how nationalism and machine politics mix in russiaPatronalistic collective action can be thought of as distinct
from collective action based on what Benedict Anderson famously
called ‘imagined communities’, or sets of people who see them-
selves as sharing something important that makes them a com-
munity even though this ‘communing’ does not take place face
to face; people in an imagined community do not generally
know one another personally and need not be connected by net-
works of personal acquaintance (Anderson 2006). Of course, for
Anderson, the nation was the consummate imagined community.
So when Ernest Gellner famously defines national- ism as political
activities designed to make the nation coterminous with the state
(or, in Michael Hechter’s useful refinement, ‘collective action
designed to render the boundaries of the nation congruent with
those of its governance unit’), we can understand nationalism
as one form of collective action that is not based primarily on
personalised rewards and punishments and not mainly through
networks of actual acquaintance (Gellner 1983; Hechter 2000: 7).
Nationalism, then, is decidedly non- patronalistic. This does not
mean that highly patronalistic societies cannot experience nation-
alism, but it does mean that large- scale mobilisation primarily on
the basis of nationalist ideals is likely to be the exception rather
than the rule in such societies, and that any such mobilisation is
more likely to occur through (and thus be limited by) personalistic
networks.
Indeed, one of the chief features of politics in highly patronalistic
societies (‘patronal politics’) is that the primary political actors in
these societies are not formal institutions like ‘parties’ or ‘parlia-
ment’, but instead extensive networks of actual personal acquaint-
ance that typically penetrate many such formal institutions at
once. In Russia, the most important networks have tended to take
three forms. One is a set of networks led by ‘oligarchs’, mega- rich
private businesspeople who typically control not only vast eco-
nomic holdings across the country but also ‘political assets’ in the
form of their representatives in different political parties, regional
or national legislatures, and even executive power as well as non-
governmental organisations. The most visible examples in post-
Soviet Russian history have included the networks of such figures
as Vladimir Potanin, Mikhail Khodorkovskii, Oleg Deripaska