Russian nationalism () first rose to prominence as a Pan-Slavic enterprise during the 19th century Russian Empire, and was repressed during the early Bolshevik rule. Russian nationalism was briefly revived through the policies of Joseph Stalin during and after the Second World War, which shared many resemblances with the worldview of early Eurasianist ideologues.
The definition of Russian national identity within Russian nationalism has been characterized in different ways. One characterisation, based on ethnicity, asserts that the Russian nation is constituted by ethnic Russians, while another, the All-Russian nation, which developed in the Russian Empire, views Russians as having three sub-national groups within it, including Great Russians (those commonly identified as ethnic Russians today), Little Russians (Ukrainians), and White Russians (Belarusians). In the Eurasianist perspective, Russia is a distinctive civilization separate from both Europe and Asia, and includes ethnic non-Russians of Turkic and other Asiatic cultures.
History Russian Empire
Prior to the 19th century, Russian Empire functioned as a multi-ethnic empire based on dynastic legitimization, tsarist autocracy, and estate-based order. Despite the Russian people being the "state people" in the empire, and the imperial patriotism integrating many elements of Russian ethnic consciousness, such as the Russian orthodoxy, history and culture, Russian Empire was not a Russian nation state and it possessed many supranational traits. In the 19th century, Russian Empire began to be affected by the rise of nationalism among its peoples, including Russians. The modern Russian national consciousness first arose in the 18th century in reaction to westernizing reforms and growing foreign influence under Peter the Great, and it was influenced by the Enlightenment and Romanticism. A noble intelligentsia, which gradually detached itself from the nobility, increasingly began to emphasize Russian language, history and people instead of state and religion. They sought to mobilize and integrate lower classes and proclaimed national loyalty above loyalty to a ruler, which put them at odds with tsarist autocratic system. They attempted to bridge the gap between the traditional folk culture and the westernized high culture of the Russian elites with the ethnically based national consciousness. This phase of Russian national movement saw the creation of a standartized literary language and Russian literature, the publication of folk poetry and historical works.
The imperial patriotism and nationalism first mingled during the "Patriotic War" against Napoleon. This led to the emergence of Russian national conservatism which was prominently espoused by Nikolay Karamzin. He imagined Russian Empire as a Russian nation state and criticized concessions made by Alexander I of Russia to Poland. This type of Russian nationalism was loyal to the state and emerged powerfully in reaction to the Polish uprising of 1830. The Russian motto "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality" was coined by Count Sergey Uvarov and it was adopted as the official ideology by Emperor Nicholas I. Three components of Uvarov's triad were: OrthodoxyOrthodox Christianity and the protection of the Russian Orthodox Church. Autocracyunconditional loyalty to the House of Romanov in return for paternalist protection for all social estates. Nationality (Narodnost, has also been translated as national spirit).
Many works concerning Russian history, mythology and fairy tales appeared. Operas by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mikhail Glinka and Alexander Borodin; paintings by Viktor Vasnetsov, Ivan Bilibin and Ilya Repin; and poems by Nikolay Nekrasov, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, among others, are considered masterpieces of Russian romantic nationalism.
However, the main goal of the government remained to preserve the status quo and traditional legitimization of the multi-ethnic empire, with "narodnost" being used in rather vague way and the Orthodox religion and autocracy remaining the main elements. After 1815, increasingly large part of the Russian intelligentsia turned away from the state, and based their nationalism on societal and political demands. Decembrists, who staged an uprising in 1825, already emphasized the goal of making Russia a democratic and centralist nation state based on French model. Subsequently two main branches of Russian nationalism emerged: Slavophiles and Westernizers. Slavophiles argued for the return to the Orthodox Church and they idealized the Rus' before Peter the Great. The Westernizers, on the other hand, pushed for liberal reforms. Both idealized the Russian peasants and their commune constitution, and favored the abolition of serfdom. They also both assigned to Russia a messianic role among European nations.
Pan-Slavism and the Slavophile movement of the 19th century, led by such figures as Aleksey Khomyakov, Sergey Aksakov, and Ivan Kireyevsky drew a line between Western Europe and Russia, emphasizing Russia as a dominant regional power as well as spiritual unity among Slavs in their Orthodox religion, of which the Russian autocratic regime was the ultimate expression. However, their movement was suppressed by Tsar Nicholas I, a law and order royalist, who surveilled and suppressed the Slavophiles. The movement was only revived in the 1870s by Konstantin Leontiev and Nikolay Danilevsky.
The political situation in Russia after the defeat in Crimean War, abolition of serfdom, political reforms and Polish January Uprising increasingly radicalized starting from the 1860s, which also affected the Russian nationalist movement. The radical movement of narodniks contained an apparently national streak in its idealization of Russian peasants and their repartitional communes. The liberals pushed for democratization of Russia, and attacked special status that some non-Russian peoples were granted in the western part of the empire. The aftermath of Polish uprising of 1863 also saw the emergence of extreme Russian nationalism loyal to the state. This was represented by Mikhail Katkov, who promoted an imperialist foreign policy based on pan-Slavism, which also found its expression in Nikolay Danilevsky's book Russia and Europe. The extreme Russian nationalists argued for integral nationalism and assimilation of non-Russian peoples in the empire. The revolutionary movements in Russia began to gradually abandon nationalism in the second half of the 19th century, with democratic intelligentsia increasingly seeing less emancipatory and democratic potential in the nationalism.
Russian government remained skeptical of all branches of Russian national movement, seeing them as a challenge to traditional autocratic tsarist system. However, the revolutions of 1848 showed the Russian government the power of the national principle. The nationalist currents also spread into the bureaucracy and the army and among the policymakers. Faced with challenge of the revolutionary movements in Russia and growing nationalism of non-Russian peoples, Russian government ultimately decided to increasingly cooperate with extreme Russian nationalists after 1863, and especially after 1881. The imperial patriotism mingled with extreme Russian nationalism. This period sought increasing concessions to extreme Russian nationalists, even if relations between tsarist state and Russian nationalism still remained ambivalent. The aggressive "imperial nationalism" emanated from the imperial patriotism as the state was forced to respond to the growing national challenge. The traditional dynastic and estate-based imperial patriotism appeared less capable of dealing with the growing challenges, and the imperial authorities sought to deal with them by seeking to use the integrational power of Russian nationalism, even if they remained skeptical of Russian national movement. This culminated in the policy of Russification pursued by the Russian Empire in the end of the 19th century, with the goal of systematization and standardization of the empire. The goal was to use nationalism to stabilize the tsarist rule. Russian authorities sought to emulate the policies pursued by other multi-ethnic empires: the Germanization in the German Empire and Magyarization in Hungary after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. However, the tsarist policy continued to favor the traditional estate-based and dynastic legitimation, and thus Russification policy was implemented with varying intensity and uniformity.
In the beginning of 20th century, new nationalist and rightist organizations and parties emerged in Russia, such as the Russian Assembly, the Union of the Russian People, the Union of Archangel Michael ("Black Hundreds") and others.
Soviet era
Under the outlook of international communism that was especially strong at the time, Vladimir Lenin separated patriotism into what he defined as proletarian, socialist patriotism from bourgeois nationalism.The Current digest of the Soviet press, Volume 39, Issues 1-26. American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 1987. Pp. 7. Lenin promoted the right of all nations to self-determination and the right to unity of all workers within nations, but he also condemned chauvinism and claimed there were both justified and unjustified feelings of national pride.Christopher Read. Lenin: a revolutionary life. Digital Printing Edition. Oxon, England, UK; New York, New York, USA: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 115. Lenin explicitly denounced conventional Russian nationalism as "Great Russian chauvinism", and his government sought to accommodate the country's multiple ethnic groups by creating republics and sub-republic units to provide non-Russian ethnic groups with autonomy and protection from Russian domination.Motyl, 2001, page 501 Lenin also sought to balance the ethnic representation of leadership of the country by promoting non-Russian officials in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to counter the large presence of Russians in the Party. However, even during this early period of Soviet history, the Soviet government appealed to Russian nationalism when it needed support - especially on the Soviet borderlands in the Soviet Union's early years.