imperial syndrome and its influenceists, and declared their belief that, in political terms, consistent
nationalism is the opposite of imperial ideology, which asserts not
the sovereignty of the people, but the dominion of the sovereign.
Nationalism, as Krylov notes, ‘considers the state of secondary
value. The country exists for the people and not the people for
the country’ (Nazdem.info 2010). Rejecting the idea of empire
and rethinking the role of state and society has already led several
Russian nationalists to reject not only imperial inclinations, but
also support for an autocratic, authoritarian model of governance.
‘When the Soviet state fell apart’, Krylov observes, ‘all ideologi-
cally committed Russian forces sided with the communists. And
as a result, they could not produce anything except a “red–brown
fusion”’ – which, in Krylov’s opinion, also led the ‘Russian party’
to disaster. Today the situation has changed radically, he holds,
and the idea that ‘nationalism and democracy are practically the
same thing’ is growing in strength (Nazdem.info 2010).
Rejection of traditional statism, opposition to the
authorities, demands for democracy
Open opposition to the current government became a defin-
ing feature of the new Russian nationalism. Almost all Russian
nationalist ideologists have spoken out against the authorities:
the authorities have been accused of persistent repression of the
Russian nationalist movement and of the entire Russian nation;
of a failure to pay attention to the problems of the Russian major-
ity; and of a reluctance to fight the influx of migrants into cities.
Russian nationalists had made similar complaints to the authori-
ties even back in the USSR (Mitrokhin 2003), but in the Soviet
period these accusations from nationalists were not associated
with demands for democratisation. By the end of the first decade
of the 2000s, however, there were signs that the sum total of
uncoordinated protest moods within elite Russian nationalism
was coming together in a single stream of sorts, on the basis of
which a new variety of nationalism was being born: ‘national
democracy’. This stood in contrast to Russian nationalism’s tradi-
tional and basic branch – the ‘national imperial’, sometimes also
referred to as ‘national patriotic’.