In Search of Russian Identity

In Search of Russian Identity.

Russian nationalism has defined Russian national identity in several ways. One ethnic conception holds that the Russian nation consists of ethnic Russians. Another, the All-Russian concept that developed in the Russian Empire, treats Russians as a broader national community made up of three subgroups: Great Russians, who were understood as ethnic Russians; Little Russians, referring to ethnic Ukrainians; and White Russians, referring to ethnic Belarusians. Contemporary Russian nationalists often connect the historical narrative of Kyivan Rus, centred on Kyiv, to modern Russia’s historical identity. Within this framework, Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians are treated as one people and as the historical basis of the present-day Russian Federation. This perspective tends to interpret distinct Belarusian and Ukrainian national identities as departures from a supposed common Russian identity. At the same time, this view is not especially useful to the Kremlin, which seeks to maintain authority over a vast political formation composed of hundreds of distinct ethnic groups, many of whom are not ethnically Russian, Belarusian, or Ukrainian.

From both European and Asian perspectives, Russia presents itself as a distinct civilisation rather than as fully European or fully Asian, even though it includes peoples from both continents. The ruling elite associated with historical Muscovy and Moscow has often been represented in similar terms. The internationally recognised Russian Federation consists of 21 republics, 9 krais, 4 okrugs, 44 oblasts, 2 federal cities, and 1 Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Many of these republics, krais, okrugs, and oblasts originated as ethnic homelands of indigenous peoples with their own languages, identities, and social structures. Some retained their own constitutions, anthems, and economic institutions until recent years. These territories were incorporated through the expansion of the Moscow-based Russian Empire, including during its Soviet phase, before re-emerging in the post-Soviet period under the name of a federation. In many cases, the titular nationality gave a republic its name and formed the basis of its formal identity, although centuries of Russian migration meant that titular groups were not always demographic majorities within their own territories. In 2017, President Vladimir Putin further reduced the autonomy of the republics by declaring them politically equivalent to the other federal subjects of Russia. In practice, the political, economic, and security leadership of many indigenous republics, krais, oblasts, and okrugs has long been dominated by ethnic Russians or by local elites whose authority

depends on loyalty to the centre. On 7 November 1917, following the October Revolution, the Romanov Empire collapsed and its territories were reorganised into the Russian Soviet Republic, presented as a sovereign socialist state guided by communist ideology. During its formation, Lenin formally recognised the former empire’s indigenous territories and republics as nominally self-determining units within Soviet Russia. This conciliatory position helped secure support from minorities during the Russian Civil War, although these entities remained subordinate to Moscow.

The Russian Soviet Republic later became the core of the Soviet Union, which included Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Karelia-Finland, Kirghizia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Tajikistan, Turkmenia, Transcaucasia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, this former imperial centre reconstituted itself as a federation, without fully honouring earlier promises of independence. Long before the USSR’s collapse, however, the ideological structure established

by its founders had already set the conditions for extreme violence and eventual dissolution. Leaving aside the broader geopolitical and economic dimensions of communist rule, the psychological reorganisation advanced by Lenin, Trotsky, and others was not compatible with a sustainable social order. In this view, the Soviet system endured as long as it did largely through the systematic use of violence and through constant mobilisation against an artificially constructed external enemy: the West.