Discussions of Russian ideology in the war against Ukraine abound with references to the concept of the “Russian world” or the views of the Russian philosophers and writers Ivan Ilyin, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Alexander Dugin. The Russian ethnic nationalism that concerned Western political analysts and some Russian politicians from the late 1970s to the early 2010s is never mentioned.
That’s because the leaders of the Russian party of war have little in common with Russia’s organized nationalist movements of the past decades. Few remember that in 2008, Putin referred to his successor Dmitry Medvedev as “a Russian nationalist like me, in the good sense of that phrase.” Ten years later, at the Valdai Forum, the Russian president called himself “the most proper, most genuine, and most effective nationalist.”
So, what became of the more traditionalist Russian nationalists, who once attracted so much attention amid waves of attacks and murders? Why have they found themselves sidelined in a war ostensibly fought in their interest?
The Russian nationalist movement dates back to the 1950s. Its nucleus was the Russian Party, which was active between about 1970 and 1988. Adherents of this movement subscribed to a variety of alternative (for Soviet times) ideologies, from Russian Orthodox Communism to anti-Semitic neo-paganism, but all of them prioritized the interests of ethnic Russians, especially “simple folk” from rural areas whom they saw as being discriminated against in urban settings for their traditional morals and Orthodox faith.
Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, a Russian fascism project, Russian National Unity, emerged. When that project collapsed (not least thanks to the efforts of the security services), it spawned a group of largely insignificant radical organizations that increasingly resembled white supremacism and neo-Nazism.
It was these groups that helped to create political illusions among the bands of Nazi skinheads such as BORN (the Military Organization of Russian Nationalists, responsible for at least ten murders) that grew exponentially—up to 50,000 people in the 2000s—and became a truly dangerous manifestation of Russian fascism. These groups were also responsible for holding the regular nationalist Russian March from 2005.
Paradoxically, in 2014 many of these same people joined Ukraine’s Azov battalion—then associated with neo-Nazi ideology—to fight on Ukraine’s side against pro-Russian separatists, and held peace rallies in smaller Russian towns. They have become harsh critics of Putin and his war because they dislike its multiethnic imperial vector.
Nowadays, their main gripe with Putin is that the Russian state is becoming increasingly multiethnic, and that the “white race gene pool” is being wasted in a senseless war against the more homogenous Ukraine. Broadly speaking, their dream is the creation of an ethnic Russian state within the territory traditionally inhabited by Russians. But since that goal isn’t very feasible in the short term, they have to content themselves with creating closed settlements of like-minded people and distancing themselves from the state as far as possible.
Meanwhile, by the 1990s, the now aging members of the Russian Party were not such dyed-in-the-wool and militant racists as the Russian fascists and Russian National Unity. After the 1993 parliamentary coup was quashed, many of the Russian Party members agreed to join the legal opposition in exchange for direct or indirect subsidies from federal and regional sources.
They drifted gradually closer to the increasingly undemocratic state. If at the start of the 1990s Russian nationalists were calling for the creation of an ethnic Russian state and rejecting the territories designated “republics” within Russia—especially the majority Muslim ones—then by the end of the decade Russian nationalists were waxing nostalgic for a return to Soviet borders and symbols, and fighting against “Russophobia”: real or imaginary attempts by post-Soviet states to rid themselves of their imperial legacy.
Thousands of Russian nationalist organizations across the former Soviet Union styled themselves as something along the lines of Pushkin appreciation societies. Really, they just wanted things to return to how they used to be. They received backing from Russian embassies for supporting “Russian culture.” From around 2005, this began to morph into the concept of the “Russian world” in the heads of Moscow officials, embodied by a system of foundations for supporting such organizations.
This “world” could have been similar to other cultural, linguistic, and religious initiatives seen around the globe if the Russian state hadn’t regularly tried to coopt it for its military strategic purposes, from organizing anti-NATO rallies to supporting the war against Ukraine.
While the world was preoccupied with traditional religious and ethnic Russian nationalism, an entirely different type of nationalist ideology was emerging in Russia: militaristic imperial nationalism that prizes territories and borders over ethnicity and religion. In Putin’s words, “the most proper, most genuine, and most effective” nationalism.
The Russian empire, followed by the Soviet Union and now Russia, gave rise to a plethora of armed protectors of statehood and state borders. These are not even regular armed forces so much as police officers, border guards, and paramilitary units performing police functions, such as Cossacks, military policemen, and security service officers.
Their professional ethos is centered around combatting forces that could break up the country and compromise its borders. This ethos is transmitted both through professional networks and along family lines. It is probably no coincidence that many high-profile Russian nationalists—like the National Bolshevik Party co-founders Eduard Limonov and Alexander Dugin—came from families of security service operatives.
Russians living in far-flung parts of the former empire have also played an important role in advancing the interests of the Russian state. These people moved to the colonized territories (the Baltics, border regions of Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East) to perform certain functions or sometimes simply inhabit the areas for the sake of strengthening the central government and weakening local communities.
Those people were by no means always ethnic Russians. Ethnic minorities living on the empire’s periphery—the Gagauz and Bulgarians in modern-day Moldova, Greeks in Ukraine, Armenians and Abkhazians in the Caucasus, the Karakalpak and Badakhshan in Central Asia—also played their part in supporting the Russian Empire and were protected by it.
The communities interested in preserving the empire and imperial practices were vocal even in Soviet times, and had a clear ideology, although few could discern it back then. These “patriots” believed that a good person should speak Russian, and that fascists and imperialists were seeking to destroy their country, so it was down to them to protect their motherland by force.
The misleadingly named ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party derived much of its success from the Far East because many people living there considered themselves to be “representatives of Russia” forgotten by the central government amid the vast expanses of Asia. Support for Putin, a retired KGB colonel who shares these views, came from similar sources. While working in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, he helped former members of special purpose policy units from the Latvian capital who went on to “protect Russian interests” in Transnistria, the former Yugoslavia, Abkhazia, and other armed conflicts.
Combat veterans who became police officers, security guards, and martial arts trainers in peacetime could be mobilized for another patriotic campaign at any moment. A classic example is Igor Girkin, a former Russian paramilitary commander who started his military career back in Transnistria before going on to play a key role in the annexation of Crimea and the early conflict in the Donbas.
The new territorial Russian nationalism grew on the one hand out of the idea of protecting Russian speakers in the Baltics and Moldova, and on the other from hatred of country leaders blamed for the breakup of the Soviet Union for having dared to support their republics’ independence from Moscow.
This nationalism is a far cry from the traditional nationalism of ethnic Russian writers from the heartland who made it in Moscow and despised literary critics for their non-ethnic-Russian origins. It’s the nationalism of Soviet soldiers, who might come from any ethnic background, but whose raison d’être is the allegiance they pledged to the Soviet and subsequently Russian flag and the entire system of ideological myths surrounding the Russian army, border, language, and culture.
This ideological construct gained currency after 1994 and reached its apex after Putin’s ascension to power, attracting traditional nationalists, communists, and even liberals. Russian armed territorial nationalism aspires above all to “protect Russians,” in which “Russians” can be any community designated as such, regardless of its own identity and opinions. The goal is to restore the borders of the Soviet Union, either partially or completely, and there are far more people prepared to lay down their lives for this idea than there ever were for the splintered and marginalized traditional nationalist ideology.
