during his third presidential term. After years of sitting on the
fence, the Kremlin reinvented itself as an active and initiating player in the nationalism field.
--Full article can be sent by email on request. Contact: yuri.teper@gmail.com --

The idea of an All-Russian nation, an attempt to integrate the western regions of the empire inhabited by Belarusians and Ukrainians into the imperial and Russian-speaking context, fell in a deep crisis with the emergence of the Ukrainian national movement. The affirmation of Ukrainian identity meant, for Russian nationalists, not just an external threat, but also the danger of a disintegration of the empire at its heart. In this sense, the territories of Galicia, under Hapsburg rule, represented not only a further strategic theater in the battle against the Ukrainian identity, being the «Piedmont» of that national movement, but, at the same time, constituted a battlefield for the affirmation of the All-Russian nation, in the context of the First World War. Aim of paper is to analyze the Galician question in the context of Russian Nationalism, reconstructing the activities of the Galician- Russian Society in the Tsarist empire and during the occupation of the region in 1914-15, and how this was the last call for the All-Russian nation idea ("obscherusskaia natsiia").

This paper analyzes changes in regional electoral behavior and attitudes towards separatism and foreign policy orientation in Ukraine after the “Orange Revolution” and the “Euromaidan,” which turned into a violent internal conflict and one of the biggest international conflicts involving Western countries and Russia. The research question is whether the regional divisions concerning domestic politics, separatism and foreign orientation have changed significantly in Ukraine since the “Orange Revolution” in 2004 and the “Euromaidan” in 2014. This paper employs comparative and statistical analyses of voting results of the 2012, 2007, 2006, and 2002 parliamentary elections, and the 2014, 2010, and 2004 presidential elections, to examine effects of historical legacies, ethnicity, language, age, and economic factors on regional support for pro-nationalist/pro-Western and pro-Russian/pro-communist political parties and presidential candidates. The study also analyses support for separatism in Crimea and Donbas after the “Orange Revolution” and the “Euromaidan.” It uses a brief survey, conducted for this study by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in April and May 2014, to examine determinants of pro-separatist attitudes. The paper also employs Razumkov Center and KIIS surveys to analyze changes in 2002-2014 in regional preferences for joining the European Union (EU), NATO, and a union with Russia. The analysis shows that Ukraine after the “Orange Revolution” remained divided along regional lines in terms of support for political parties and presidential candidates and attitudes towards joining the EU, NATO, and a Russia-led union. After the “Euromaidan,” such divisions in foreign policy orientation and, to a lesser extent, support for presidential candidates and political parties remained. A significant rise in separatist sentiments helped to fuel separatist takeovers of power in Crimea and Donbas and Russian military intervention in these regions.

В статье рассматриваются воззрения графа С.С. Уварова в контексте «третьего русского национализма» - волны националистической идеологии и политики в России связанной с деятельностью императора Николая I. Политика Уварова во главе Министерства народного просвещения, определяемая знаменитой «триадой» показывается как классическая форма националистического стандартизированного образования нацеленного на унификацию школы, формирование национальных образовательных кадров, русификацию окраин и подъем национального сознания у представителей коренной национальности Империи. Относительный неуспех политики русификации окраин связан с тем, что она приходила в противоречие с политикой «русификации русских» - формирование восприятия России как самобытной цивилизации противоречило предназначавшейся Уваровым для неё роли в качестве носительницы европейской цивилизации для окраин. Отмечается, что под влиянием этого противоречия в трактовке триады самим Уваровым произошли изменения – в 1840-е годы он в посвященном славянской проблеме «Циркуляре» переходит к гегельянскому истолкованию русской народности как успешного исторического дела, а православия и самодержавия как характерных черт, определяющих эту народность. Такая трактовка окажет заметное влияние на формирование воззрений Константина Леонтьева. Однако приписанные Леонтьевым славянофилам противоречие «духу правления» Николая I и политике Уварова было, в действительности, гораздо менее острым. Для политической доктрины императора и министра был характерен именно национализм в самом строгом смысле слова – включая признание нации высшим источником политической легитимности. Расхождения между императором и славянофилами касались не направления, а темпов политических изменений.

