The Kremlin’s new approach to national identity
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Blurring the boundary between civic and ethnic:
The Kremlin’s new approach to national identity
under Putin’s third term
Helge Blakkisrud
Traditionally, the Russian – and later Soviet – state has always
relied on an imperial approach to the ‘national question’: on
loyalty to the state and the dynasty/Communist Party rather
than to an ethnically defined community. For a long time, the
Romanovs tended to treat all instances of Russian ethnonation-
alism with considerable scepticism; the very idea of casting the
nation in ethnic terms appeared antithetical to their dynastic
understanding of the state (Kappeler 2001). And despite their pur-
ported ‘ethnophilia’, Soviet nation- builders repeatedly denounced
all expressions of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ (Slezkine 1994).
The breakup of the Soviet Union did not immediately change
this. After 1991, the multi- ethnic ‘Soviet people’ was replaced
by an equally complex and multi- faceted ‘Russian’ (rossiiskii)
civic identity intended to encompass everyone residing within the
borders of the new state (see, for example, Tolz 2004; Rutland
2010; Shevel 2011). However, as the dust settled and the Soviet
overlay started to wear off, a re- appraisal gradually began to take
place.
This chapter traces the evolution of President Vladimir Putin’s
approach to the Russian national idea and national identity after
his 2012 return to the Kremlin – a period during which, against
a backdrop of internal and external challenges, with the mass
protests in Moscow and St Petersburg after the 2011 State Duma
elections and the evolving crisis in Ukraine, the Kremlin under-
took a re- calibrating of its understanding of the national ‘self’.