The New Russian Nationalism Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism

the new russian nationalism

Ethnic core nationalism

Tishkov’s civic nationalism, however, does not seem to carry the
day in Russia. In Putin’s second presidential term (2004–8) eth-
nonationalism, previously a fairly marginal phenomenon even in
the Russian nationalist movement, increasingly came to the fore
(Popescu 2012). Writing in 2009, Alexander Verkhovsky (2010:
89) claimed that ‘neither civic nor even imperial, today’s Russian
nationalism is instead almost exclusively ethnic’. This may be an
exaggeration, but the tendency Verkhovsky identified was obvi-
ously correct. The leading nationalist organisation at the time
was the Movement against Illegal Immigration (DPNI). Although
DPNI’s programme in many respects reflected a multinational
stance, for instance by supporting the reintroduction of a nation-
ality entry in Russian passports, it also specifically demanded that
the Russian (russkii) people should be recognised as the ‘state-
bearing’ or ‘state- forming’ (gosudarstvoobrazuiushchii) nation in
the Russian Federation, ‘the people which has created this state
and which makes up the majority of the country’s population’
(Programma DPNI 2009).
In December 2010, DPNI was banned by the Russian authorities

• only to re- emerge as one of two founding organisations in a new
  movement, Russkie, which explicitly calls itself an ‘ethno- political
  association’.^4 As former DNPI leader Aleksandr Belov- Potkin
  explains:

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union a national reawakening

took place among all ethnic groups in the country, but most mark-

edly among the Russians since their ethnic identity had been very

weak. A new nation is being born today, a new identity, a new self-

understanding. I myself was raised with a Soviet identity, but my son

has a very different identity, an identity as a Russian. The empire

disappears as a distant historical memory.^5

In Russkie former DNPI members collaborate with former
members of the Slavic Union (Slavianskii soiuz), another banned
organisation. The Slavic Union had several neo- Fascist features,
but in contrast to similar organisations in past decades, like