the new russian nationalismeven larger than before. The cost–benefit analysis of politicising
nationalism had thus changed dramatically with respect to the
prospect of renewed street protests. Suddenly, playing the nation-
alist card seemed more like the safer option.
Third, one particular move in response to Putin’s domestic
political crisis on Ukraine – the brazen step of annexing Crimea
- not only promised to address the first two considerations just
discussed, but also held out the nearly unique promise of neatly
sidestepping the tension between the two strands of Russian
nationalism described above. This is because Crimea’s residents
consist of an ethnic Russian majority, and the largest minority,
Ukrainians, is also Slavic. Crimea, then, effectively hit the ‘sweet
spot’ of Russian nationalism, offering an opportunity to expand
Russian territory toward the USSR’s frontiers while also bringing
in primarily ethnic Russians. Moreover, this territory also pos-
sessed several additional traits that made annexation politically
appealing. For one thing, Crimea already hosted Russia’s Black
Sea Fleet, which meant both that annexation could be explained
in part as an effort to protect national military interests and
also that Russian troops were already available there to assist
the annexation effort and to deter a possible Ukrainian military
response. Because Crimea is a peninsula, with only a thin reed of
land connecting it to the rest of Ukraine, it had naturally defen-
sible borders and could relatively easily be ‘snipped off’. Finally,
with its historic connection to Russia itself, transferred to the
USSR’s Ukrainian republic from the Russian one only in 1954
in an act that many Russians considered arbitrary, a majority
already believed that Crimea was actually ‘Russian (rossiiskaia)
territory’ (Polit.ru 2013). While this move clearly risked a pow-
erful negative response abroad, this could also be portrayed at
home as challenging an international order that had worked
against Russian interests, a challenge that Putin’s strategists had
long considered making.
The effect of the Crimean annexation, coming shortly after
Russia’s successful hosting of the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi
in February 2014, was a dramatic surge in public support for
Putin. Importantly, as the chapter in this volume by Alexseev and
Hale shows, there was no lasting concomitant surge in national-