Stalin and the Soviet theory of nationality and nationalism: Intellectual and political roots,implementation,and post-1991 legacies

1. Tsarist and socialist backgrounds

Since the mid-18th century, the Russian Empire’s political and intellectual elite was very sensitive to the importance of the language question and its manipulability. This was so, possibly also because of the late development of Russian itself, perfected by Alexander Pushkin only at the beginning of the following century. That elite was thus well aware of what could be done about languages and how. The same applies to the surge of Russian national feeling, which Alexander Herzen famously tied to the ‘patriotic war’ against Napoleon and its aftermath. Tsar Alexander I and his friend and foreign minister, the Polish prince Adam Czartoryski, had openly discussed the possible mobilization of national feelings in Europe against the French already in the previous decade [Czartoryski 1887; Grimsted 1970]. Despite their conflicts, these discussions continued during the Congress of Vienna, especially à propos the Polish (but also the Finnish and later the Greek) questions. Later on, such debates were resumed, albeit on quite a different note, by Tsar Nicholas I and his minister and ideologue, Count Sergei Uvarov, who made ‘nationality’ (narodnost’, possibly molded upon the Polish narodowość) one of the pillars of his well-known ideological triad.

The sophistication of the repression that followed the Polish 1863 revolt should therefore not come as a surprise. It also had a preventive element at its core, directed against the development of Ukrainian, which was soon declared a dialect of Russian to sap the burgeoning of a Ukrainian national movement. Six years later, in 1869, in his Rossiya i Evropa, Nikolai Danilevsky formalized the idea of a Russia that was not part of a Europe presented as a Latin-German creation but rather the center of its own Slavic world. His idea was possibly influenced by earlier German anti-French stands, which later presented Germany as the natural defender of the interests of peoples against French and then Anglo-French domination. Danilevsky’s Russia was called to ‘decolonize’ itself from European intellectual oppression, albeit introducing much-needed Western technology to be able to defend its own ‘world’. It was a model then pursued also by Japan, and later on China, the USSR, and countless other countries, and recently found a new practitioner in Vladimir Putin.

It was thus not a chance that it was at the International Statistical Congress held in Saint Petersburg in 1872 that language was chosen as the main criterion to single a nationality out. German statisticians then supported this solution to prove that Alsatians were, in fact, Germans, even if they did not want to be considered such (the recent annexation of the region could therefore be justified). Russian statisticians and officials joined them with an eye on Ukrainians and Belarusians, whose languages had just been declared simple varieties of Russian [Labbé 2019]. In the following decades, Tsar Alexander III, conservative intellectuals and politicians like Konstantin Pobedonostsev, and the Russian Orthodox Church adhered to an even stricter and more repressive line, strengthening anti-Ukrainian (but also anti-Armenian, etc.) policies in favour of Russification. The big surprise was the 1897 census, which contained a question about Ukrainian – identified as ‘little Russian’ – thus implicitly affirming its different status. In this climate, the Donbas, which had become the Empire’s most strategic industrial and mining region, was ‘Russified’ through immigration and by sending Ukrainian peasant children to schools where only Russian was taught. Reacting to this rigid Russification, Stalin became an ardent Georgian nationalist in the Orthodox seminar where he was studying.

As to the socialist background, in their 1848 Manifesto, Marx and Engels declared the proletariat the enemy of nationalism and substituted Thierry’s struggle among peoples with class struggle (of which Marx presented Thierry as the father) as the motor of history. This binary opposition continued to define the relationships between socialism and nationalism in the eyes of many for decades. But a closer analysis shows this to be a fallacy. Already by 1849, in their Neue Reinische Zeitung, Marx and especially Engels were calling for a war against Slavic ‘reactionary’ small peoples (such as Czechs and Croats), proposing to annihilate them in terms that today would make both communist fathers supporters of genocide: ‘Implacable struggle, war to death against the Slavs, traitors to the revolution, extermination, terrorism without consideration – not in the interest of Germany, but in that of the revolution’ was their solution. Engels then supported a war to ‘wipe out from the face of the earth not only reactionary classes and dynasties but whole reactionary peoples’. The absorption of the Slavic ‘demographic masses’, after the terroristic destruction of their elites, into the superior, revolutionary nationalities (German, Hungarian and Polish) was, for the duo, ‘part of progress’ [Kohn 1953; Rosdolsky 1986].

