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The "New" Russian Identity: Individual, Group, and Empire in the Conceptualization of Citizenship
Institute on East Central Europe
March, 1997
For many Russians and non-Russians alike, the war in Chechnya has served as an ominous warning that the Russian Federation remains in a precarious time of transition. Many question whether it can survive in its present form or whether deeply unsettling questions of ethnicity and national identity will continue to hinder Russia's development as a post-Soviet independent state. On the one hand, President Boris Yeltsin's government has tried to remain pragmatic despite the disaster in Chechnya, striving to diffuse potential future ethnic conflict in other ethnic "titular" constituent republics by signing bilateral, extra-constitutional agreements with the political leaders of those republics.
In addition, the Yeltsin government has shown pragmatism and sensitivity toward the 20 percent ethnically non-Russian population in embodying the "new" non-ethnic Russian citizenship in the federation's 1993 Constitution through what Robert Hayden has defined as the "currently accepted democratic constitutional nor[m] which view[s] the individual citizen as the basic subject of constitutions," 1 and by extension, as the basic subject of the state itself. The Russian Constitution includes several clauses which go far in achieving this definition of citizenship. Article 19 emphasizes equality before the law regardless of nationality, race, or language. Articles 28 and 68 expressly outline "the right to use one's native language and to create the conditions for its study and development," and Article 69 underlines the rights of "small indigenous peoples in accordance with international law." 2
On the other hand, Chechnya has served to illuminate just how confused and unsettled the very concepts of citizenship and identity are in post-Soviet Russia. Although a number of scholars have questioned whether the Russian Federation will meet the same fate as the Soviet Union in its state-building process, most have taken an economic-institutional approach. Surprisingly few scholars have stressed the importance of Russian identity in its complicated and clashing cultural, historical, and political variations as an important variable in the modern Russian state-building process. Simply put, few scholars are openly asking which post-Soviet national and state identity is being forged by the war on Chechen civilians. As of April 3, 1996, a United Nations Human Rights Commission report placed the number of civilian casualties at 26,550 and the number of refugees at 437,000. 3
Mark R. Beissinger is one of the few scholars who has openly addressed the question of modern Russian state-building through an identity approach. He stresses that the attack on Chechen civilians marks a radical shift in the Yeltsin leadership's conceptualization of citizenship.
Coercive state-building is an ambiguous but symptomatic endeavor, in that it contradicts the legitimacy and shared identity that is supposed to underlie the modern state and lays bare the modern state's imperial alter ego. A government that declares war against those it claims as its own citizens because they do not recognize themselves as its citizens is caught in a vicious circle, for it thereby produces the very conditions that spawned perceptions of it as an empire in the first place. 4
As the early efforts to base a concept of Russian identity on constitutional, individual rights have not encouraged the Chechen leadership to give up its quest for independence, the Russian government has resorted to armed conflict to force the rogue republic -- and in a sense, the rogue ethnic identity -- back into line. As Beissinger implies, the Russian leader-ship has begun to use imperial methods and logic in its maintenance of state homogeneity.
