This chapter examines the evolution of the radical wing in Russian nationalism, from the early days of Dmitrii Medvedev's presidency in 2008 to the war in the Donbas region that started in 2014. ‘Russian nationalism’ is an extremely broad concept (see Laruelle 2009a); there is no such thing as one unified movement of Russian nationalists. However, in the context of an authoritarian regime and the general weakness of political movements, we may note one important distinguishing criterion: relations with the authorities. This enables us, for the purposes of discussion, to separate those nationalists who oppose the authorities from those who support them. This chapter deals only with the opposition sector, so organisations like Motherland (Rodina) and the People's Assembly (Narodnyi Sobor) are not examined here.

The opposition sector is also diverse. Here I will focus on those groups and organisations that are characteristic of it, which means excluding from the analysis those currents that, while undoubtedly interesting, are not typical. First, I will not be examining groups and organisations representing the ‘old nationalism’ of the 1990s, because these groups are becoming steadily less active and do not play any special role in the movement as a whole. Second, I will not be considering those groups that are primarily Stalinist, and nationalist only as a secondary consideration, like the followers of Colonel Vladimir Kvachkov. Eduard Limonov's followers also clearly keep themselves apart from the nationalist movement. Third, I exclude from the analysis here all national democratic currents – not because they are not part of the nationalist movement (they are), but because they differ significantly from the main sector and are notably fewer in number (in terms of various numerical indicators). National democrats clearly have their own, emergent path, and it would be a mistake to examine their dynamics and potential together with the rest.

Nationalism is featuring increasingly in Russian society and in public discourse. Previously dominated by ‘imperial’ tendencies – pride in a large, strong and multi-ethnic state able to project its influence abroad – Russian nationalism is now focusing more and more on ethnic issues. This new ethnonationalism comes in various guises – as racism and xenophobia, but also as a new intellectual movement of ‘national democracy’ that deliberately seeks to emulate conservative West European nationalism.

Western media often fail to grasp the important differences between the various strands of Russian nationalism. Traditionally, Russian nationalists have focused on the perceived need to maintain a large and strong state, and have been far less concerned with ethnic interests and racial purity. These nationalists are usually referred to as ‘statists’ (gosudarstvenniki) or with the more derogatory term ‘imperialists’ (impertsy). Opposed to them are ethnonationalists who fight for the interests not so much of the Russian state but of the Russian people, ethnically defined. These two groups distrust, even hate, each other in their pursuit of opposing political goals.

Achieving ethnic and cultural homogeneity will be impossible as long as Russia remains a huge multi-cultural state with a hegemonic position in the post-Soviet space. A consequence of Vladimir Putin's drive to maintain a high degree of influence in the Central Asian and Caucasian post-Soviet states has been his willingness to keep Russian borders open to labour migration from these regions. To be sure, also in the Soviet period there was significant movement of people between the various parts of the USSR, but the setting has now changed radically. Gone is the overarching common Soviet culture; knowledge of the Russian language among the non-Russians in the other post-Soviet states is dwindling; and the immigrants who now arrive in Moscow and other large Russian cities often have little or no education and establish themselves as a poorly integrated Lumpenproletariat.

How to explain the continued presence of the imperial legacy in the political life of Russia, and its impact on Russian nationalism? This has been a focus of my research for more than a decade (Pain 2001, 2004, 2008, 2012). The combination of Russian nationalism and imperial consciousness is conducive to the development of a special phenomenon in Russia that may be called ‘imperial nationalism’. That term may sound odd, at least to those within the Western academic tradition who are accustomed to examining nationalism as one of the factors confronting empires, as a factor involved in destroying the imperial system, but, in the Russian setting, an imperial nationalism that supports imperial aspirations really does exist, and has appeared more than once – recently manifesting itself boldly after the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation. The second decade of the 2000s had begun with political events that – it seemed to many – augured the replacement of imperial nationalism by a new (for Russia) anti-imperial Russian nationalism (Milov 2010; Russkii svet n.d.). Such hopes increased with the rise of the democratic opposition movement and the participation of Russian nationalists in the political protests that began in December 2011. The subsequent defeat of this new, anti-government, anti-Soviet Russian nationalism once again prompts reflection on the reasons for the stability of the imperial component in Russian nationalism – and, indeed, in contemporary Russian society as a whole.

In this chapter I take up some fundamental theoretical problems raised by such scholars as Sergei Gavrov (2004), Alexander Motyl (2004), Dominic Lieven (2005), Mark Beissinger (2005) and Egor Gaidar (2006) as a kind of extended conversation. These are primarily questions about the essence of empire, and the reasons for the reproduction or preservation of some imperial characteristics in the politics of post-Soviet Russia since the turn of the millennium. Here I propose a new theoretical construct – the ‘imperial syndrome’.

