If the chapters in Section 1 began with the questions ‘when are we?’ and ‘where are we?’, then this second section proceeds from the question ‘who are we?’ In other words, the focus moves from ideas about Russia to ideas about Russians: not, of course, about Russians individually, as people, but about Russians collectively, as a people; or indeed about the masses, conceived as the people. Self-definition may be both affirmative and contrastive: we are we because of what we are; and we are we because of what we are not. There is a close relationship, sometimes amounting to interdependency, between representations of the self and representations of ‘the other’.

Chapter 4 starts with a broad survey of Russian ideologies of self, of Russianness, from the eighteenth century onwards. These are official and elite ideologies of the nation, devised and propagated from above: by rulers and their agents, by writers, critics, and intellectuals. Such elites were quite capable of producing radically different constructs of the nation while invoking the imagined ‘people’. But how – if at all – did the ‘people’ themselves conceive or represent Russianness? The second part of the chapter looks at examples from ‘popular’ culture, at emerging forms such as posters and postcards and popular music, to reveal another dimension and dynamic in the production of ideas, or ideals, of Russianness.