Two variants of the Russian radical right: Imperial and social nationalism

The text combines three lines of discussion. First, on the empirical level two Russian political parties – the CPRF and the LDPR – are characterized with regard to their specific profiles of right-wing radicalism. Second, these profiles are attributed to specific variations of the interpretation of the Russian past. Third, the empirical findings are traced for insights into the Leninist legacy concept. The main hypothesis on the empirical level is that Russian ultra-nationalist actors refer to different currents of a common national imagination in order to combine nationalist ideological elements with other programmatic features. On the conceptual level, the legacy concept is able to render systematic insights not into the history of a given state but into varying interpretations of what can be seen as ‘usable pasts’ from the perspective of various intellectual entrepreneurs.