Russia's great identity dilemma is rooted in fundamentally contrasting views within the political and intellectual elite, both ethnically Russian and non-Russian, about the natural identity of the Russian state and Russian citizenship. As in other Central and Eastern European states (such as the former Yugoslav states), questions related to ethnicity and national identity have bubbled over just as the Russian state has attempted to redefine itself both culturally and politically in the turbulent wake of over 70 years of communism. An important understanding of how questions of national identity can become part of a state's political agenda in the wake of communism has been outlined by Susan Woodward, who has theorized that -- unlike the widely held belief that ethnic nationalism is endemic to certain peoples like Croats and Serbs -- nationalism in the former Yugoslavia is very much a political dish cooked up and served to the population by political elites to entrench their power and gain independence. 5
Ethnicity has increasingly become a political issue for many in the Russian Federation, despite the initial efforts of the "liberal" Yeltsin leadership to play down ethnicity constitutionally. Denis Dragunskii emphasizes that "ethnicity . . . plays an extremely important role in the development of new political institutions in the post-Soviet space. [A] full range of political and property rights of physical and juridical persons is being tied to an individual's ethnic identification and to the ethnopolitical orientations of organizations." 6 In Moscow, Caucasian migrants, many from inside Russia, have complained loudly about indiscriminate harassment at the hands of police, government officials and even civilians. Many have been denied residential permits or, worse yet, have been expelled from the city limits without due process as a result of the pervasive cultural belief that many Moscow-based Caucasians, especially Chechens, are involved in widespread criminal activities. 7
As a number of scholars have recently emphasized, ethnicity has entered modern Russian political discourse in the guise of a peculiar form of nationalism, which shall be explored in greater detail later. Yeltsin himself has adopted elements of this new nationalism into his own political discourse (best represented by his actions in Chechnya and the signing of a "Treaty on Forming a Community" with Belarus, which aims to merge many of the two states' functions) by purging from his inner circle those politicians who had been at the vanguard of political and economic change in Russia. Instead of Yegor Gaidar's liberal market reforms and Andrei Kozyrev's pro-West foreign policy, Yeltsin has now surrounded himself with hardline former communist officials who have led the push toward a very different "new Russia" than Gaidar and other liberals had tried to establish. Sergei Kovalev, the prominent human rights leader in Russia, sums up this shift quite aptly.
[The new] ideology is not the ideology of early, classical communism, but a new form. . . best described by the untranslatable word "derzhavnost," which means, roughly, "power-ness" or "state-ness." Politicians on all sides say they are "democrats," but in fact the state is deified, placed above society, outside society, over society. Once again the human being becomes a cog in the mechanism, an insignificant little cog. 8
Ethnicity has become an important variable in this new ideology. As made evident in Chechnya and with the Belarus accord, the very identity of Russia, of Russianness, is a driving force of this ideology. This essay explores the shifts in Russian identity over the last five years, particularly among political elites. As we shall see, Russia is not only struggling in its economic and political transition, but in its identity transition as well.
Setting the Stage for Identity and Citizenship in the "New Russia"
Two major currents of ethnicity have become key to the future of Russia: How non-ethnic Russians, particularly those citizens of the ethnic titular republics (Tatars, Bashkors, Chechens, etc.), see themselves within the framework of the Federation -- that is, do they conceive of themselves as Russian citizens, reflecting their constitutional right to do so? -- and how ethnic Russians, especially political and intellectual elites, conceive of ethnicity and national identity in the "new Russia." As alluded to earlier, Yeltsin and various "liberal" political elites struggled between 1990 and 1993 to mold Russia into a democratic state based on the constitutional ideal of individual rights, often termed the "civic principle." Hayden and Matthew Rhodes, among others, have posited that this "civic" interpretation of citizenship remains the most basic legalistic antidote to the dangerous trend in certain post-communist states that establishes the "national principle" as the primary constitutional basis for statehood and citizenship. 9 In states like Croatia and Slovakia, new post-communist constitutions have come to define "sovereignty [as] resid[ing] with a particular nation (narod) the members of which are the only ones who can decide questions of state form and identity." 10 Bogdan Denitch emphasizes that this "national principle" legal definition of citizenship divides the state into "at least two classes of citizens: the majority, the full members of the political nation, and the minority (or minorities), who will be tolerated and given fewer rights. The minorities will never be fully equal members of the political nation if that political nation is defined ethnically." 11
Russia's identity crisis is multifaceted and intrinsically complex. The Yeltsin leader-ship realized early that it needed to devise a way to include non-ethnic Russians in order for the Federation to survive as a political unit. In addition to emphasizing the "civic prin-ciple" for Russian citizenship in the constitutional aspect of the state-building process, the Yeltsin government has actively negotiated with regional governments, particularly those of ethnically titular republics, to define powers left unclear in the federal constitution. The Russian Federation is divided into 57 different regions, oblasts, and krais, and 21 "ethnic homeland" titular republics. Russia's 1989 census officially numbered the non-Russian ethnic groups living within its borders at 126, with a population of 30 million. 12
Yet as Steven Solnick theorizes, an increasing number of institutional "asymmetries" between the regional governments and the Yeltsin-led federal government have reflected as well as entrenched two strongly contrasting visions of the Russian state. 13 Leaders in Tatarstan, Bahkortostan, Sakha, and Tuva have been able to use to their own benefit the increasing disarray in Moscow resulting from political polarization between parties and leaders and the increasing unpopularity of the Yeltsin leadership due to socially disruptive economic reform. Yeltsin had been forced to seek alliances with regional leaders in his early struggles with the Duma. 14 These compromises led to a situation, even before the bilateral treaties between Moscow and many of the Russian constituent republics were signed, in which the issues of sovereignty and identity came into question.
