6Backing the USSR 2.0: Russia’s ethnic minorities
and expansionist ethnic Russian nationalism
Mikhail A. Alexseev
Rossiiane. It was a word that Eltsin had trouble pronouncing,
particularly after indulging in inebriating festivities, yet he clung
doggedly to it in public statements, to reassure the ethnic minori-
ties they belonged in the Russian state just as much as the majority
ethnic Russians (russkie) did. Putin enunciated the word clearly
and smoothly after arriving in the Kremlin in late 1999. But in
March 2014, the month Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine,
Putin switched over to russkie when addressing the joint session
of Russia’s two houses of parliament. Crimea was now ‘a pri-
mordial russkaia land’, its key port of Sevastopol – ‘a russkii city’
and Ukraine’s capital Kyiv – ‘the mother of russkie cities’ (Putin
2014a). The annexation of Crimea was accomplished, Putin
asserted, to defend the 1.5 million russkie there from the pro- EU
protesters who had swept away Ukraine’s Moscow- leaning gov-
ernment in February 2014. With the guards behind him sporting
an updated version of the Imperial Russia regalia, Putin signed
into law Crimea’s annexation, signalling his resolve to expand
Russia’s territory and dominance in the former Soviet space under
the banner of ethnic russkii nationalism (see Aridici 2014 for a
review). Commenting on Putin’s vision, his spokesman Dmitrii
Peskov said: ‘Russia (Rossiia) is the country on which the Russian
[russkii] world is based’ and Putin ‘is probably the main guaran-
tor of the safety of the Russian [russkii] world’ (Coalson 2014).
Although Russia’s militarised intervention in Ukraine thrust it
into the media limelight, the conceptual shift to russkie had been