the new russian nationalismconstitutional order, could on that basis be deemed ‘civic nation-
alists’. However, while these first Russian ‘nationalists’ defended
the value of popular representation, by the start of the twentieth
century nationalism had degenerated into a highly reactionary
political force, defending autocracy, Russia’s imperial structure
and the ethnic, religious and social inequality of its inhabitants.
Nationalism based on these principles took shape conceptually
and organisationally in the Russian Empire in the 1900s, and
then – after a temporary embargo during the Soviet period – was
revived in the post- Soviet Russia of the 1990s, initially as a politi-
cal force opposing the then- officially proclaimed ideas of mod-
ernisation, liberalism, federalism and tolerance. Since the turn
of the millennium, imperial nationalism has become a political
fellow- traveller of the Russian authorities. However, as noted
above, there were clear signs of an entirely new Russian national-
ism in the wave of fervent political protest in 2011/12.
The rise and fall of the ‘new’ (national democratic)
Russian nationalism, 2010–14
The characteristics of this current in nationalism were revealed
as clearly as if in a laboratory experiment. Indeed, many of them
were deliberately constructed as a contrast to traditional Russian
nationalism.
Anti- imperial nature of the new nationalism
According to one popular theorist of the ‘new’ nationalism,
Konstantin Krylov, Russian nationalism’s transition from an
imperial to a national ideology emerged quite recently: ‘For a start,
Russian nationalism proper is essentially a new phenomenon. I
measure its history from around the first decade of the 2000s’
(Nazdem.info 2010). Russian nationalism was conceived as impe-
rial, and in the movement that, according to Krylov, was ground-
lessly termed Russian nationalism, until the late 1990s almost
‘everything boiled down to fantasies of “how we can make good
the empire”’. The national democrats demonstrated their rejection
of the imperialism traditionally associated with Russian national-