1The ethnification of Russian nationalism
Pål Kolstø
On 18 March 2014 Putin held a landmark speech to the Russian
Federal Assembly, justifying the annexation of the Crimean pen-
insula that took place on the same day. Some of the arguments
were vintage Putin rhetoric – the need to build and defend a
strong Russian state, a lament over double Western standards
in international relations and so on. What was new, however,
were his references to the Russian people as an ethnic entity.
Putin claimed that, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union ‘the
Russian people have become one of the largest divided nations
in the world, if not the largest’ (Putin 2014a). By ‘the Russian
people’ he was clearly referring not to ‘the (multi- ethnic) people
of Russia’, but to ‘ethnic Russians’ – wherever they may live, also
abroad. The expression he used was russkii narod, a concept that
in the modern Russian political lexicon had until then been used
in the ethnic sense only, not in referring to the political nation.
For the latter entity, the Eltsin Administration had introduced
the term rossiiskii narod. It is true that in the Tsarist era the
terms rossiiskii and russkii had often been used interchangeably
(Tishkov 2013), and Putin was arguably trying to resurrect the
pre- revolutionary terminology. In an article from January 2012
(Putin 2012b) he referred also to ‘Russian Armenians’, ‘Russian
Tatars’ and ‘Russian Germans’ – using the term russkii rather
than rossiiskii. In the context this seems to mean ‘Armenians,
Tatars and Germans who live in Russia and undergo some kind
of acculturation into Russian culture’. However, his claim that