As far back as 1990 Yeltsin had encouraged regional sovereignty. To the Bashkir leadership as well as to other titular republican leaders, he had explicitly said, "Take as much power as you yourselves can handle." 15 As he presented it, Russia would be institutionally reorganized into a highly decentralized state structure in which republics and regions would be grouped together in a kind of "confederation." In his ongoing battle to delegitimize the Soviet government and bring about an "independent" Russia, Yeltsin had emphasized that its future was to "begin with the declaration of the economic independence and sovereignty of each autonomous republic" and that each "should be granted the right to leave the federation." In this sense, Yeltsin openly lauded non-Russian ethnicity as a valuable component of a still undefined future Russia, mainly in an attempt to drum up support in his fight against Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet central government. By late 1990 eight autonomous republics of Russia, including Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, had followed Yeltsin's encouraging words by declaring outright sovereignty within a loose Russian federation. 16
For Peter Stavrakis, Yeltsin and then-Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar doomed Russia to a long period of institutional limbo and political infighting with their "studious avoidance of the need for thorough government [and bureaucratic] restructuring." 17 As in other former communist countries in Eastern Europe, a vast majority of the pre-transition nomenklatura has remained in high positions of authority. Stavrakis analyzes this post-Soviet class on a political and economic level, illustrating how many important decisions about such issues as privatization have been affected and changed to benefit certain groups and individuals within this class. Furthermore, the very fact that many of the communist bureaucratic elite remained in their positions of power -- or that there was no radical restructuring of the bureaucratic power structure as Stavrakis prescribed -- has meant that many communist-era political beliefs and ideals have survived intact and ideologically untouched. As Tibor Varady emphasizes, some of those ideals had everything to do with how a state conceives of itself and of the identity of its citizens. The remaining bureaucratic and political elites
inherited the mental coordinates of the one-party consciousness. The mindset that mandated an ostracism of dissidents, and which imposed the assumption that those who are ideologically different must be enemies and traitors, survived -- and ethnic minorities now fill the same position that ideological dissidents did earlier. Minorities have found themselves outside the new trends, and even outside the logic of the new communities that have been taking shape. They have become essentially an encumbrance; an obstacle by their different culture, language, alphabet -- or by their very existence. 18
In addition to the surviving "one-party consciousness" of many of Russia's bureau-cratic and political elites, the triple combination of a socially strenuous period of economic transition; the rise of an extreme right-wing, nationalistic party voice as well as the rapid return to influence of the Communist Party; and perhaps most importantly, the deteriorating health of President Yeltsin, has led to a situation in which governmental unity has "disin-tegrated into ministerial fiefdoms" 19 as bureaucratic elites fractured into different "cartels" or "clans" tied to various interest groups and political parties. 20 Just as dramatically, the "softening" of the various center bureaucracies allowed regional governments to take the lead in general reform processes. Within a few years of the Soviet collapse, the nascent Russian state was on the road toward a broad decentralization of political and economic authority. 21 According to Solnick, it was the increasing disarray in the "center" that "forced Moscow to enter into ad hoc negotiations," leading to the flurry of extra-constitutional, bilateral "treaties" that officially transferred certain powers from the center (Moscow) to the periphery (the republics -- at least to those that had signed the treaties). 22 In the end, many of the concessions Moscow made to republics such as Bashkortostan have related to economic matters, such as control of natural resources and tax collection. 23
Despite the legal concessions granted in the bilateral federal treaties and the "civic principle" of citizenship codified in the post-Soviet federation constitution, the fundamental issue for the future of the Federation remains more precariously abstract. Namely, can Russia really exist as a multi-ethnic state?
