Russian nationalists in the Komi Republic: a case study of the Frontier of the North

The article examines some generic traits of the “new” Russian ethnic nationalism, namely, de-ideologization of the nationalist milieu and its inclination for civic activism. It results from a case study of the Frontier of the North (FN – Syktyvkar), an ideologically ambivalent organization that combines dual Russian/Komi ethnic nationalism, anti-migration sentiments, white racism, and fragments of other ideologies. The article demonstrates that, unlike nationalists of the previous generation, FN is not hostile to public authorities and is ready to cooperate with them. FN’s grassroots activism, as well as sports and healthy recreational activities, attracts young people. The organization tackles the most acute social problems, often neglected by everyone else, and has become a working civil society institution. The authors argue that these tactics win the “new” nationalists sympathy among ordinary people and makes the groups politically stronger and more influential than the previous nationalist generation. However, state anti-extremist policy hampers the advancement of nationalists into mainstream politics.     

The Soviet origin of Russian chauvinism: Voices from below

The fledgling democracy of Russia is facing many challenges. Perhaps the most dangerous of all is the rise of an aggressive chauvinistic nationalism. Initially, political analysts regarded it as a “recent” phenomenon which was filling in the ideological vacuum left by communism. As time went on, however, scholars began to grasp its deep historical roots and investigate its ideological evolution during the Soviet period. In this process, they tended to focus on the “legitimate” domains of the Soviet system – such as the official press, the literary field of socialist realism, and so on – in order to investigate how “the Russian idea” overtly coexisted or even covertly prospered within the boundaries of officially sanctioned ideology. The main goal of this paper is to bring a new dimension to our understanding of contemporary Russian nationalism, by approaching the whole phenomenon from below. While focusing on the Soviet period, this paper traces the ideological evolution of Slavophiles and their selective degeneration into chauvinism at the social level. In particular, it analyzes the underground ideological field of samizdat – uncensored illicit publications – where Slavophiles played a significant role. In this way, we can hear the “unfiltered” voices of rising Russian nationalists during the Soviet era.     

History,memory and nation building in the post-Soviet colonial space

This is an article on Bolshevik nationalities policy and ethnic engineering, asking who, in fact, decided which populations belonged together as ethnic groups (narodnost') and thus had the right of national self-determination, and how the level of autonomy was determined for each ethnic unit. Scholars have dealt with Russian and Soviet nationalities issues for decades already, but they have turned their attention mainly to the larger nationalities (at the level of SSR, and to a lesser degree the levels of ASSR and autonomous oblast). I argue that the lower levels of national territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union (national okrug, raion, volost', and selsovet) are worthy of greater academic attention, at least from the ethnological point of view. Having this kind of low-level territorial autonomy has often been a question of to be or not to be for the small ethnic groups concerned, and hence the subject is connected with the question of preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in Russia.     

The Euromaidan and the crisis of Russian nationalism

This article examines the reverberations in Russia of the Euromaidan protests and the fall of the Yanukovych regime in Ukraine. It shows how the events in Kyiv provoked a major crisis in the Russian nationalist movement, which was riven by vituperative denunciations, the ostracism of prominent activists, the breakdown of friendships, the rupture of alliances, and schisms within organizations. Focusing on pro-Kremlin nationalists and several tendencies of opposition nationalists, it argues that this turmoil was shaped by three factors. First, the Euromaidan provoked clashes between pro-Kremlin nationalists, who became standard-bearers of official anti-Euromaidan propaganda, and anti-Putin nationalists, who extolled the Euromaidan as a model for a revolution in Russia itself. Second, the events in Ukraine provoked ideological contention around issues of particular sensitivity to Russian nationalists, such as the competing claims of imperialism and ethnic homogeneity, and of Soviet nationalism and Russian traditionalism. And third, many nationalists were unprepared for the pace of events, which shifted rapidly from an anti-oligarchic uprising in Kyiv to a push for the self-determination of ethnic Russians in Crimean and southeast Ukraine. As a result, they were left in the uncomfortable position of appearing to collaborate with the oppressors of their compatriots.     