Thus, also Marxist writings provided a basis for ‘deconstructionist’ policies in the national domain. Possibly, we are here before one of the sources that inspired Stalin in 1933. Indeed, even Lenin, whom Stalin always called his teacher, did not rule out the possibility of leading revolutionary peoples in a war of destruction against peoples that were reactionary bulwarks. In reading the 1848 Manifesto with some attention, one also discovers that Marx develops within it the concept of a ‘national class’ (a class representing the interests of the nation) and an ‘internationalist’, not a ‘cosmopolitan’ theory. Later on, he agreed on the right of the Polish and the Irish peoples to self-determination, against Russian imperialism in the former case, and to favour an English revolution in the latter.

The real shift turn, however, began with Karl Kautsky, a Prague Jew who never gave up on internationalism and refused to admit the consequences that his friends and colleagues in the German and Austrian social-democratic movement derived from his intuitions. Kautsky witnessed the Czech conquest of Prague, previously a German city, through modernization and urbanization. He thus correctly concluded that, contrary to what Marx had foreseen, ‘capitalistic development’ did not lead to the absorption of small, backward peoples into larger, more ‘progressive’ ones, but rather the contrary. Anticipating Ernest Gellner's theory of nationalism, which often rehashed those debates, Kautsky posited that development fed, rather than weakened, nationalism. Eduard Bernstein and Otto Bauer soon followed, and in 1908, the latter formalized a new Marxist theory of nationalism. The theory fed on the Hapsburg experience as well on the new ‘scientific psychology’ then developing in Germany, but also on the Ottoman experience with Millet, and following Karl Renner, proposed, among other things, ‘national cultural autonomy’ as a solution to the national problems in Central-Eastern Europe. The mainstays of this new theory were:

1) Through education, urbanization, and the creation of new elites, modernization revived peoples previously considered as destined to extinction;

Even though Stalin was to attack Bauer, one can thus maintain that he used the latter’s theories as a basis for his own. In Kautsky’s plans to reform the Hapsburg empire, we can see the seeds of Lenin’s idea of a Union of socialist republics [Graziosi 2017].

Meanwhile, a theory of ‘Socialism in one country’ was also emerging in the German social-democratic movement. It was premised on the reasonable idea that a general, global socialist revolution was highly improbable and that socialism might win first in England or Germany. The new socialist countries were, therefore, destined to co-exist for a while with the capitalist world and had to develop their own economies as closed systems. This was possible only if they had the necessary size and resources, including colonies called to provide much-needed raw materials; In fact, socialists too denied the right to self-determination to ‘uncivilized’ colonial peoples [van Ree 2010].

This is the background against which Lenin’s crucial double rupture must be placed and can be understood in its magnitude: self-determination was to be for everyone, all peoples had the same rights, and the development of capitalism in imperialism renewed the concept of revolutionary peoples, which were now – in a radical break with Marx and Engels’ ideas – those oppressed by European imperialism. Echoes of Enrico Corradini’s theory of proletarian and bourgeois nations fighting each other can be clearly discerned, and peoples, rather than classes, made a comeback as movers of history.

Possibly also because of his initial formation as a nationalist militant, Stalin was then Lenin’s most trusted collaborator in national affairs. In 1913, at Lenin’s instigation, he wrote his famous Marxism and the National Question (a title to which ‘and Colonial’ was subsequently and significantly added). During the Civil War, Stalin even held the position of Commissar of nationalities. In the booklet and later in power, he understood both the staying power and the malleability of peoples, nations, and languages. He also developed a vision of Russia as a ‘Continent’ composed of many peoples rather than a simple nation. This vision recalled Nikolay Danilevsky’s ideas and those of the very ideological Russian geographic school of Vladimir Lamansky and Vasily Dokuchaev.

