This is a legacy website featuring a collection of work by the Carnegie Endowment’s global network of scholars on topics including Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, and the post-Soviet states. This site is a product of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Washington, D.C. For more recent work by Carnegie scholars in this field, please visit Carnegie Politika.
In May 2012, the arrest of ordinary demonstrators on Bolotnaya Square and the riot charges pressed against them signalled the authorities’ shift from soft authoritarianism that tolerates limited discontent to a more repressive style of government.
There is no need to invent a special day like the National Unity Day for strengthening national identity, because one day in a year cannot change people's vision of their nation. This is an everyday job for the citizens at all levels of Russian society.
“National identity” and “nationalism”—there is nothing permanent about them. They vary, depending upon who speaks about them, and they change as time goes by. Those who resort to ultra-nationalism now in Russia had better hurry, because the nation states are losing efficacy, and values transform as economy and society change.
On November 4, President Putin spoke in the Kremlin about cohesion, consolidation, and indissoluble unity of the people of Russia. Government policies, in contrast, do more to deepen the xenophobic sentiments than to temper them. If the Day of National Unity was established as a step toward consolidating the Russian nation, today it sounds at best as a celebration of wishful thinking.
Russia does not have and will probably never have a specific event that can become a symbol of national consolidation. Still, something specific that consolidates everyone at once is necessary and the Kremlin wants people to nationally unite against the external enemies.
Russia-EU relations are of a technical rather than strategic character nowadays. A parallel functioning of the EU and the Eurasian Union would lead to more debate about strategic vision of Europe and the Eurasian continent.
Russia has repeatedly resorted to imposing embargoes on EU countries to test Europeans’ unity. Yet in almost all cases, Moscow’s bullying has failed to break EU solidarity.
The problem with the nation-building effort in Russia is that a nation cannot be built from above. Unless people begin treating their state as their own, Russia will continue to be a country and a state, but no nation.
The simple axiom is: as far as you have a sufficient economic growth, you can be generous to the immigrants, but if the economy goes wrong, you should limit the inflow of foreign workers. The Russian economy is now ill, with a growth rate at slightly above one percent. And the more frustrated the Russians become, the more acute the ethnic problem becomes.
As outbursts of ethnic violence grow more frequent, the Russian government relies first and foremost on police measures, such as roundups, detentions, or tightened migration policy. The rhetoric of administrators of various levels increasingly caters to xenophobic sentiments which risks to incite such sentiments even further and lead to new ethnic clashes.