The New Russian Nationalism Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism

the ethnification of russian nationalism

of hard- line imperial nationalists like Aleksandr Prokhanov,
Albert Makashov and Sergei Baburin, all of whom have been
characterised by Stephen Shenfield (2001) as ‘fascists’. The
same appeal was signed also by ‘red’ statist nationalists like
Communist Party leaders Gennadii Ziuganov and Aman Tuleev
(Den’ 1992).
The major aim of the ‘red–brown’ coalition – first against
Mikhail Gorbachev, later against Boris Eltsin – was in fact not
to preserve the communist ideology or the planned economy but
to hold the Soviet Union together as state. In a public appeal, the
organisers of the National Salvation Front used highly emotive
language:

Dear rossiiane! Citizens of the USSR! Fellow citizens! An enormous,

unprecedented misfortune has befallen us: the motherland, our

country, a great state, which has been given us by history, by nature,

and by our glorious forefathers, is perishing, is being broken apart, is

being buried in darkness and non- existence. (‘Slovo k narodu’ 1992)

The National Salvation Front pledged to ‘work consistently for
the restoration of the state unity of our country’.
The ‘red-browns’ failed in their bid for power in October 1993,
when the besieged Russian parliament that they controlled was
shelled into surrender by Eltsin- loyal troops. After this defeat,
the ‘red’ and the ‘brown’ statists drifted apart and important
differences in their thinking came to the fore. Even so, both fac-
tions continued to adhere to a basically ethnicity- neutral variety
of statism. Ziuganov promoted cultural Russian nationalism but
generally eschewed an emphasis on ethnicity in his argumen-
tation (Simonsen 1996: 103), while Vladimir Zhirinovskii and
his Liberal- democratic Party are somewhat more difficult to pin
down. According to Laruelle, Zhirinovskii cannot reasonably be
classified as either an ‘imperialist’ or an ‘ethnonationalist’. On
the one hand he has campaigned for a self- sufficient regime in
which ethnic Russians would enjoy legal primacy, but at the same
time ‘he refuses... to provide a racial definition of Russianness,
emphasizing instead a linguistic and cultural sense of belonging to
a Russian world’ (Laruelle 2009a: 100).