2. The Soviet experience up to 1953

In mid-1919, a great peasant insurrection, inspired by vague socialist-revolutionary slogans that fused the social with the national, forced the Bolshevik government out of Ukraine. It was, and remained, the most significant Soviet defeat at the hands of a popular movement. In the fall, when Bolsheviks were able to return after beating Anton Denikin’s White Army, Lenin wrote a secret letter to the Party leadership stating that no mistakes like those committed in 1918–1919 were to be repeated: force would be used against those trying to impose Russification, and respect of the Ukrainian language and culture was to be implemented [Pipes 1999]. At the same time, he forced the pro-Russian Donbas Bolsheviks to join the newly re-constituted Ukrainian socialist republic.

The debates that accompanied the birth of the USSR culminated in 1922 in a famous conflict between Lenin and Stalin over the new State's name. In line with his idea of Russia as a continent more than a nation, Stalin wanted a Russian socialist federation. Instead, Lenin opposed all ethnic qualifications and opted for a Union of Soviet socialist republics. After a bitter debate, Lenin carried the day [Lewin 1968], and Stalin later repeatedly stated that Lenin had been right. In 1923, the new principles coalesced into a new policy of ‘indigenization’ (korenzatsiya) which supported formerly oppressed nationalities with policies that resembled those later associated with affirmative action [Martin 2001]. Meanwhile, Willi Münzenberg was creating a new anti-imperialist rhetoric based upon the national liberation struggle of oppressed peoples against European imperial powers [Gross 1974].

By 1920–1921, some Russian intellectual émigrés were instead elaborating the first Eurasian doctrine, presenting Russia as a particular world, different from and inimical to the European one. The movement soon split into pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet factions, with the former claiming that, for all its horrors and mistakes, the Bolsheviks had separated Russia from Europe, this being 1917’s most important and valuable achievement. The anti-Bolshevik faction did not disagree. As one of its foremost leaders, the great linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy, wrote in 1925,

“Eurasianism agrees with Bolshevism in rejecting… the entire culture that existed in Russia immediately before the revolution and continues to exist in the countries of the Romano-Germanic West… Eurasianism agrees with Bolshevism in its call for the liberation of the peoples of Asia and Africa who are enslaved by the colonial powers” [Laruelle 2008].

According to both factions (but also 1923 Bolshevik declarations), each people was a ‘living or even thinking entity’, which had to develop separately, following its nature; for all their anti-European rhetoric, Eurasianists thus followed the Herder-Fichte-Romagnosi line of argument, which conceived the ideal world as a union of, in Gian Domenico Romagnosi’s definition, etnicarchie [ethnicarchies].

By the end of the 1920s, also thanks to the support of the Soviet Republics’ national-communist leaderships, who feared Trotsky’s internationalism, not unreasonably seeing in it, in Soviet conditions, a cover for Russification, Stalin had affirmed his power over the party. In 1929, he launched his ‘revolution from above’ not to modernize the country, as was later claimed by historians unable to see and understand the power of ideas, but – as he openly proclaimed – to build socialism via collectivization of agriculture and speedy industrialization. That same year, he wrote The National Question and Leninism (published only in 1949), his most important essay on the national question after 1913. In it, he repeated his previous theory of the nation:

a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of the common possession of four principal characteristics, namely: a common language, a common territory, a common economic life, and a common psychological make-up manifested in common specific features of national culture [Stalin 1913]

Then, he added that nations were not only those already possessing ‘their own, separate national State… All oppressed nations, which have no independent statehood’, had the right to build their own State via national liberation movements (this is why the words ‘and colonial’ were added to the title of the 1913 booklet). Stalin also noted that 1917 had created a new species: besides bourgeois nations, there were now ‘the new Soviet nations, which must be qualified as Socialist nations’. Although he did not say so, he was thus implicitly recognizing that Bauer was right: the victory of socialism does not extinguish nations. Instead, they flourished, not just formerly oppressed ones: if nations had ‘a colossal power of stability’, socialist nations possessed this quality to a higher degree because of their deeper and more solid roots in the people and their homogenous, classless nature.