Market meets nationalism: making entrepreneurial state subjects in post-Soviet Russia

This paper argues that nationalism and neoliberalism should not be considered as conflicting ideologies, but can enter into a productive association. This association creates an entrepreneurial nationalism that people can actively embrace as self-governing subjects in pursuit of a good life and successful career, rather than as subjects governed through state-mandated projects from above. The paper illustrates this argument with material from nine months of fieldwork at a Russian elite university. While students at that university strive to develop their potential and increase their market value to be successful in the competition for the best jobs, they also emphasize that developing themselves is not antithetical to serving Russia and being true to one's country. On the contrary, advancing Russia and advancing one's own career are articulated as two sides of the same coin. At the same time, the Russian nationalist project is reframed in entrepreneurial terms: making the Russian nation strong is about developing its potential and raising its competitiveness in the global marketplace.     

Post-Pussy Riot: art and protest in Russia today

This article shows that resistance and a critical discourse continue in the arts, especially in visual art, in Russia under the present political conditions when free speech has been seriously circumscribed. When in May 2012 Vladimir Putin was reinstalled as president with a new authoritarian conservative agenda, it was expected that the situation for culture would change. This article addresses the question of whether a critical discourse survived in the arts under the new conditions. It presents the new political context for the arts, and provides examples of various artistic strategies of resistance/protest in Russian contemporary art by applying Jacques Ranciere’s concept of dissensus. The focus is on visual art, although references are also made to the world of theater. The first section presents the new official role given to culture and the new state cultural policy as components of a reactionary backlash against the reform policies under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, and describes conflicts around art and art productions that followed from the new state policy. A second section gives examples of dissensus in art today by presenting artworks by Piotr Pavlenskii, Arsenii Zhilyaev, Stas Shuripa, and Anna Titova.     

The Europeanization process and Kurdish nationalism in Turkey: the case of the Democratic Society Party

This study aims at analyzing the impact of the European integration process on Kurdish nationalism in Turkey by focusing on the Democratic Society Party (Demokratik Toplum Partisi, DTP) as the major pro-Kurdish political party in Turkey between 2005 and 2009. It argues that the Europeanization process in Turkey, which accelerated in the post-Helsinki period, has brought about some important consequences concerning the recognition and expression of Kurdish identity. The study examines Europe's impact on the DTP through analysis of party documents and interviews with party representatives, in order to investigate the meaning and use of the European integration process in the DTP's sub-state nationalist ideology. This analysis shows that, although the Europeanization process in Turkey has somewhat broadened opportunity structures for Kurdish sub-state nationalist politics, overall the EU's impact on the DTP's nationalist politics has remained indirect and limited.     

Shading,lines, colors: mapping ethnographic taxonomies of European Russia

This article explores the role of maps in the construction and development of ethnographic taxonomies in the mid-century Russian Empire. A close reading of two ethnographic maps of “European Russia” produced by members of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, Petr Keppen (1851) and Aleksander Rittikh (1875), is used to shine a spotlight on the cartographical methods and techniques (lines, shading, color, hatching, legends, text, etc.) employed to depict, construct, and communicate these taxonomies. In doing so, this article draws our attention to how maps impacted visual and spatial thinking about the categories of ethnicity and nationality, and their application to specific contexts and political purposes within the Empire. Through an examination of Keppen’s and Rittikh’s maps, this article addresses the broader question of why cartography came to be regarded as such a powerful medium through which to communicate and consolidate particular visions of an ethnographic landscape.     

Church–state conflict in Moldova: the Bessarabian Metropolitanate

The article’s main focus is the relationship between the re-established Bessarabian Orthodox Metropolitanate and the government of the post-Soviet Republic of Moldova. The article demonstrates that the Moldovan government refused recognition to the nascent church until 2002 primarily for two reasons: first and foremost, the Moscow Patriarchate opposed the idea of another Orthodox Christian church in Moldova outside of its jurisdiction; second, the government feared that the newly independent Republic of Moldova would fall under the influence of neighboring Romania, whose Orthodox Church offered patronage to the Bessarabian Metropolitanate. After a historical overview of the Orthodox Church in the Republic of Moldova, the article first presents and analyzes the history of the conflict between the Bessarabian Metropolitanate and the post-Soviet Moldovan government, and second, the European Court of Human Rights verdict ordering the government to recognize the Metropolitanate, before verdict’s implementation, and reactions to it. All these are done with an eye on intra-national relations among Moldova, Romania, and Russia, as well as those between the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church in connection with this conflict.     