La guerra in Ucraina è anche guerra di rappresentazioni, di mappe mentali e d’identità. Ne sono testimonianza i testi e i discorsi di Vladimir Putin, che ormai da un decennio dedica largo spazio alle interpretazioni degli avvenimenti e dei processi storici. Nella visione del presidente
russo il passato è elaborato senza soluzione di continuità, in una genealogia dello Stato e del potere che abbraccia personalità e momenti spesso contraddittori della storia, tradotta in un’unica e grande eredità da difendere e ampliare. In questa narrazione c’è spazio per il battesimo della Rus’ e il volo di Gagarin nello Spazio, per la vittoria sovietica del 1945 e per la battaglia del lago ghiacciato vinta da Aleksandr Nevskij contro i cavalieri teutonici, in un affastellarsi di fgure storiche di governanti e condottieri dove le differenze vengono annullate. In modo da mettere insieme Ivan il Terribile e Alessandro III, Aleksandr Suvorov e Georgij Žukov, connettendo la Russia odierna con un passato idealizzato da grande potenza.

В монографии анализируется образ женщины и женского начала в философских текстах русских мыслителей XI — XX веков, показывается место учения о женственности в отечественной философии, его связь с основными ценностями русской культуры. Особое внимание уделено выявлению взаимовлияния философии женственности и русского национального самосознания.

The monograph deals with Russian philosophers’ views on woman and the feminine principle. The author pays a special attention to the issues on intersection of the philosophy of the femininity and Russian nationalism.

"У русского националиста, рванувшегося из уютного круга единомышленников в большую политику, ничего, кроме идеи и веры в эту идею, нет». Наглядным примером такого сочинителя и говорящей телеперсоны на ведущих российских каналах можно назвать Егора Холмогорова, чья пустая по содержанию книга «Русский националист» была издана в престижном издательстве «Европа» и чьи горячечные заклинания «мы русские националисты» стали по «честным понедельникам» и в другие дни звучать на многомиллионную аудиторию".
Российский народ: история и смысл национального самосознания / В.А. Тишков ; Институт этнологии и антропологии им. Н.Н. Миклухо- Маклая РАН. – М. : Наука, 2013 с. 19


Не каждый день тебя выходя за границы академических приличий в академическом издании полощет академик...

Что ж. С пустой книгой может ознакомиться каждый желающий.

По совести сказать, я и сам считаю её спустя 13 лет после написания пустоватой и состоящей из поверхностной публицистики. К тому же она отягощена тяжелыми просоветскими и сталинистскими прихромами. Сейчас я бы написал совсем другую книгу и по форме и по содержанию.

Однако есть немалое количество людей, которых "Русский националист" в те годы по их собственным словам "перепахал". Поэтому данная книга заслуживает быть включённой в эту коллекцию в качестве публицистического памятника "нулевых" и выражения мироощущения тогдашнего русского национализма.

Проспект книги, посвященной русскому национальному самосознанию, уникальным особенностям русской цивилизации и современному положению русских в России в связи с изменением Конституции. Книгу можно приобрести во всех крупных торговых сетях и на сайте издательства без наценки: https://kmbook.ru/shop/russkie-nacziya-czivilizacziya-gosudarstvennost-i-pravo-russkih-na-rossiyu/

The article analyzes how the nationalist segment of the Russian public has engaged in attempts to interpret and evaluate the Crimean annexation and the war in Donbass. The Crimean annexation was justified in the Kremlin by a novel use of nationalist rhetoric. Initially, this rhetoric paid off particularly well – boosting Putin’s popularity ratings and endearing him to virtually all Russian nationalists. He could present himself as the foremost defender both of ethnic Russians abroad and of Russia’s state interests, stealing the thunder from Russian ethnonationalists and the state-centered nationalists alike. However, in spite of the initial euphoria, the war in Eastern Ukraine has antagonized the nationalist segment of the Russian public which had been won over by the Kremlin only months earlier. Russian TV footage of burned houses in East Ukrainian towns and hamlets prompted questions about why Putin was not doing more to defend them.

В книге рассматриваются вопросы, имеющие фундаментальное значение для российских граждан и страны в целом: почему мы один народ-нация, как мы себя ощущаем и как нас воспринимает остальной мир? Особое внимание уделяется категории «российский народ», а также процессу формирования национальной идентичности (нациестроительства). Отстаивается точка зрения о существовании исторического Российского государства (Рос-
сийская империя – СССР – Российская Федерация). Акцентируется внимание на реализации целенаправленных планов и программ усилиями больших коллективов, государств и отдельных личностей в историческом процессе.