From May 2013 to November 2014, Russia's domestic and international environment underwent a tectonic shift. As hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens in neighbouring Ukraine rose up against the Moscow-backed and increasingly authoritarian government of Viktor Yanukovych and ultimately ousted him in early 2014, the Kremlin and the media it controls ratcheted up anti-Western rhetoric, dramatically increased its use of nationalist themes, and even employed military force in a sudden operation to annex the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and its port of Sevastopol, which Ukraine had since independence rented out to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The Kremlin then expanded its activity with a separatist insurgency in parts of eastern Ukraine. The Russian state, after almost a quarter century of retreat and recovery, finally appeared to be striking back to restore what many Russians saw as its rightful place in the world.

Theories of nationalism indicate that such events would have a profound effect on Russia's national and state identity among the general public – particularly given the intense use of state-backed symbolic politics (Suny 1993; Billig 1995; Kaufman 2001), the invocation of emotive mythology and rhetoric (Breuilly 1993), the direct contestation of state borders (Brubaker 1996), the putative need to respond to invasive international influences (Greenfeld 1992), the mobilisation of nationalist collective action (Hechter 1995; Wintrobe 1995), and changing social categorisations (Horowitz 1985). With these factors suddenly becoming more prominent during 2013 and 2014, one would expect significant shifts in support among the Russian public for various ‘institutionalized forms of [nationalist] inclusion and exclusion’ (Wimmer 2002: 9) – that is, attitudes as to which groups to include or exclude from the nation or the state. Indeed, there is a significant literature that argues state leaders often anticipate such upswells of nationalist and patriotic sentiment and sometimes even launch wars precisely in order to generate ‘rally-around- the- flag’ effects that can squelch dissent and boost support for a leadership whose popularity is flagging (see Levy 1989).

This chapter examines how ordinary residents of the Russian capital relate to the sharply increased influx of migrant workers to Russia, and to Moscow in particular. For several decades now, Western academics have scrutinised cross-border migration to Western European countries through the prism of local residents’ perceptions. However, far more attention has been paid to the problems of the migrants themselves than to the attitudes of the host populations.

Similarly in Russia: despite the growing volume of academic literature on diverse aspects of the lives of migrant workers, efforts at viewing this issue through the eyes of the host population are fairly rare. Well-established centres for the study of public opinion (Fond ‘Obshchestvennoe mnenie’ (FOM), the Levada Centre and others) periodically conduct large-scale surveys nationwide or within specific regions, and the collated ‘percentages’ are then commented on, above all in the press and online media, as well as in social media. Less often are such ‘official’ surveys, or surveys conducted by teams of researchers, analysed in academic literature (see, for example, Leonova 2004; Tiuriukanova 2009; Grigor'eva et al. 2010). There are practically no studies that for comparative or analytical purposes draw on Western experience of studying public attitudes towards migrants, and employ the conceptual approaches used in these works to explain the reasons for various public sentiments.

Instead, research on perceptions of migration in Russia consists overwhelmingly of works of a polemical-conceptual nature, in which – from a constructivist position – the authors analyse and criticise discursive practices widespread in Russian society (see, for example, Karpenko 2002; Malakhov 2007, 2011; Shnirel'man 2008; Regame [Regamey] 2010; Demintseva 2013). These discourses have an alarmist character – employing concepts of ‘territorial ethnic balance’, ‘ethno-cultural safety’, ‘critical share of immigrant population’, ‘ethnic criminality’ and the like – thereby furthering the ethnification of social relations and the growing migrantophobia among the populace.

On 18 March 2014 Putin held a landmark speech to the Russian Federal Assembly, justifying the annexation of the Crimean peninsula that took place on the same day. Some of the arguments were vintage Putin rhetoric – the need to build and defend a strong Russian state, a lament over double Western standards in international relations and so on. What was new, however, were his references to the Russian people as an ethnic entity. Putin claimed that, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union ‘the Russian people have become one of the largest divided nations in the world, if not the largest’ (Putin 2014a). By ‘the Russian people’ he was clearly referring not to ‘the (multi-ethnic) people of Russia’, but to ‘ethnic Russians’ – wherever they may live, also abroad. The expression he used was russkii narod, a concept that in the modern Russian political lexicon had until then been used in the ethnic sense only, not in referring to the political nation. For the latter entity, the Eltsin Administration had introduced the term rossiiskii narod. It is true that in the Tsarist era the terms rossiiskii and russkii had often been used interchangeably (Tishkov 2013), and Putin was arguably trying to resurrect the pre-revolutionary terminology. In an article from January 2012 (Putin 2012b) he referred also to ‘Russian Armenians’, ‘Russian Tatars’ and ‘Russian Germans’ – using the term russkii rather than rossiiskii. In the context this seems to mean ‘Armenians, Tatars and Germans who live in Russia and undergo some kind of acculturation into Russian culture’. However, his claim that ‘the Russian people has become one of the largest divided nations in the world’ clearly presupposes an ethnic understanding of ‘the people’. As long as ‘the Russian people’ is understood as ‘the total population of Russia’, it can by definition not be divided among various states.

