the new russian nationalismLaruelle (2008: 29) sees their movement as ‘an extreme form of
statism’.
John Dunlop (1983, 1985) identified the vast majority of
Russian nationalists in the post- war dissident movement as
culturalists (or vozrozhdentsy in his terminology) rather than
‘National Bolsheviks’. They were deeply preoccupied with pre-
serving Russian cultural traditions and monuments, concerned
about the decay of the Russian countryside and at least some of
them professed the Orthodox faith. Other scholars have found a
much larger element of statism and aggressive Messianism, even
proto- fascism and fascism, among anti- regime Russian national-
ists (Yanov 1978; Laqueur 1993; Duncan 2000: 82–96; Shenfield
2001: 40–4). Neither the dissident statists nor the vozrozhdentsy
questioned the territorial integrity of the Soviet state – with a
few notable exceptions. Best- known here is Solzhenitsyn, with
his appeal to the Soviet leaders to let go of Central Asia and
concentrate the resources of the state on developing the Russian
North (Solzhenitsyn 1980). It is true that Solzhenitsyn under
no circumstances envisioned relinquishing the demographically
Slavic parts of the Soviet state such as Ukraine, Belarus and north-
ern Kazakhstan. However, by combining an ethnic reasoning
with a readiness to forego state grandeur he anticipated the later
development of Russian ethnic core nationalism (quadrant 4 in
my matrix). Also a few other dissident nationalists in the 1970s
and 1980s can be seen as ethnonationalists, including Vladimir
Balakhonov (Szporluk 1989: 25–6) and Sergei Soldatov (Dunlop
1983: 250).
Nationalism after the dissolution of the unitary Soviet
state
The collapse of the USSR was a major watershed in Russian
history in the twentieth century, and inevitably affected the tra-
jectory of nationalist thinking as well (Dunlop 1993). According
to Georgiy Mirsky, this almost immediately led to two separate,
major reorientations in Russian perceptions: towards an ethnic
Russian nationalism, on the one hand, and towards a non- ethnic
loyalty towards the Russian Federation, on the other: