the new russian nationalismpromote the interests of the Russian republic above those of the
Union centre (Dunlop 1993). From this starting point, the trans-
formation of the RSFSR into a democratic nation- state based on
civic nationalism, the Russian Federation, commenced (Breslauer
and Dale 1997: 315–17; Kolstø 2000: 194–202).
In the 1990s it was widely predicted that the phenomenon of
the ‘new’ Russian diaspora in the ‘near abroad’ would become a
major impetus behind a revitalisation of Russian ethnic identity.
Accounts of discrimination of their fellow Russians in the other
Soviet successor state would lead to an outburst of ethnic soli-
darity (Melvin 1995: 127; Zevelev 2001: 5). However, while the
diaspora issue figured prominently in Russian media for a while,
no large- scale mobilisation around this issue took place, neither in
Russia nor among the diaspora communities themselves (Kolstø
2011). There were various reasons for this, but probably most
important was the attitude of the Russian government at the
time. Little support for the diaspora was forthcoming, rhetori-
cally or financially; and, crucially, the official policy was coached
in deliberately non- ethnic terms (Zevelev 2001). The diaspora –
Russians as well as others with roots in the RSFSR – were referred
to as sootechestvenniki, ‘compatriots’ or ‘fellow countrymen’.
Ostensibly a purely political, ‘civic’, term, it is probably more cor-
rectly regarded as multi- ethnic but cultural. It defined as ‘compa-
triots abroad’ not only all persons holding Russian passports, but
also all direct descendants of Russian citizens living abroad who
identify with Russian culture (Federal’nyi zakon 1999).
The theoretical underpinnings of the Russian Federation-
centred nation- building project are practically the work of one
man, Valerii Tishkov, director of the Institute of Ethnography
and Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. In con-
trast to most of his Russian colleagues, Tishkov is a convinced
constructivist who believes that nations are the product of
nationalists, not the other way around. He liked to quote the
nineteenth- century Italian nationalist Massimo D’Azeglio who
wrote, ‘We have created Italy – now we have to create Italians’
(Shakina 1992). Tishkov saw no reason why Russia could not
develop into a modern nation- state with the same kind of iden-
tity and the same attributes as other European states. The struc-