Russian Nation-building from Yel'tsin to Medvedev: Ethnic, Civic or Purposefully Ambiguous?

Abstract

This article surveys nation-building efforts in post-Soviet Russia. There have been five main nation-building projects reflecting the dominant ways of imagining the ‘true’ Russian nation but each has been fraught with contradictions and therefore have been unable to easily guide state policies. At the same time, a solution to the Russian nation-building dilemma may be emerging. This solution does not resolve the contradictions associated with each of the nation-building agendas but instead legalises the ambiguous definition of the nation's boundaries in the 1999 law on compatriots and the 2010 amendments to it. The fuzzy definition of compatriots in the law allows Russia to pursue a variety of objectives and to target a variety of groups without solving the contradictions of existing nation-building discourses.