the new russian nationalismof the world’s two superpowers and, indeed, the largest country
on the planet. Among the first to claim that Russians should
be ready to let go of the Asian parts of the state was Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn. But for a long time his remained an isolated voice
in the wilderness. The leading contemporary Russian nationalist
Konstantin Krylov (Nazdem.info 2010) maintains that Russian
(ethno)nationalism is a ‘new phenomenon’, dating roughly from
the first decade of the new millennium – an assessment echoed by
Emil Pain, a keen observer of the Russian nationalist scene (Pain
2014: 48; Pain, this volume).
Whence, then, the new ethnic turn in Russian self- understanding?
A simple answer would be that it is linked to the collapse of the
USSR – but that is far from the whole story. Under Eltsin both
the regime and its critics espoused various brands of state- focused
nationalism: the hardliners (the ‘red–brown’ opposition) were
Soviet nostalgics who longed for the defunct superpower, while
the Eltsinites sought to inculcate in the population loyalty to the
truncated Russian state, the Russian Federation. At that time,
actual ethnonationalists were few and far between; they were to
come later.
A typology of Russian nationalisms
Numerous books and articles have been written about Russian
nationalism – under the tsars (Riasanovsky 1959; Seton- Watson
1986; Simon 1991; Tuminez 2000; Tolz 2001), in the Soviet
Union (Yanov 1978; Dunlop 1983; Dunlop 1985; Carter 1990;
Brudny 2000; Mitrokhin 2003), under perestroika (Szporluk
1989; Dunlop 1993), and in the post- communist period (Tuminez
2000; Tolz 2001; Laruelle 2008; Laruelle 2009a). These analyses
have argued that nationalism has influenced the worldview of
Russian thinkers and politicians and shaped events in Russia. For
instance, Nikolai Mitrokhin (2003: 41) has claimed that Russian
nationalism was ‘a rather widespread phenomenon’ in the USSR,
while John Dunlop (1985: 92) expressed the view that Russian
nationalism was well positioned to replace communism as state
ideology. In contrast, in 1990 Alexander Motyl (1990: 161–73)
claimed that Russian nationalism was a marginal phenomenon in