The victory of socialism in one country thus opened ‘a whole epoch of formation of socialist nations’. Besides, the theory that claimed that with socialism and internationalism, the number of languages would decrease had been proved wrong:

Until now, what has happened has been that the socialist revolution has not diminished but rather increased the number of languages; for, by stirring up the lowest sections of humanity and pushing them on to the political arena, it awakens to new life a number of hitherto unknown or little-known nationalities. Who could have imagined that the old, tsarist Russia consisted of not less than fifty nations and national groups? The October Revolution, however, by breaking the old chains and bringing a number of forgotten peoples and nationalities on to the scene, gave them new life and a new development. [Stalin 1929]

Most importantly, for tragic developments that were soon to come, Stalin also recognized that

nations and national languages possess… a tremendous power of resistance to the policy of assimilation. The Turkish assimilators—the most brutal of all assimilators—mangled and mutilated the Balkan nations for hundreds of years, yet not only did they fail to destroy them, but in the end were forced to capitulate. The Tsarist-Russian Russifiers and the German-Prussian Germanisers, who yielded little in brutality to the Turkish assimilators, rent and mangled the Polish nation for over a hundred years, just as the Persian and Turkish assimilators for hundreds of years rent and mangled and massacred the Armenian and Georgian nations, yet, far from destroying these nations, at the end they were also forced to capitulate. [Stalin 1929]

Stalin’s revolution-from-above unsettled national-communists because it required more centralization, and they knew of the opposition of their peasantries to the collectivization of the land they had conquered in 1917–1921. Ukrainian ones, in particular, worried over the 1930 peasant revolt against collectivization and the significant show trials against Ukrainian nationalism held in that same period. Stalin, however, convinced them that through speedy industrialization and the urbanization of Ukrainian peasants, they would conquer Kyiv and Kharkiv just as the Czechs had conquered Prague one hundred years before. Besides, as he repeatedly stated, the attacks were directed at ‘bourgeois’ nationalism, not a socialist one. He stated that, contrary to early 1919 policies, Ukrainization and support for developing the Ukrainian language would continue, as it did up to late 1932.

Then, however, the continuing opposition of the Ukrainian peasants and the suspicion that grew over the summer of 1932 that Ukrainian national-communists were abetting village resistance convinced Stalin that a radical turn was required. It was embodied in the secret decree for grain procurement of December 1932, which started a radical and extremely violent policy directed at submitting peasants and destroying the Ukrainian ‘wrong’ intelligentsia and communist movement. It was to become famous as Holodomor, with its almost four million deaths in less than a semester from a willingly procured hunger and its scores of thousands of repressed, shot, or deported urban Ukrainians [Graziosi 2015, Graziosi 2022]. Yet Ukraine remained, and after WWII, Stalin actually ‘rewarded’ the Republic he had brutally and successfully recast with entry into the United Nations and the reunification of ‘Ukrainian lands’ previously occupied by Poles, Hungarians, etc.

After 1933, Stalin’s USSR was thus on its way to become the Russian and Russified Federation he had proposed in 1922, but not in name or form. The grandiose celebration commemorating the centenary of Pushkin's death in 1937 proved the point. One year previously, in his Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky clearly perceived Stalin’s ideological Great Retreat, as Nicholas Timasheff, an important Russian sociologist who emigrated to the U.S., was to call it in a famous book [Trotsky 1936; Timasheff 1946].

Stalin had then just celebrated with his famous toast to the ‘Great Russian People’ his triumph in WWII, which coincided with the creation of a greatly expanded Soviet ‘Russian World’, which extended its shadow up to Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Bucharest and Sofia through the creation of a tightly controlled outer ring. In 1943, he also authorized the re-creation of the patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, which he almost annihilated in previous years [Roccucci 2011]. In 1945, even émigré Eurasianists, including Roman Jakobson, the great linguist teaching at Harvard, welcomed these new actions.

In 1950, three years before dying, Stalin published Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, his last major work devoted to the questions of nations, peoples, languages, and classes. Despite losing sight of crucial ‘Third World’ developments and of the vital importance of decolonization (that in 1929 he had so acutely felt), he summed up and expanded his thoughts on these matters by developing them along new paths, proving that he continued to think along Marxist (an original Marxism to be sure), not nationalist lines:

Language—he wrote—radically differs from the superstructure. Language is not a product of one or another base, old or new, within the given society but of the whole course of the history of the society and of the history of the bases for many centuries. It was created not by some one class, but by the entire society, by all the classes of the society, by the efforts of hundreds of generations. It was created for the satisfaction of the needs not of one particular class, but of the entire society, of all the classes of the society. Precisely for this reason it was created as a single language for the society, common to all members of that society, as the common language of the whole people. Hence the functional role of language, as a means of intercourse between people, consists not in serving one class to the detriment of other classes, but in equally serving the entire society, all the classes of society. This in fact explains why a language may equally serve both the old, moribund system and the new, rising system; both the old base and the new base; both the exploiters and the exploited. [Stalin 1950]

In other words, languages, peoples and nations were historically more significant and long-lasting than classes (whose importance was crucial, but over a shorter period). But at crucial points, where extreme violence could and should be applied, as a rule, languages, peoples and nations had to be dealt with care and attention.