Four Russias: Liberal, Archaic, Statist, and Neo-Soviet Conceptualizations of Identity and State by the Political and Intellectual Elite
As mentioned earlier, recent government policies have reflected a dramatic sea change in the conceptualization of Russian identity in the Yeltsin camp, in both political-institutional and citizenship frameworks. What is Russia? Who is Russian? Will the new Russian identity have strong cultural and ideological links with the Russia of the Tsarist times? With Soviet Russia? With the "liberal" and "democratic" traditions of the West? Since Russia's "independence" and the collapse of the Soviet state, political and intellectual leaders of various ideological persuasions have been struggling with these questions. As Stephen Shenfield writes, "Contemporary politics of Russia is defined to a large extent by the divergent answers that its citizens give to the question of the place that the `new Russia' (or is it a reborn `old Russia'?) should strive to occupy in the history of the Russian state." 24
The answers given by the Russian leadership have fallen into different categories at various times in the struggle to define Russia as a state, and thus, Russians as a people. Yeltsin's early "civic" vision of the "new Russia" was based neither in a "Tsarist vision" nor in a Soviet conceptualization of statehood and citizenship, both of which shall be outlined later. Shenfield describes Yeltsin's early political vision as "liberal." 25 Its primary proponents are advocates of Western-style democracy and capitalism and are led by such reformers as Gaidar. Politically and culturally, the "liberals" reject the heritage of both the Tsarist and the Soviet periods.
Although there are few historical precedents for the liberals to point to, Shenfield argues that many "draw inspiration from the democratic interlude in 1917." 26 Some academics and intellectuals like Alexander Tsipko and Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew on a supposed liberal, multi-ethnic past, which had laid the groundwork for a new Russia. Tsipko argued that a mono-ethnic state, a russkii state, could be nothing but a pipe dream since a multi-ethnic state, a rossiiskii state, had been developing over the centuries. 27 Solzhenitsyn argued that although any Russian empire, either in a Soviet or "Tsarist" guise, could not be forcibly maintained, Russian spiritual renewal could be found in its pre- communist past, in Russian spiritual and cultural traditions, which had been eroded throughout the communist period. True democracy in Russia could be achieved through the kind of local self-government (zemstvo) brought about by Tsar Alexander II's reforms and through the return to cultural importance, particularly on the local level, of the Russian Orthodox Church. Although Solzhenitsyn is included in a "liberal" camp with some difficulty, it is important to stress that he has remained quite critical of a return to "empire" for Russia. Instead, he has advocated a fraternal confederation of sorts between the Slavic Russian Orthodox Republics: Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the writer strongly (and boldly) advocated its dismemberment. 28
In contrast to the liberals of both the intellectual and political persuasion, nationalist and communist political thinkers and leaders throughout Russia have continued to encourage full-bodied Tsarist and Soviet ideals of Russianness in the conceptualization of a future Russia and have tried to introduce "blood and soil" ethnic nationalist ideals of Russianness. As shall be shown, all three principles (Soviet, Tsarist, and "blood and soil" nationalist) 29 intrinsically contrast with the "civic" ideal of citizenship and statehood, to use the terminology of Hayden and Rhodes. The Tsarist vision, which Shenfield terms "archaic," incorporates two major factors in its conceptualization of Russianness: language and religion. 30 Views of some modern "archaic" visions of Russia differ from the widely accepted Tsarist ideal of Russianness; extremists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who hold Tsarist Russia as a model for a future state, have shown "a reluctance to grant that a non-Russian who converts to Orthodoxy can be considered a Russian." 31
