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.