3. The post-1953 Soviet experience

After Stalin’s death, the role of Great Russian nationalism somewhat subsided, also because of his successors’ choices and preferences. As it has been successfully demonstrated, Great Russian nationalism had by then conquered its own space within a Party that was also increasingly dominated by ethnic Russian leaders [Brudny 1998; Mitrokhin 2003]. At the ideological level, however, the idea of a ‘Soviet people’ as a ‘stable community’, a new and ‘higher’ historical phenomenon, was and remained the officially dominant one. This was also the case in the increasingly important WWII victory celebrations, which after 1965 became the most important Soviet festivity. Yet the central pillar of the ‘Soviet people’ narrative rapidly became an aggressive, militarized, and parochial nationalism that, while insisting on its not only Russian essence, expressed and nurtured extreme nationalist feelings and beliefs (well represented by terrible monuments) of which the ‘Russian party’ within the Party was a major sponsor [Brunstedt 2021].

Meanwhile, at least the embryo of a ‘Soviet people’ was indeed developing out of the Soviet decades-long experience via a Soviet culture that Moscow tried to keep as separate as possible primarily from the Western one, but also from those of other socialist countries. ‘Soft’ Russification, also pushed by personal convenience (education, careers, mobility, etc.), urbanization, school and television, conscription, mixed marriages (in which the Russian half often linguistically prevailed), etc. were strong contributors.

In the late 1970s, Brezhnev claimed that ‘the 1960s–1980s were an important period in the history of Soviet nationalities. The gap that had existed in social structures of main ethnic groups was practically eliminated as a result of social mobility, together with quotas and preferences in the sphere of education’. Censuses proved some of his points. Soon after 1991 former Soviet scholars confirmed that ‘the unitary strategy of development and the imposition of Russian-language ideological presentations from the Center resulted in the formation of similar socio-professional structures and many common cultural and value orientation’. Only Central Asian republics experienced ‘serious developmental gaps’. Still, some things moved in the same direction [Tyshkov 1997].

Russification, however, did not automatically imply a pro-Russian choice, and for many, language ceased to be a ‘national flag’, as had happened in Ireland. There were indeed important exceptions, the ethnic Russian ‘plantations’ for imperialist purposes in annexed territories, like the Baltics, Moldova or Northern Kazakhstan being possibly the most important ones: in 1989, Russians constituted 30 percent of the population in Estonia; 38 in Kazakhstan; 34 in Latvia, and more than 20 in Ukraine and Kirgizia. After 1945, a devastated Crimea had been repopulated with ethnic Russians. Yet, for the much larger Russian-speaking population, the choice of Russian was not directly equivalent to a national one.

The late Soviet theoretical vision of nationalities and peoples is indicated by the 1964 Atlas narodov mira [Bruk and Apenchenko 1964], an extraordinary ethnographic effort to map the world’s peoples based on spoken languages. The book is still widely used by anthropologists, linguists and economists worldwide (even an online GIS version has been produced), and it indirectly and yet powerfully expressed the Soviet policy of supporting decolonization and national liberation movements then at the peak of their power. It was a support based on Herderian-Corradinian-Leninist-Stalinist visions of history, rather than on the original Marxist one: peoples, not classes, were, once more, the movers of history, and the fusion of the national and the social was its most crucial underpinning.

The Soviet scholars’ theories of the 1960s and 1970s confirm the point. As one of their most important representatives, Valery Tyshkov, summarized in the early 1990s, ‘the Russian social science tradition, especially with respect to interpreting ethnicity, is heavily dominated by the primordial approach’. [Tyshkov 1997] As he noted, this approach was also rooted in the Slavophile emphasis on the crucial importance of the narod/volk. It was tied to discovering the original dispersion and differentiation of human groups in the endless expanses of Siberia, the study of whose ‘primitive peoples’ constituted the primary formative scientific experience for most Russian and Soviet ethnographers.

