the ethnification of russian nationalism‘the Russian people has become one of the largest divided nations
in the world’ clearly presupposes an ethnic understanding of ‘the
people’. As long as ‘the Russian people’ is understood as ‘the total
population of Russia’, it can by definition not be divided among
various states.
Ever since taking office, Putin has regularly been characterised
in Western media as a ‘nationalist’. His original brand of nation-
alism was clearly of the statist kind, derzhavnost, with a strong
emphasis on the state, the derzhava. In his article ‘Russia on the
eve of the millennium’, published on 30 December 1999, the day
before he was appointed acting president, Putin stressed the cen-
trality of a strong state for Russian identity and discussed the
cultural foundations of Russian statehood (Putin 1999; see also
Kolstø and Blakkisrud 2004). Remarkably, not once did he use
the adjective russkii at this point. In a lengthy section, Putin dis-
cussed what he regarded as ‘traditional Russian values’ – but he
consistently referred to them as rossiiskie values, even if these
values were generally the same ones as those that numerous
authors before him had singled out as typical of ethnic Russians
and not necessarily of other peoples of Russia. At this stage Putin
not only toed the terminological line of his benefactor President
Eltsin but underplayed the ethnic component in the nation concept
even more than his predecessor had done. Later, the term russkii
gradually crept into his speeches.
The substitution of one word for ‘Russian’ with another in
Russian political discourse, I hold, was not just a matter of phras-
ing: it reveals a fundamental shift in nationalism and national
identity that has taken place in Russia in recent decades, from
statist to ethnonationalist positions. This change is evident at
various levels, societal and political. Before it found its way
into Putin’s speeches, it could be detected in oppositional public
discourse.
Nikolai Mitrokhin (2003: 47) traces organised Russian ethno-
nationalism back to the 1950s and 1960s. In the pre- perestroika
period the vast majority of Russian nationalists, also of the eth-
nonationalists, had the Soviet Union as their country of reference
and could not contemplate any truncation of its territory. Most
Soviet citizens took great pride in the fact that their state was one