This chapter traces the role of economics in intellectual debates over Russian national identity. On one side are the modernisers who believe that the only way to restore Russia's prosperity and standing in the world is to embrace Western market institutions. On the other side are nationalists who believe that economic integration will erode the political institutions and cultural norms that are central to Russian identity. They argue that erecting barriers to Western economic influence, and creating an alternate trading bloc, are necessary to prevent the exploitation of the Russian economy and even the possible destruction of the Russian state. The chapter traces these debates from the chaotic reforms of the 1990s through what appeared to be a winning Putin model in the 2000s, and then the uncertain waters after the 2008 financial crash, culminating with the Western sanctions (and Russian counter-sanctions) imposed after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

It is possible to imagine a middle position, a third way between the modernisers and the nationalists: a distinctively Russian economic model that combines elements of trade openness with measures to ensure Russia's long-term development. However, Russia has by and large failed to come up with its own third way model, and has instead remained trapped between the polarities of integration and autarky.

Vladimir Putin was trying to build a third-way model of state corporatism plus international integration in the period 2000–8, but the model showed its limitations in the stagnation following the 2008 financial crash. He then shifted to an alternative approach in the form of the Eurasian Economic Union: a regional trading bloc that would be under Russia's control and would be to a degree insulated from the global economic institutions dominated by the US and its allies.

This chapter examines the ideology and the political practice of Russian ethnic nationalists, exploring religio-ideological trends in contemporary Russian ethnic nationalism and assessing their potential. By Russian ethnic nationalists, I refer solely to those individual authors, parties and movements who hold the self-determination of Russians as an ethnic group as a central element of their ideology and political programme. Thus I do not deal here with political movements that are not nationalist but that borrow from the nationalists various popular ideas or political slogans at odds with the basic ideology of that party or movement.

Ethnic nationalists do not acknowledge that it is possible or necessary to create a civic nation that unites different ethnic and racial groups within Russia. For them, the Russian Federation is an alien state, dominated by a minority that oppresses the majority – akin to the South African system of apartheid. Nationalists often call Russia ‘Rossiianiia’ or ‘Erefiia’ (‘RF-iia’), stressing that they are not patriots. For nationalists, the word ‘rossiianin’, a citizen of the Russian Federation, as opposed to ‘russkii’, an ethnic Russian, is an insult, and ‘tozherossiianin’ (‘also-a- Russian- citizen’) is a scornful label for non-Russian ethnic groups.

Russian ethnic nationalism and religion in historical Perspective

Ethnic nationalism is a relatively young ideology in Russia. Political thought in Russia has always focused on the relationship between the state and Orthodox Christianity. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the historical role of the Russian people was rarely questioned. As John Anderson notes, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Slavophiles were the first to focus more on the roots of religion in the ‘national psyche’ (2012: 209). Slavophiles barely distinguished the ‘people’ from the ‘state’: ‘they all took the view that Orthodoxy was in some sense core to the very identity of Russians as a people and Russia as a state’ (ibid.). At that time the Russian people were divided into social classes with differing legal status, so the foundations for ethnic nationalism had not yet been laid. The idea of a civic nation, borrowed from the West, was unacceptable to conservatives, but was to become the hallmark of the liberal and social-democratic camp.

Traditionally, the Russian – and later Soviet – state has always relied on an imperial approach to the ‘national question’: on loyalty to the state and the dynasty/Communist Party rather than to an ethnically defined community. For a long time, the Romanovs tended to treat all instances of Russian ethnonationalism with considerable scepticism; the very idea of casting the nation in ethnic terms appeared antithetical to their dynastic understanding of the state (Kappeler 2001). And despite their purported ‘ethnophilia’, Soviet nation-builders repeatedly denounced all expressions of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ (Slezkine 1994). The breakup of the Soviet Union did not immediately change this. After 1991, the multi-ethnic ‘Soviet people’ was replaced by an equally complex and multi-faceted ‘Russian’ (rossiiskii) civic identity intended to encompass everyone residing within the borders of the new state (see, for example, Tolz 2004; Rutland 2010; Shevel 2011). However, as the dust settled and the Soviet overlay started to wear off, a re-appraisal gradually began to take place.

