the kremlin’s new approach to national identitynot taking seriously the spread of ‘Russophobia’ within Russian
society. ‘To me it is obvious that today, the Russian people
(russkii narod) needs systematic support of its culture, language,
forms of self- organisation, forms of citizenship [and] community
action’ (Chaplin 2012). Dmitrii Demushkin, one of the leaders of
the Russian nationalist organisation Russkie, simply dismissed
the whole strategy as ‘empty and toothless’ (Natsional’nyi aktsent
2012).
Also representatives of the ethnic minority communities voiced
criticism during the public hearing process. Although the state
was to guarantee equal rights to all peoples residing in the Russian
Federation – the draft had fixed the number of such peoples to
193, and the number of different languages used in the public
education system to 89 – and protect the cultural and linguistic
diversity these groups represented (Proekt... 2012), formulations
about the need for further consolidating Russia’s administrative
structure caused considerable concern. In the ethnic autonomies,
the latter was interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on their status
as independent federal subjects; in terms of population, the auton-
omies tend to be much smaller than the oblasts and krais, so the
leaders of these autonomies feared that the authorities would use
the strategy as a pretext for reviving the merger process. After vig-
orous protests from, inter alia, Tatarstan, overt calls for merging
ethnic autonomies with other federal subjects were omitted from
the final draft (Litoi 2012; Khisamiev and Coalson 2012).
Finally, the draft strategy was also criticised for ignoring the
elephant in the room: the definition of what constitutes Russia’s
‘national idea’. Viacheslav Mikhailov, co- chair of the working
group that prepared the draft and former Minister of Nationalities
Affairs and Federal Relations (1995–2000), admitted that the
authors had been ‘criticised for the fact that we formulate the
goal of the state nationalities policy without having formulated
a national idea’, but went on to explain that the strategy should
be ‘a consensus- oriented document, a form of social contract’
(Gorodetskaia 2012b).
On the whole, the draft provoked considerable debate and
reaction. According to one of its authors, Valerii Tishkov, former
Minister of Nationalities Affairs (1992) and Director of the