backing the ussr 2.0institutionalised and promoted earlier, when Putin returned to
the Kremlin in early 2012. In a programmatic newspaper article
on national identity, Putin claimed that Russia was a unique
multi- cultural civilisation. This civilisation was based, he argued,
on centuries of coexistence among ethnic groups along with the
recognition of a special consolidating and leading role of ethnic
Russians. ‘The core and the binding fabric of this unique civi-
lisation’, he wrote, ‘are the russkii people, the russkaia culture’
(Putin 2012b). In essence, Putin was proposing a non- Marxist re-
packaging of the Soviet principle that ethnic Russians should play
a leading role in the process of the ‘merging and getting closer’
(sliianie i sblizhenie) of all ethnic groups. In the new version,
this applied to the ethnic groups in the Russian Federation – but
potentially also those in its ‘near abroad’ – with the Russian lan-
guage as ‘the language of interethnic communication’.
This shift raises a question – important both politically and
theoretically: Could Putin’s turn to ethnic Russian great- power
nationalism alienate Russia’s ethnic minorities, if not spark off
anti- regime protest among them? To what extent may Putin’s
expansionist rhetoric re- animate among them common memo-
ries of imperial and Soviet- era oppression? To what extent may
it ignite grievances about the diminution of political status of
ethnically non- Russian republics under Putin’s ‘power vertical’
- followed by encroaching restrictions on the use of languages
other than Russian, particularly in government and public life, in
the predominantly ethnically non- Russian territories of Russia?
Ethnic minorities not only comprise about one- fifth of Russia’s
settled population as well as the majority of an estimated 2.5 to 7
million labour migrants (Bessudnov 2014),^1 they are also heavily
concentrated in geopolitically sensitive areas of the Caucasus and
down the Volga River to the Central Asian borderlands. Even if
latent, their grievances, if sizeable, could serve as a prospective
constraint on Putin’s expansionist policies.
In particular, we may ask whether Putin’s ethnic national-
ist turn would face backlashes in Tatarstan, a territorial home
to more than 2 million Tatars. The latter are Russia’s largest
ethnic minority, numbering more than 5.5 million throughout
Russia. How may they respond, given the not so distant history