the ethnification of russian nationalismsuch as the Russian National Union (RNS) and the National-
Republican Party of Russia (NRPR) (Shenfield 2001: 225–44).
RNS soon developed in the direction of pure neo- Nazism.
NRPR leader Nikolai Lysenko initially declared that his party
would lean heavily on the ideas of Solzhenitsyn; evidently, it was
Solzhenitsyn’s emphasis on Russian ethnic concerns that appealed
to him. However, Solzhenitsyn’s rejection of imperial aspirations
was not to Lysenko’s liking; in the end, NRPR ideology became
a combination of Russian ethnic nationalism and great power
imperialism (Shenfield 2001: 233).
Both of the above- mentioned parties had hundreds of members,
but they were overshadowed by a third supremacist movement,
Russian National Unity (RNE), which for a time became the
largest Russian nationalist organisation. At its apogee this mili-
tant and militarised movement allegedly had tens of thousands of
members and 350 regional chapters (Laruelle 2009a: 56). RNE
leader Aleksandr Barkashov took a definite stance against state
patriotism in favour of ethnic Russian nationalism. Nationalism,
he proclaimed, is to love one’s nation and to recognise it as the
highest value. Everything else, including the state and its political
and economic system, must be subordinated to the goal of achiev-
ing the highest possible creative manifestations of the nation
(Barkashov 1993: 2). The RNE featured several Nazi- inspired
symbols, including a variety of the swastika, and must be charac-
terised as a fascist movement (‘O simvole.. .’ 1993). The state, it
held, ought to become ‘an ethnic entity at the service of a titular
Russian people’ (Laruelle 2009a: 55). However, the RNE basi-
cally fell apart in the early 2000s; while there are still organised
fascist groups in Russia, only some of them continue in the impe-
rial tradition of the RNE.
Russian Federation- centred civic nationalism
During the power struggle between Mikhail Gorbachev and his
nemesis Boris Eltsin in the late perestroika period, the Eltsinites
secured control first over the RSFSR legislature in June 1990
and over the newly established RSFSR presidency in June 1991.
As a result, Eltsin and his supporters began to identify with and