As embodied in the view of Zhirinovsky and other ultra-right-wing politicians and intellectuals, however, this group is less representative of a traditional Tsarist concept of Russianness than that of a "populist-nationalist," deeply racist or ethnic nationalist and "statist" conceptualization of Russia -- that is, "a blood and soil" nationalist. 32 For these politicians, the Russian state is paramount. As it exists in the power-sharing sense that Yeltsin has attempted to build with bilateral agreements between Moscow and the ethnic republics, a federation only dilutes the "ultimate value" of the state and Russia itself. 33 One of the most prominent examples of this view is exemplified in the Russian National Unity Party, whose program explicitly calls for the "expelling [of] all aliens, i.e., non-Russians, from the country's social life." 34 In the last years of perestroika, certain Russian intellectuals and academics had worked on a new paradigm emphasizing the uniqueness of the ethnic Russian nation. Lev Gumilev wrote about the "ethnogenesis" of the Russian nation that had roots not just in social history, but in "biological, geographical and psychological factors" unique to Russia. 35 In an article for Liternaturnaya Rossiya, Dmitrii Balashov took Gumilev's theory farther using a more academic language, arguing that a "Russian `ethos'. . . was chiefly determined by the adaptation to the conditions of life in the forests and swamps of Northern Europe, including a short agricultural cycle and the need to interact with the neighbors from whom they were not separated by natural barriers." 36
In contrast to the "national principle," the traditional "archaic" vision of Russian identity includes two main components: Russian as a first language and confessional Orthodoxy. As opposed to the aforementioned "civic" and "national" principles of statehood and citizenship, this view could be termed an empire principle. And unlike the ethnic nationalist ideals behind the "national principle," the empire principle, in particular the Russian empire principle, limits identity to language and religion. Still, both the "empire" and the "national" principles share important traits, as Walker Connor's basic definition of "nation-alism" indicates. The essence of citizenship in both can be described as "a psychological bond that joins a people and differentiates it, in the subconscious conviction of its members, from all non-members in a most vital way." 37 In other words, the key concept is not "who is Russian" but "who is not Russian." The answers vary, of course, and the very historical inability of Russians to confidently answer these questions remains a root cause of current instability. The "national principle" distinguishes populaces along deeper lines than the empire principle, with a more complete infusion of ethnicity into the mix. Maria Todorova theorizes that "unlike language, territory, religion, race and so on - which are essentially `dividers' along one criterion. . . ethnicity is a complicated sum total, an aggregate of different qualifiers which is used for the demarcation of the ethnic boundary." 38
The Russian empire principle is more limited in its delineation of peoples and tends to absorb Orthodox Slavs -- specifically Ukrainians and Belorussians -- in the Russian identity paradigm. Russian identity, as it developed during the Tsarist empire, was fundamentally unclear, as several authors have emphasized. This was largely due to the fact that Tsarist Russia in its modern incarnation "represented a confused mix of empire and state-building." 39 As Dragunskii notes, relentless territorial expansion transformed Russia into an organism that collapsed under its own weight. This space, drawn together by the imperial center, comprised huge fragments of other cultures, religions, and lifestyles. 40 Ethnic Russians were hence a minority in the broad expanses of the Russian empire-state. Irina Livezeaunu writes that "this made a broad and flexible definition of `Russians' imperative, whether to counter Polish Catholicism or Tatar Islam, to absorb Ukrainians and Belorussians in eastern Poland, or Mordvinians, Chuvash and Chermis in the Volga region." 41 As political rights were introduced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the perception of Russianness as being based in religion became political. In 1906, Orthodox parishes were given voting privileges over Catholic or Uniate (not to mention Islamic) parishes as a way to filter out non-Russians. Hence the main qualification for the new "citizenship" right to vote was religion. 42 To this day, this conception of Russianness has persisted for many. Indeed, it has become an important element in the changing political conception of identity among the political elite.
"Neo-Soviets," as Shenfield calls those politicians and political elites who have directly transferred the Soviet conceptualization of statehood and identity to Russia, have also included Tsarist and nationalist ideals in their own political platforms. The Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov declared in 1993 that the "roots of Russian communism should be sought not in Western Marxism, but in Orthodox Christianity and the Russian collective (obshchina)." 43 "Neo-Soviets" also differ from their direct predecessors in that many Communist Party elites now openly criticize the Soviet legacy of "ethnically based sub-units" as "the seeds of the current disintegration of the Union." In the chaotic sea of post-Soviet Russian politics, "neo-Soviet" political candidates such as Zyuganov have not shied from using the empire principle both directly and indirectly in their political discourse in an attempt to appeal to the Russian electorate.
