changes in russian nationalist public opinion 2013–14who supported Russia’s territorial expansion in the past must
have felt that expanding to Crimea was enough.
In both May 2013 and November 2014, respondents were given
a prompt that state borders sometimes change in the course of
history, and were then asked where they believed the borders of
the Russian Federation should be. The share of those who said
Russia’s borders should remain the same increased sharply – from
about 39 per cent in 2013 to 50 per cent in 2014 (not counting
the 8–9 per cent who found it hard to say or refused to answer in
each survey). The crucial difference, of course, is that after March
2014 ‘the same’ implied the inclusion of Crimea into Russia. The
proportion of respondents who preferred an expansion of Russia’s
territory – either bringing Ukraine and Belarus into a ‘Slavic
Union’ or incorporating all territories of the former Soviet Union
- dropped from 47 to 38 per cent. The 2013/14 period appears to
have marked a turning point. In mid- 2013, a larger and statisti-
cally significant proportion of respondents wanted to see Russia’s
territory expand than stay the same. In 2014, a larger and statisti-
cally significant proportion wanted Russia’s territory to remain the
same rather than expanding. Meanwhile, the share of respondents
who preferred having the Muslim republics of the North Caucasus
excluded from Russia remained about the same – indicating that
xenophobic views (those who so deeply wanted an ethnically pure
Russia that they would even accept territorial contraction as the
price) remained relatively constant year on year. Figure 7.6 shows
all response frequencies on this question in 2013 and 2014.
These findings indicate that views of Islam are not about territo-
rial expansionism. After the annexation of Crimea, public prefer-
ences for expansion to a ‘Slavic Union’ or a ‘USSR 2.0’ went down,
but views stayed the same regarding the exclusion of Russia’s North
Caucasian Muslim regions. This implies that ethnic/ imperialist
nationalist and xenophobic nationalist views operate with at least
partially different perceptual logics. The NEORUSS survey data
on Russians’ views of Islam further support this idea. In particular,
only a small change was observed when respondents were asked
if Islam posed a threat to social stability and Russian culture. In
2013, about 66 per cent of the respondents agreed completely or
partially that Islam posed such a threat, compared to 70 per cent in