the ethnification of russian nationalismgraveyard of discarded scientific ideas – alongside Lysenkoism,
which it allegedly resembles.
Krylov (2012) derisively calls the current Russian Federation
Erefiia (‘RF- iia’), while Pavel Sviatenkov claims that not only in
the RSFSR but also in the Russian Federation the Russians have
been deprived of a nation- state. For members of one of the smaller
Russian ethnic groups, such as the Avars, it can make sense to say
both that ‘I am an Avar’ and ‘I am a rossiianin’, Sviatenkov claims.
In that case ‘Avar’ means ethnicity and rossiianin citizenship – ‘but
for a Russian, such a phrase is devoid of meaning’ (Sviatenkov
2010: 3–4). Sviatenkov accepts that a common rossiiskii identity is
possible, but on one indispensable condition only: ‘if it is coupled
to the recognition of a state status for the Russian people, Russia as
the national state of Russians’ (2010: 6, emphasis in the original).
However, most Russian ethnonationalists will not be content
with converting the present Russian state within its current borders
into a Russian nation- state. They regard ethnic Russians in the
‘near abroad’ as members of the Russian nation, and demand that
Russians who live in compact settlements outside Russia must be
given the right to conduct referenda on unification of their ter-
ritory with Russia. To justify this, Vladimir Tor, a leader of the
National- Democratic Party, points to how German reunification
was conducted in 1990: each of the German Länder of the former
DDR was allowed to hold a referendum on joining the Federal
Republic of Germany.^9 Contemporary Russian ethnonationalism,
then, contains an element of ethnic irredentism. We may also note
that Tor’s recipe is strikingly similar to the method adopted by the
Kremlin as the formal procedure for incorporating Crimea into
the Russian Federation in March 2014.
Ethnonationalist rhetoric in the Russian leadership
Writing in April 2014 Igor Zevelev (2014: 3) has argued: ‘even if
ethnonationalism in Russia does not make up an organised politi-
cal force, it is quite clear that its intellectual influence has been
growing in recent years’. While most Russian ethnonationalists
acknowledge that their impact on Russian public debate has been
limited thus far, they note with satisfaction that some of their