¹ See, for example, Shlapentokh, Vladimir, Sendich, Munir, and Payin, Emil, The New Diaspora: Russian Minorities in the Former Soviet Republics (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994)Google Scholar; Khazanov, Anatoly, After the USSR: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Kolstø, Pal, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics (London: Hurst and Company, 1995)Google Scholar; Melvin, Neil, Russians beyond Russia: The Politics ofNational Identity (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995)Google Scholar; Segbers, Klaus and Spegeleire, Stephan De, eds., Post-Soviet Puzzles: Mapping the PoliticalEconomy ofthe Former Soviet Union (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlags-gesellschaft, 1995)Google Scholar; Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chinn, Jeff and Kaiser, Robert, Russians as the New Minority: Ethnicity andNationalism in the Soviet Successor States (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Bremmer, Ian and Taras, Ray, eds., New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Tishkov, Valery, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame (London: Sage Publications, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laitin, David, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Prizel, Ilya, National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Rus sia and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Poppe, Edwin and Hagendoom, Louk, “Types of Identification among Russians in the Near Abroad,” Europe-Asia Studies 53 (January 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Brubaker, Rogers, “National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External National Homelands in the New Europe,” Daedalus 124 (Winter-Spring 1995)Google Scholar; Brubaker (fn. 1).

³ Smith and Wilson consider the possibility that many ethnic Russians outside Russia would consider their state of residence to be their homeland, something that our analysis indicates is quite prevalent; see Smith, Graham and Wilson, Andrew, “Rethinking Russia's Post-Soviet Diaspora: The Potential for Political Mobilisation in Eastern Ukraine and North-East Estonia,” Europe-Asia Studies 49 (July 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Technical note on surveys: The surveys in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan were directed by Dr. Polina Kozyreva of the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences. The data from Ukraine are based on a block of questions in the Ukraine Fall 1998 Omnibus Survey conducted by Dr. Volodymyr Paniotto of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. The samples in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan were designed as representative samples of Russian speakers in those countries. While most of the respondents were self-identified as Russians, many belonged to other nationalities. In Ukraine the sample was a nationally representative sample, of which Russian speakers (and specifically Russians) were only a randomly selected part. The numbers of respondents and Russians (given in parentheses) in the four surveys are Belarus 803 (765), Kazakhstan 798 (619), Kyrgyzstan 800 (685), and Ukraine 1,600 (329). The interviews were conducted face-to-face, and in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan almost all were conducted in Russian. In Ukraine the interviews were conducted in Russian or Ukrainian, according to the respondent's wishes. There was very little item nonresponse in the survey. For this reason, for the sake of completeness of the interpretation, in much of the tabular analysis we include those who responded “difficult to say” (”don't know”) or who did not answer the question (NA or refused) in the reported percentage distributions; however, ex- eluding such responses would not have appreciably changed our interpretations. The focus groups in Kazakhstan were held in Astana on April 6, and in Almaty on April 7,1999. They were conducted under the direction of the Institute of Sociology (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) and with the assistance of the Public Opinion Foundation. The Ukrainian focus groups took place on September 20, and September 22,1999, in Kiev (Kyiv) and Lviv, respectively, and were also supervised by researchers from the Institute of Sociology. In both countries there were ten participants per group, with variation within the groups in terms of gender, age, education level, and ethnic identity of the participants.

⁵ It is important, however, to submit this proposition to empirical analysis in future research.

⁶ Kaiser, Robert, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 8Google Scholar.

⁷ Herb, Guntram H., “National Identity and Territory,” in Herb, G. H and Kaplan, David H., eds., Nested Identities: Nationalism, Territory, and Scale (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 17Google Scholar. For another discussion of the interaction between territory and national identity, this one on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, see Dudwick, Nora, “The Cultural Construction of Political Violence in Armenia and Azerbaijan,” Problems ofPost-Communism 42 (July-August 1995)Google Scholar.

⁸ Brubaker(fn.2).

⁹ See, for example, on secessionism in South Asia, Thomas, Raju G. C., “Competing Nationalisms: Secessionist Movements and the State,” Harvard International Review 18 (Summer 1996)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ For analysis of causes of irredentism, see Saideman, Stephen M. and Ayers, R. William, “Determining the Causes of Irredentism: Logit Analyses of Minorities at Risk Data from the 1980s and 1990s,” Journal ofPolitics 62 (November 2000)Google Scholar.

¹¹ As Table 1 indicates, however, there is almost no empirical support for the idea that ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan think of their homeland in this way.

¹² Kaiser, for example, discusses the way in which the migration of “nonindigenes to another nation's homeland has served to heighten the perception among indigenes that the nation and its primordial claim to homeland is under attack”; see Kaiser (fn. 6), 24. What he does not discuss in this section, however, is whether new residents may over time come to think of their new area as their homeland.