Among their leaders was Sergei Shirokogorov, one of the founders of the discipline, who after 1917 stayed in China and based his general model and classification of ‘ethnoses’ on the study of Tungusic peoples. In 1922, he defined what an ethnos was with words belonging to the same intellectual milieu in which Stalin’s thoughts on the matter were rooted: ‘a group of people, speaking the same language, who recognize their shared heritage, and have a shared complex of social mores, mode of life, retained and sanctified traditions which differentiate them from other groups’ [in Tyshkov 1997]. Shirokogorov’s approach profoundly influenced the Soviet scholarly community, also through Yulian Bromley, who was for many years the director of the Academy of Science’s Ethnographic Institute. In 1981, Bromley still defined an ethnos as ‘a historically stable entity of people developed on a certain territory and possessing common, relatively stable features of culture (including language) and psyche, as well as the consciousness of their unity and their differences’, [in Tyshkov (1997)] that is with words that many Western Marxist and more generally Left-oriented anthropologists or historians would have found more absurd than wrong.

In a perfect Hegelian or Mazzinian vision, that ethno-social organism found its full realization through being a nation and achieving statehood. The Soviet people, defined as a meta-ethnic community, thus was, in many ways, an aberration. Not surprisingly, in 1994, one could still read in books published in a new Russia naturally still inhabited by the same peoples and scholars that ‘human history is not only a history of States, of outstanding personalities, and ideas, it is also a history of peoples-ethnoses’, which make States, produce outstanding figures, and build languages and cultures.

The affinities, sunk in similar roots, between the official Soviet concept of ‘peoples’ and that of the second Eurasian generation are striking but unsurprising. Its leading exponent, Lev Gumilëv, was an uncommon man from an extraordinary family formed by exceptional experiences, including the long years spent in the Gulag. He also was an extremely eccentric (to say the least) thinker. Official Soviet ethnography attacked him for his ‘anti-Marxist’ and naturalistic, ‘biologizing’ approach, so did traditional and religious Russian nationalists, and in 1974, his dissertation for a doctorate in geography, ‘Ethnogenesis, and the Biosphere of the Earth’ was rejected.

For Gumilëv, the ethnos was the natural form of existence for the human species but also a category needing differentiation. Super-ethnos, ethnos, sub-ethnos, ethnic relics, etc., peopled his imagination. He was especially interested in the (for him) highest form, the super-ethnos, whose genesis he tied to the influence of cosmic radiation in specific geographic points and moments of history (an idea he possibly derived from his contact in the Gulag with the great geneticist Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky). Such super-ethnos (the Russians being one, but, in a way, the Soviet ‘people’ too could be considered such) grew out of the fusion of previously existing ones, operated through the capacity of men, as organisms, to absorb the biochemical energy of the biosphere’s living substance. They had a definite lifespan of approximately 1200–1500 years, depending on the power of the irradiation that generated them, and provided them with different degrees of energy he called ‘passionarnost’. These super-ethnoses, like Gobineau’s races, thus lived through well-defined stages, determined for Gumilëv by the progressive dissipation of that initial energetic capital: ethnogenesis, rise, breakdown, inertia and death [Laruelle 2008].

By the beginning of the 1980s, despite the eccentricity of these theories, Gumilëv’s fame started to grow, especially but not only in new, hard nationalist circles. In 1989, his rejected dissertation was published with their support, and after 1991, his ethnic theories became immensely popular in Russia as in some Central Asian republics. Incredibly, given their intellectual content, they also acquired some respectability in the West, not only in extreme right-wing circles but often in combination with the revival of the pseudo-science of geopolitics.

4. The post-1991 legacy

When Gorbachev became general secretary, among his many delusions was the idea that Brezhnev was, after all, right: in the USSR, the ‘national question’ had been, in the main, solved. In a way, this wasn’t wrong. The USSR was not the ‘shattered empire’ as a famously titled book claimed it to be [Carrère d’Encausse 1978]. Instead, it resulted from the failure of the economic system upon which it was premised and of the attempt to reform it. Only after the failure of uskorenie (acceleration) and perestroika and the subsequent economic crisis, did nationalities start to move, contributing to the final demise of Gorbachev’s attempt at reforming the political system and national relations.