For the most part, however, "neo-Soviets" identify with a "new Russia" that is a continuation of the Soviet Union and directly identify with much of the Soviet heritage. This heritage is multi-faceted; for our purposes, it is important to focus on how "neo-Soviets" conceive of Russian statehood and, by extension, Russian identity. Perhaps this conceptualization was must powerfully exemplified on March 16, 1996, when the Communist Party-dominated Duma ratified a "non-binding" resolution that branded the abolishment of the Soviet Union -- effective after the Belovezha agreement of December 2, 1991 -- as "illegal." In a sense, this resolution could be seen as a traditional Soviet or Marxist-Leninist statement, a rejection of the nationalist waves that capsized the Soviet Union. Nationalism had always been officially presented as "intrinsically chauvinist and threatening to the existence of the multi-national Soviet state" by the Soviet political elite. 44 To counteract the deep magnetism of nationalism, Soviet elites spent the better part of 70 years attempting, and failing, to craft a Soviet identity, a Soviet nation that would incorporate each of the multitudes of ethnic groups, often conveyed by the favored term gosudarstvennost', or "statehood." 45 In the end, this Soviet identity was seen by many non-Russians as nothing more than a retitling of the Russian empire. Beissinger emphasizes that this failure resulted from the Soviet regime's inability to "extinguish" nationalist aspirations. Instead, the regime "allowed the population to avoid the choice between Soviet and [existing] national identities" by maintaining both simultaneously -- in essence, encouraging both. 46 In other words, the Soviet Union occupied the same physical and psychological space as Tsarist Russia, while restructuring that same empire into "the form of an ethnocratic hierarchy," as Dragunskii calls it. The official structuring of ethnicity into "nationalities," "nations," and "national groups" reflected this "ethnocratic approach of the authorities to the state." 47 For Beissinger, the dual identity that was created by allowing "nationalities" and "nations" while attempting to forge a Soviet identity is the "critical element" in explaining the quick disintegration of the Soviet Union. As he puts it, "it was not difficult for ethnic entrepreneurs to mobilize non-Russian populations on the basis of their opposition to empire, for the Soviet state had always maintained two realities throughout its existence: empire and state." 48
With the recent call for the reestablishment of the USSR, Russian "neo-Soviets" have attempted to capitalize on the "empire principle," in the belief that many Russians feel as though their true state, as its boundaries had been demarcated for centuries, has been dismembered. According to Volodymyr Zviglyanich, the symbolic motion to reestablish the Soviet Union "sent a powerful appeal to the traditional psycho-emotional sentiments of the bulk of the Russian populace, to its primordial feeling of "sobornost" (common will)." 49 It is unclear just how receptive the Russian population is to this appeal. A broad survey taken by Russian state radio less than a month after the Duma vote found that only 14 percent of those polled saw the restoration of the Soviet Union as "an important task." Meanwhile, over 46 percent considered that it was impossible to "restore" the USSR. 50
Despite these important and encouraging figures, it is hard to imagine that neo-Soviets would alter their political platform substantially enough to disavow the Soviet Union and its empire connotations. Moreover, it is difficult to gauge just how unappealing or appealing the ideal of sobornost is to Russians in general. The Russian identity in a historical sense has been evolving within the framework of empire since the time of Peter the Great. Put simply, Russia itself has always existed as an empire at the same time as it been building its gosudarstvennost'. In this sense, an "empire principle" has existed side by side with a "national principle" in a confused clash of Russian citizenship and Russian statehood. Add to this definition of Russian citizenship the "civic principle," which by definition strives to include ethnic non-Russians, especially Muslims and non-Russian speakers living within the Russian Federation, and the confusion is increased.