¹³ This distinction can be found in a work by Dmytri Kornilov, the leader of the International Movement of Donbass (Ukraine), cited in Shulman, Stephen, “Competing versus Complementary Identities: Ukrainian-Russian Relations and the Loyalties of Russians in Ukraine,” Nationalities Papers 26 (December 1998), 621CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, most participants in focus groups in Ukraine did not make distinctions between “homeland” and “fatherland,” noting that the two words employed were synonymous. Focus groups in Kazakhstan did not discuss the terminology for “homeland” at all.

¹⁴ Smith and Wilson (fn. 3) emphasize both the external homeland idea of Brubaker and the idea that some in the ethnic minority may consider their homeland to be in their state of residence. They also mention, however, that there is no reason to assume that diaspora Russians would perceive of Russia as their homeland. Poppe and Hagendoorn (fn. 1) approach the issue differently. Rather than focusing on the identification of homeland, they classify forms of ethnic self-identification among Russians in the near abroad. Poppe and Hagendoorn divide respondents into six categories based on their responses to closed-ended questions about citizenship and draw conclusions about the likelihood of national integration based on the dominant subtypes present in a given state.

¹⁵ Brubaker (fn. 2), 108.

¹⁶ Ibid., 110. This point is echoed by Melvin (fn. 1), who argues that the search by officials in Russia for a term to describe the ethnic Russians outside the Russian Federation was based on the assumption that Russia was, in fact, the homeland (rodina) of these Russians (p. 16).

¹⁷ This is certainly how those who have not given Brubaker's article a close reading have come to think of the “external national homeland” field; see Brubaker (fn. 2).

¹⁸ The assumptions imply that even if these first two ideas are not true, the external national homeland would be a pivotal actor, adopting policies that affect the ethnic minority in their state of residence. As Brubaker (fn. 2) claims, the national minorities must “contend” with the “‘homeland’ nationalisms” of the external national homelands with which they share an ethnic bond, and the relationship between the national minorities and external national homelands is (like the other relationships in the nexus) “responsive and interactive” (pp. 109, 119–20, emphasis in original). For further discussion, see Lowell Barrington, “Rethinking the Triadic Nexus: External National Homelands, International Organizations, and Ethnic Relations in the Former Soviet Union” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, New York, April 15–17,1999).

¹⁹ The word rodina, rather than otechestvo, was used in the survey to designate “homeland.” Evidence from focus groups suggests that respondents may not distinguish an important difference between the two words. See fn. 13.

²⁰ It is surprising, given the tendency of ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to show greater attachment to Russia in other ways, that so many in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan chose to identify their state of residence as their homeland.

²¹ This idea of the USSR remaining as a homeland after its collapse is pointed to in the literature on post-Soviet ethnic relations; see, for example, Smith and Wilson (fn. 3).

²² It is tempting to take those who said “where I live” and throw them into the category of the state of residence or to combine those who said “where I was born” with specific country answers based on their response to the country-of-birth question. To do so would be to assume that when respondents make a general statement “where I was born,” they are thinking of the state where they were born rather than the region or city. To assume that respondents have country in mind when thinking about homeland is risky. However, it may be reasonable to classify the “where I was born” or “where I live” responses with the set of responses, including multilevel identities, that are associated with the country of current residence or the country of birth. In this way, we can distinguish those who identify their homeland as “Russia” or “Moscow” or “where I was born” (if the person was born in Russia) as a more generic “Russian homeland”; and we can classify those who give a homeland as “Kazakhstan” or “Al-maty” or “where I live” as a generic “Kazakhstan homeland.” Thus, we can distinguish those who have an internal homeland from those who have an external homeland. But caution is still in order about assuming that these homelands are necessarily at the country level.

²³ Brubaker(fn.2), 127.

²⁴ Davis, Sue and Sabol, Steven O., “The Importance of Being Ethnic: Minorities in Post-Soviet States—The Case of Russians in Kazakhstan,” Nationalities Papers 26 (September 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Ibid., 475.

²⁶ See Melvin (fn. 1); Galina Vitkovskaya, “Potential Migration of Russian-Speaking Populations from Central Asia to Russia,” in Demko, George J., loffe, Grigory, and Zaionchkovskaya, Zhanna, eds., Population under Duress: The Geodemography of Post-Soviet Russia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Shulman (fn. 13) claims that such a heightened sense of identity would waken the “internal national pull” of the minority in question (in this case the Russians) and lead the minority to reach out to the external homeland. While the data do show a greater tendency for Russians in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to reach out to Russia, they also show that for most Russians living there these Central Asian states are their homelands. Thus, while a greater ethnic distance between the majority and minority (and policies by the state that emphasize ethnicity) may make members of the minority more likely to look for help from coethnics in a neighboring state, it does not seem to be enough to overcome the sense of homeland. Indeed, as we show below, country of birth seems to be the decisive factor in determining choice of homeland by the Russians in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, and Ukraine.