Blocked Mobility and the Rise of Cultural Nationalism: A Reassessment

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the blocked mobility thesis, especially in regard to its use to explain the rise of cultural nationalism. The thesis states that young university students see their upward mobility thwarted and as a result develop nationalist movements which, they believe, will provide them with an independent state and open up career opportunities for them. Using quantitative archival data from Ireland during the early 1900s and Canada during the 1960s, this paper challenges the major assumptions of the blocked mobility thesis. For these two cases it was found that there was neither an overproduction of graduates nor a contracting state structure, two essential preconditions of the blocked mobility thesis. This empirical finding forces us to develop an alternative approach to explaining the rise in cultural nationalism. Part of this paper is taken up with outlining this alternative approach.     

Under construction and highly contested: Islam in the post-Soviet Caucasus

While scholarship on Islam in the Caucasus has focused on the late Soviet religious revival – the rise of Salafi jihadism and religious radicalisation in the northern part of these strategic crossroads – no study to date has addressed the discursive struggle over the social functions of regional Islam. This article deconstructs these discourses in order to examine the very varying, and often conflicting, representations of Islam advocated by various actors across the region and within particular republics. The article highlights the contested functions of regional Islam against the background of a religious revival that is still a work in progress.     

Understanding the exclusionary politics of early Turkish nationalism: an ethnic boundary-making approach

Turkish nationalism has long presented a study in contrasts. The nationalist movement that created the Republic of Turkey sought to define the nation in explicitly civic and inclusive terms, promoting a variety of integrationist reforms. Those same nationalist politicians, however, endorsed other policies that were far more exclusionary, expelling many religious and ethnic minorities from the new nation and imposing harsh restrictions on those who remained. The seemingly contradictory nature of Turkish nationalist policies has been mirrored by much of the scholarship on Turkish nationalism, which has often viewed Turkish nationality through the lens of the “civic/ethnic divide,” with various scholars arguing that the Turkish nation is exclusively civic or ethnic. This article seeks to transcend this dichotomous way of looking at Turkish nationalism. I argue that the policies previously seen as being exclusively civic or ethnic are in fact both examples of boundary-making processes, designed to forge a cohesive nationalist community. Seen through a boundary-making perspective, the seemingly contradictory nature of Turkish nationalist policies in its early years is not paradoxical at all, but represents a multidimensional effort to construct a cohesive national community that could replace the defunct Ottoman state.     

Party identity change in post-communist politics: the cases of the successor parties in Hungary, Poland and Russia

In recent years much has been written on the communist successor parties. Although much of the existent work focuses on the electoral performance of these parties or has described, in great detail, the development of single parties, this paper evaluates the utility of theories of party identity change in application to the successor parties. As an initial exploration we investigate the successor parties' programs before and after the initial competitive parliamentary elections in Hungary (in 1990), Poland (in 1991) and Russia (in 1993) to determine the extent to which poor electoral performance in initial competitive elections compelled the successor parties to alter their political identities.     

Abkhazia: Patronage and Power in the Stalin Era

Abkhazia during the Stalin era was at the same time a subtropical haven where the great leader and his lieutenants built grand dachas and took extended holidays away from Moscow, and also a key piece in the continuing chess match of Soviet politics. This paper will examine how and why this small, sunny autonomous republic on the Black Sea, and the political networks that developed there, played a prominent role in the politics of the south Caucasus region and in Soviet politics as a whole during the Stalin period.     

Pussy Riot as agent provocateur: conspiracy theories and the media construction of nation in Putin's Russia

This article studies the impact of conspiracy theories on post-Soviet Russian nation-building through the analysis of how the Pussy Riot trial was constructed by the Russian media. Conspiracy theory as a phenomenon is defined as a populist tool for relocation of power among different political actors, which creates identities and boosts social cohesion. This interpretation of conspiracy theories helps investigate how the media constructed the image of Pussy Riot and their supporters as a conspiring subversive minority, which threatened the Russian nation. The ability of conspiracy theory for swift social mobilization helped the authorities to strengthen the public support of its policies and model the Russian nation as ethnically and religiously homogeneous.     

