the new russian nationalismpossible moment before the 2008 presidential campaign process
was to start, the system’s major networks almost all fell in line
behind him and ushered the protégé to a comfortable victory, no
runoff necessary (Hale and Colton 2010). This protégé, Dmitrii
Medvedev, represented perhaps the least nationalist of the avail-
able credible alternatives for Putin, being widely seen as relatively
‘pro- Western’ (Sakwa 2011a).
This is not to say that nationalism played no role whatso-
ever during this period, of course. Spikes of nationalist rheto-
ric could be noticed around the campaign seasons, as with
Putin’s warnings that anti- Russian ‘jackals’ were feeding around
Western embassies, that forces in the West were aiming to carve
up Russia, and that Western election observation activity was
nefarious and needed to be curtailed in the run- up to the 2007–8
elections (Polit.ru 2007; RFE/RL 2007a, 2007b, 2007c; various
media news reports observed by the author on 1 December
2007 in Russia). Such rhetoric could be interpreted as essen-
tially defensive from a domestic politics perspective, however,
designed to pre- empt political opponents with stronger national-
ist reputations from mobilising such issues while simultaneously
undercutting any support there may have been for Western criti-
cism of Russian elections and backing for Russia’s opposition.
Regardless, as noted above, surveys have consistently found that
Putin backers tended to stand out not for harder- line stances on
such issues, but instead for more moderate stands, although on
the whole nationalist issues were not the strongest drivers of citi-
zens’ leadership preferences (White and McAllister 2008; Colton
and Hale 2009; Hale and Colton 2010; Treisman 2011b; Colton
and Hale 2014).
The drop in Putin’s support and succesion as regime
destabiliser 2009–12
As the 2000s wound to a close, then, nationalism was not much
needed politically by Putin and he had generally relied more on
other bases of support, especially since his main opponents all
had more pronounced stands on nationalist issues than did he.
This situation started to change, however, as the global financial