As Russia\u2019s attempt to reestablish its \u2018external empire\u2019 via its war on Ukraine enters its third year, Osteuropa<\/em> focuses on the relations between Moscow and its \u2018internal empire\u2019, the myriad republics, oblasts and territories that make up the Russian Federation.<\/p>\n Though a federal system was enshrined in the Russian Constitution of 1993, \u2018in reality, Russia has for the past twenty years been a de facto imperium\u2019, note the editors in their preface,<\/p>\n In an article on \u2018Russia\u2019s internal empire\u2019, political scientist Andreas Heinemann-Gr\u00fcder lays out a capsule history of Russian federalism in the post-Soviet era, detailing the changing dynamics between Moscow and the hinterlands as the former alternately relaxed and tightened its grip on the latter.<\/p>\n The Russian Federation, a patchwork of 83 regions of varying ethnic composition and legal status, is a largely Soviet-era inheritance. Most regions were originally granted substantial autonomy by the Bolsheviks, who needed allies in the civil war and whose governmental apparatus was at that time not powerful enough to rule by repression alone.<\/p>\n The merciless centralization of the Stalinist era put an end to all this, however, and it would require the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union for the peripheries to again assert their respective claims to relative sovereignty, writes Heinemann-Gr\u00fcder.<\/p>\n In addition to drafting the 1993 Constitution that formalized the federal separation of powers, the Yeltsin government negotiated 46 bilateral agreements with individual regions, each of which spelled out the precise powers to be delegated and the quantum of autonomy granted. This largely peaceful transition to a system in which regional governments enjoyed a relatively high degree of self-determination demonstrates that \u2018Russia was not doomed to eternal empire; in the 1990s, it was still an open question as to how the situation would play out\u2019.<\/p>\n The centralizing backlash in the wake of the First Chechen War (1994\u201396), however, exposed federalism\u2019s shallow roots in Russia: unlike in the US, India or West Germany, for example, it has never been a constitutive part of Russia\u2019s political culture. \u2018In the end, federalism was simply a tactic to prevent the disintegration of the central state during phases of weakness\u2019.<\/p>\n By way of explaining the ideology behind the Kremlin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, historian Nikolay Mitrokhin traces the development of three main strands of Russian nationalism.<\/p>\n The first he dubs \u2018white racism\u2019, which is represented by a motley assortment of neo-Nazis, skinheads, Pan-Slavists and anti-immigration cranks. (Mitrokhin notes the paradoxical fact that many members of such movements traveled to Ukraine in the \u2018Russian Spring\u2019 of 2014 to enlist in the Azov Brigade and fight against<\/em> Russia, having concluded that such aggression against a \u2018brother nation\u2019 was misbegotten.)<\/p>\n Then there were the \u2018traditional nationalists\u2019 or \u2018ethno-nationalists\u2019, for whom the organizing (and exclusionary) principle was the specific constellation of language, culture and religion they would conceptualize as the \u2018Russian world\u2019.<\/p>\n Ultimately, however, it would be the third, \u2018imperial\u2019 brand of nationalism that carried the day, the kind Putin was referring to when, in 2018, he told think-tank conference-goers that he represented \u2018genuine, successful nationalism\u2019. This is a nationalism less concerned with the particulars of the Russian Weltanschauung<\/em>, writes Mitrokhin, and more with \u2018borders and territory\u2019, and the \u2018cult of victorious Russian weaponry\u2019.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.eurozine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Osteuropa1-32024-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/p>\nRussian nationalisms<\/h2>\n
An open wound<\/h2>\n