Remembering and forgetting: the state policy of memorializing Stalin's repression in post-Soviet Kazakhstan

The general perception of Western analysts and observers is that the nation-states created as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union all treat the memory of the dark, repressive aspects of the Stalinist regime in public spaces as a symbolic element in the creation of a new post-Soviet identity [Denison, Michael. 2009. “The Art of the Impossible: Political Symbolism, and the Creation of National Identity and Collective Memory in Post-Soviet Turkmenistan.” Europe-Asia Studies 61 (7): 1167–1187]. We argue that the government of Kazakhstan employs non-nationalistic discourse in its treatment of Stalinist victims’ commemoration in a variety of forms, through the creation of modern memorial complexes at the sites of horrific Soviet activity (mass burial places, labor camps, and detention centers), purpose-built museum exhibitions, and the commemorative speeches of its president and other officials. Kazakhstan's strategy in commemorating its Soviet past is designed to highlight the inclusiveness of repression on all peoples living in its territory at that time, not just Kazakhs, thereby assisting in bringing together its multinational and multiethnic society. Thus, the official stance treats this discourse as an important symbolic source of shaping the collective memory of the nation, based on “a general civil identity without prioritizing one ethnic group over another – a national unity, founded on the recognition of a common system of values and principles for all citizens” [Shakirova, Svetlana. 2012. “Letters to Nazarbaev: Kazakhstan's Intellectuals Debate National Identity.” February 7. Accessed July 28, 2015. http://postsovietpost.stanford.edu/discussion/letters-nazarbaev-kazakhstans-intellectuals-debate-national-identity].     

The outflow of minorities from the post-Soviet state: the case of Kazakhstan

The author examines the flow of the non-Kazakh population from the territory of Kazakhstan since the country became independent in December 1991. "This study [analyzes] the ongoing migration process from...a Kazakh point-of-view--meaning, not from the position of a Kazakh ?nationalist' but from a pragmatic stance, taking into consideration the specific elements of the situation in the country. In particular, it is suggested that the ?nationalist' interpretation (which is not actively promoted in the country's internal politics, by the way) is less than ideal as a scientific explanation of this migration, and various other contributing factors will be presented."     

Understanding resource nationalism: economic dynamics and political institutions

Resource nationalism is on the rise around the globe. During the recent global resource boom, many governments have adopted nationalistic policies to maximise the political and economic benefits from their mining and energy sectors. Existing theories of resource nationalism rely upon economistic bargaining models, which fail to interrogate how political processes shape governments’ resource policy strategies. This article extends and develops these bargaining models by theorising the role of political institutions – specifically those found in rentier, developing and liberal market economies – in determining patterns of resource nationalism. A survey of 12 major resource-producing countries reveals that contemporary resource nationalism takes a range of distinct forms, which are connected to differences in political institutions that structure the objectives and policies of governments. It is therefore argued that while economic dynamics function as an enabling factor, political institutions are an equally important conditioning factor shaping the distinctive forms of resource nationalism observed today.     

Regionalisation and regionalism in the post-Soviet space: Current status and implications for institutional development

The aim of this article is to analyse the nexus of integration and disintegration processes in the post-Soviet space. On the one hand it considers ‘formal’ regionalism projects and the reasons for their inefficiency, and explores the real impetus behind the repeated attempts at top-down regional integration by post-Soviet elites. On the other hand, it analyses the bottom-up regionalisation of the post-Soviet space through the investment activity of Russian corporations, and demonstrates possible effects of this process for institutional development.     

The muslim slavs of Bosnia and Herzegovina (with reference to the Sandzak of Novi Pazar): Islam as national identity

Using results from a 2010 survey conducted in the Republic of Buryatia, this paper compares the responses of Russians and Buryats on questions of religious practice and belief, as well as the role of religion and religious organizations in the political sphere of contemporary Russia. Buryats more commonly identify with a religion and more frequently attend religious services in comparison to Russians living in the republic. There is greater consonance between the two groups on the public role of religion, with both Russians and Buryats generally supportive of the recent extension of religious education into schools and the creation of national holidays for all traditional religions, among other issues.