Russian nationalists then deeply worried about Russian demographic trends, and academics too decried the fact that the Russian nation was dying out, also because of alcoholism. Even mixed marriages, a most powerful tool of Russification, were presented as a danger for the ‘Russian ethnos’ if they passed a certain threshold because of the ‘chimeras’ they produced. Such ideas also contaminated the Russian Democratic movement (Demrossiya) supporting Yeltsin. They pushed for the USSR's demise, but many did so because they believed that this way, a considerable weight would be lifted from Russia’s shoulders. And the strength of the nationalist component within that front was soon evident, as in the choice to start the first Chechen war.

That strength, a fruit of the above-mentioned Soviet education and rhetoric, was also apparent in a public opinion for which Soviet great-power status had represented compensation for personal misery. While many Russians tried to rebuild their lives, Moscow was the scene of red-brown demonstrations chanting horrible slogans. By December 1993, Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist party was already gathering a plurality of the Russian vote. In those same years, the status of the 25 million ‘Russians’ (many of whom were only Russian speakers produced by Soviet times) living outside Russian borders agitated public debates, as did the questions of Crimea and the Donbas, and important academics called for a new president, capable of changing Soviet nationalities policies deemed ‘Russo-phobic’ [Tyshkov 1997; Kotkin 2001].

A young Putin took part in those debates, and it was in the discussions that accompanied the Soviet decline and collapse and the difficult years that followed that his mental outlook and ideology came of age. Many of the traits of this ideology, whose importance Western observers greatly underestimated, were already present in Russia at the Turn of the Millennium, his first important speech of December 1999 [Putin 2000]. Albeit in very controlled terms, in this speech he affirmed his belief in the greatness of a Russia that could not but be a great power, a status presented as essential to Russia’s very existence. Statism, he added, was another characteristic that made Russia essentially different from liberal countries. For Russians, he stated, a strong state was not an anomaly to be discarded. It was, instead, a source and guarantor of order and the initiator and main driving force of any change. A strong state was thus to be rebuilt, and Putin’s personal preferences and cultural limitations significantly contributed to the ‘neopatrimonial’ rather than the rule of law features this new creature soon manifested.

The speech also contained words aimed at re-assuring Western powers in a moment in which he felt the relative weakness of his Russia. Thus, Putin affirmed his opposition to restoring an official state ideology and imposing forced civil accord in a democratic country where social agreement was to be voluntary. Soon afterwards, however, the insistence on the re-edification of a ‘vertical of power’, its rapid implementation also via the incarceration and assassination of journalists and opponents, and how the second Chechen war was conducted, proved where his heart was.

The sources, strengths and orientations of his ideological make-up were soon also evident. Among its primary traits one could identify the respect paid to Solzhenitsyn going hand in hand with the recognition of Stalin’s role in rebuilding the greatness of an albeit Soviet Russian world; the privileges afforded the Russian Orthodox Church; the organization of the return of the bodies of White leaders such as Anton Denikin and extreme nationalist ideologues like Ivan Il’in, who in 2005 were officially buried in the Donskoi cemetery (a symbol of Russian nationalism); or the vision of a new ‘Russian world’ presented in 2007 as a community of destiny.

After 2008, the financial crisis and the repeated signs of President Obama’s focus on a reformist attempt to refashion the United States pivoting away from the US’s traditionally internationalist stance, accompanied by the weakness Washington showed in Syria and by the growing rift with China, convinced Putin that many of the boundaries which constrained his aspirations had disintegrated. He then started to present Russia as the natural ally of the new ‘Global South’, with speeches echoing the USSR’s anti-western and anti-colonial stance. The use of force and war rapidly became an option, in Georgia and the Middle East first, in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, and finally with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, premised upon a rather traditional Russian nationalist discourse, ideologically denying Ukrainians’ right to existence.

Probably, also Putin’s Russia, like many other nationalism-led countries of the past, will pay a heavy price for this deadly ideology, which is already inflicting great misery on its neighbours and part of its own population and making Russia’s future bleak.