The New Russian Nationalism Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism

imperial syndrome and its influence

The latter they regarded as always and intrinsically self- interested,
greedy, deceitful and coldly frugal (Tsimbaev 1986). These later
Slavophiles harnessed the concept of the nation – as an ethnic
phenomenon permanently grafted to the body of the Russian
people – to preserve autocracy and imperial power.
Within this circle of later Slavophiles an ideological move-
ment arose whose adherents began to see themselves as ‘Russian
nationalists’ – and who were also defined as such by outside
observers. In this author’s opinion, several of the major generic
characteristics of Russian nationalism have maintained their sig-
nificance from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day:

• essentialism – the idea that there are special, eternal cultural
  qualities of the Russian people that distinguish them funda-
  mentally from other peoples, in particular from the peoples of
  Western Europe. The West always functions as the constituting
  ‘Other’ in relation to Russian nationalism;


• defensive imperial character – from the start, Russian national-
  ists saw the service of autocracy and the preservation of empire
  as vitally important goals for their political activity. As the
  central point of their political programme, the first legal party
  of Russian nationalists that emerged in 1905 expounded that
  ‘the Union of the Russian People... establishes as its sacred,
  immutable duty to make every effort to ensure that the land
  won by the blood of our forefathers remains an eternally inal-
  ienable part of the Russian state. All attempts to dismember
  Russia, by whatever means, will be decisively and absolutely
  eliminated’;^2


• the principle of the political domination of ethnic Russians – a
  merging of the idea of protecting the empire with a recipro-
  cal requirement for preferential rights to be accorded ethnic
  Russians within that empire – to the ethnic Russian people, the
  ethnic Russian nation: ‘Russia for the Russians’.

Thus, the idea of the nation first appeared in Russia at the end of
the eighteenth century as a sign of the enlightened sector of soci-
ety’s expectation of revolutionary change. Its first advocates, the
Decembrists, who promoted the idea of the nation as a source of