²⁸ In the cases of Belarus and Ukraine such a large ethnic difference does not exist between the titular populations and the ethnic Russians. As Szporluk puts it, “Ukrainians and Belarusans are commonly perceived in Russia as being Russian”; Szporluk, Roman, “Introduction: Statehood and Nation Building in Post-Soviet Space,” in Szporluk, ed., National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and tie New States of Eurasia (Armonk, N.Y.; M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 9Google Scholar.

²⁹ See Melvin (fn.l), 109–10; Davis and Sabol (fn. 24), 481–82.

³⁰ Shulman (fn. 13), 621.

³¹ Ibid.

³² We recognize of course that many Russians emigrated from Central Asia in the 1990s and thereby “voted with their feet.” Yet these emigration decisions may well be based largely on pragmatic grounds—a sense of both the economic and social situations in Central Asia compared with Russia or other alternative locations. They do not necessarily reflect a “call to the homeland.” Given that we conducted our surveys during a period of continued heavy emigration of Russians from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, our finding that only a minority of Russians defined Russia as their homeland is especially instructive.

³³ Respondents who indicated that their homeland was “where I live” were also classified as selecting an internal homeland.

³⁴ This includes respondents who selected “USSR,” “CIS,” “Former Soviet Union,” and “Outside FSU.”

³⁵ For details of the discussion groups, see fn. 4.

³⁶ It would also counter evidence from a survey in Estonia in 1991 which showed that the younger generation of both Estonians and Russians was much less accommodating toward the other nationality than was the older generation. See Anderson, Barbara A., Silver, Brian D., Titma, Mikk, and Ponarin, Eduard D., “Estonian and Russian Communities: Ethnic and Language Relations,” International Journal of Sociology 26 (Summer 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Reduction in error was calculated by comparing the percent correctly predicted with the percentage of cases labeled 1 on the dependent variable.

³⁸ Another coefficient is significant at p ≤ .10.

³⁹ We assessed confidence in parliament, the courts, government, and the presidency. Results are available upon request from Lowell Barrington ([email protected]).

⁴⁰ Easton, David, “An Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems,” World Politics 9 (April 1957)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ For this analysis, we divide the responses into two categories: persons who intend to leave the country and those who intend to stay or who are undecided.

⁴² The analogous figure in our survey for Russians in Ukraine is 81 percent.

⁴³ We obtain similar results to those in Figures 3 and 4 if we use country of birth in place of homeland. However, as noted earlier, the two variables are highly correlated with one another, and so we use “homeland” here because we have information on this variable from all four countries in our study.

⁴⁴ This is the number of registered forced migrants and refugees, according to the head of the Federal Migration Service in Russia. See Eurasia Foundation, Tatiana Regent: Migrationfrom Former Soviet Republics to Russia Has Reduced (www.eurasia.org.ru/english/july/Eng0008.html).

⁴⁵ Net outmigration from Central Asia and Transcaucasia to Russia is not, however, a post-Soviet invention. It had been going on for at least two decades prior to the demise of the Soviet Union. See Anderson, Barbara A. and Silver, Brian D., “Demographic Sources of the Changing Ethnic Composition of the Soviet Union,” Population andDevelopment Review 15 (December 1989)Google Scholar; idem, “Population Redistribution and the Ethnic Balance in Transcaucasia,” in Suny, Ronald G., ed., Transcaucasia, Nationalism, and Social Change: Essays in the History ofArmenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996)Google Scholar. But without question emigration accelerated rapidly in the 1990s. For recent analysis of this trend in Kazakhstan, see Rowland, Richard H., “Regional Population Change in Kazakstan during the 1990s and the Impact of Nationality Population Patterns: Results from the Recent Census of Kazakhstan,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 42 (December 2001)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Zevelev, Igor, “Russia and the Russian Diasporas,” Post-Soviet Affairs 12 (July 1996), 280Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Kaiser, Robert and Chinn, Jeff, “Russian-Kazakh Relations in Kazakhstan,” Post-Soviet Geography 36 (May 1995), 270Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Smith and Wilson (fn. 3).

⁴⁹ When this article was first presented as a conference paper, one audience member asked whether the finding of a strong effect of place of birth was simply the result of the word rodina having such an implication. The individual suggested that if otechestvo (fatherland) were used instead, the results might differ. This concern is a valid one, but one that we answer in two ways. First, as mentioned above, the fact that the root of rodina does somewhat imply place of birth makes the finding about length of residence all the more surprising. But second, we examined this question in some detail in the focus groups in Ukraine. The respondents generally stated that it did not matter whether one was discussing rodina or otechestvo (fatherland); the implication was similar in both cases (though in the Kiev discussion there was mentioned the opinion that fatherland is a wider concept than homeland). For the focus group participants, the most important issue in choice of homeland was where one was born, though many respondents discussed the idea of homeland as the place where one feels happy and secure.

⁵⁰ This reference and our title come from the classic World War II poster with the slogan “Rodina-Mat' Zovet!”