This chapter traces the evolution of President Vladimir Putin's approach to the Russian national idea and national identity after his 2012 return to the Kremlin – a period during which, against a backdrop of internal and external challenges, with the mass protests in Moscow and St Petersburg after the 2011 State Duma elections and the evolving crisis in Ukraine, the Kremlin undertook a re-calibrating of its understanding of the national ‘self’. Based on a reading of Putin's programmatic speeches on national identity, I argue that traditional ethno-political correctness, associated with a civic, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional identity, has been increasingly challenged by a shift in focus towards the traditional ethno-cultural core of this identity: its ‘Russianness’ (russkost’). That said, I find that the Kremlin clearly stops short of pursuing clear-cut ethnonationalism. Instead, to maximise its room for manoeuvre, the Kremlin has been deliberately blurring the borders of the Russian ethnic ‘self’, making it possible to re-interpret this ‘self’ as something more narrow but also broader than the body of citizens of the Russian Federation.

In this chapter I agree with Henry Hale's double argument that Putin has generally avoided making nationalism a central element of his popular appeal, and that the majority of the population has not interpreted Putin as a standard-bearer of nationalism – other, competing political groups are more distinctly associated with the nationalism niche. I share the view that in his third presidential term, marked by a sharp decrease in popular support and the anti-regime protests of 2011/12, Putin has been advancing a conservative value agenda in order to reinforce some of the regime's constituencies and to marginalise the liberals – and the nationalists. However, I challenge the view, advanced in several chapters in this volume, that Putin has suddenly brought nationalism into the picture, despite what is widely said about his ‘shift’ toward ethnonationalism during the Ukrainian crisis.

I interpret Putin's use of the term russkii in his 18 March 2014 speech justifying the annexation of Crimea as simply reflecting what had already become the mainstream use of the term. The term russkii is employed in a very blurry way to define both what is Russian by culture (and culture has always been more important than ethnicity: Russian culture is russkaia, not rossiiskaia, even if Gogol is of Ukrainian origin and Vasilii Grossman from a Jewish family) and in relation to the state in general. While rossiiskii is still used by those who identify with ethnic minorities to dissociate their ethnic from their civic identity, for most of the 80 per cent of those citizens who are both russkie and rossiiane, rossiiskii has a purely official flavour: it is used in speaking about Russia in terms of citizenship, legal system and what pertains to the state as an administration, whereas russkii is increasingly associated with ‘everything Russian’, and therefore also as the Russian state understood in its historical longue durée.

Rossiiane. It was a word that Eltsin had trouble pronouncing, particularly after indulging in inebriating festivities, yet he clung doggedly to it in public statements, to reassure the ethnic minorities they belonged in the Russian state just as much as the majority ethnic Russians (russkie) did. Putin enunciated the word clearly and smoothly after arriving in the Kremlin in late 1999. But in March 2014, the month Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Putin switched over to russkie when addressing the joint session of Russia's two houses of parliament. Crimea was now ‘a primordial russkaia land’, its key port of Sevastopol – ‘a russkii city’ and Ukraine's capital Kyiv – ‘the mother of russkie cities’ (Putin 2014a). The annexation of Crimea was accomplished, Putin asserted, to defend the 1.5 million russkie there from the pro-EU protesters who had swept away Ukraine's Moscow-leaning government in February 2014. With the guards behind him sporting an updated version of the Imperial Russia regalia, Putin signed into law Crimea's annexation, signalling his resolve to expand Russia's territory and dominance in the former Soviet space under the banner of ethnic russkii nationalism (see Aridici 2014 for a review). Commenting on Putin's vision, his spokesman Dmitrii Peskov said: ‘Russia (Rossiia) is the country on which the Russian [russkii] world is based’ and Putin ‘is probably the main guarantor of the safety of the Russian [russkii] world’ (Coalson 2014).

Although Russia's militarised intervention in Ukraine thrust it into the media limelight, the conceptual shift to russkie had been institutionalised and promoted earlier, when Putin returned to the Kremlin in early 2012. In a programmatic newspaper article on national identity, Putin claimed that Russia was a unique multi-cultural civilisation. This civilisation was based, he argued, on centuries of coexistence among ethnic groups along with the recognition of a special consolidating and leading role of ethnic Russians.