From Individual to Group: The Yeltsin Leadership and Its Identity Paradigm Shift
The federal government has reflected this confusion since the first Russian elections in 1990. Just as the Yeltsin government tempered its enthusiasm for radical economic reform after 1993, confused signals related to Russian identity have emanated from Moscow. By surrounding himself with "liberals" like Gaidar, Yeltsin seemed in his first years to be an advocate of a "new Russia" built on a "civic principle" foundation of individual rights and freedoms. Indeed, in his call for a Russian "confederation" 51 of sovereign republics, the Russian president clearly advocated this civic identity as a way of stripping the Soviet Union of its remaining legitimacy as a state. The post-Soviet Constitution of 1993 encoded freedoms of religion and language and absolute equality before the law regardless of race or nationality. Since late 1993, however, Yeltsin has modified his language and actions in regard to identity and rights in the "new Russia." Much of this change in direction has had to do with his inability or unwillingness to purge the Soviet bureaucracy, as Stavrakis and Shevtsova have emphasized. As a result, many Soviet-era apparatchiki, who could also be classified as "neo-Soviets," have had an influential role in directing the economic and political transition of the state. Their economic stature and political power have only grown with time. Many in the highest echelon of the "neo-Soviet" bureaucracy have managed to direct privatization efforts for their own benefit, particularly in the regions. 52 These economic gains have translated into increased political power, as bureaucratic elites like the department head of the Ministry of Finance and the leading manager in Gossnab, the State Provision Committee, have become the president of a leading commercial bank and the head of a commodity exchange, respectively. 53 In addition, the expectation that reformers and liberals would dominate in the Duma elections of 1993 proved to be dramatically wrong, as Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats emerged as the numerically strongest party. In one fell swoop, the comically outrageous politician who had once suggested laying nuclear waste along the Lithuanian border and blowing it into the republic with giant fans, became a parliamentary leader, and his highly nationalistic message became commonplace in parliamentary debates. As Dragunskii notes, Zhirinovsky and many of his nationalist allies stressed that the Russian nation had been "oppressed" during the entire communist period -- in essence, that Russians had been an "oppressed majority" without their own state. The new Russia had to be established on a "national principle" to counteract years of "discrimination" against the Russian people. 54
The ultimate losers since 1993 have been the "liberals." Slowly, Yeltsin has filled his inner circle with hardline elites and has purged or encouraged the resignations of his liberal allies like former Prime Minister Gaidar and Foreign Minister Kozyrev. Some of the "winners" directly represent the neo-Soviet bureaucratic nomenklatura, like KGB-trained Foreign Minister Yevgenii Primakov. Others, such as the self-avowed Cossack Nikolai Yegorov, identify with revitalized Tsarist traditions. In an ironic twist little noticed outside the CIS, Yegorov was appointed Minister for Nationalities and Regional Affairs in November 1994. Considering the Cossack history of intolerance toward Caucasian Muslims, Russian Jews, and other non-ethnic Russians, this change of personnel was unsurprisingly viewed with befuddled consternation by the political leaders of the non-ethnically Russian communities, particularly in the Islamic Northern Caucausus.
The new elites within the Yeltsin circle had two major traits in common. They had a radically different conceptualization of Russian citizenship and statehood than the "liberals." In the language of human rights, citizenship and statehood were now conceived of not in an individual rights framework but in a group rights framework in which the state itself took primacy. Liberals were portrayed by new elites in the Yeltsin government as having betrayed the Russian collective state, not only through their support of the radical economc policy of shock therapy, but through their purposeful and tragic "antistate ideology" in which individual rights were placed above the state. Andranik Migranyan, a member of Yeltsin's Presidential Council, effectively summarized this view in a January 1995 editorial for Nezavisimaya gazeta.
The apotheosis of the triumph of antistate ideology was the formula "Russia is united and divisible," advanced by the "Democratic Russia" movement, which tried to realize these ideas ideologically and politically. This initiated the process of disintegration, this time of the Russian Federation. It was the dominance of such ideological aims that fed separatism in Chechnya and in other regions and paralyzed the federal authorities' will to strengthen the state. It was these aims that prevented Russia from becoming an effective instrument of the new integration process in the area of the former Soviet Union. 55
The most powerful example of the group rights conception of citizenship came in the government's growing defense of the Russian diaspora in the former Soviet republics. Indeed, the image of the oppressed Russian people became as increasingly commonplace in the Kremlin as it was in the nationalist and communist-dominated Duma. Citizenship and voting restrictions in the Baltics were termed "apartheid" and "ethnic cleansing" by officials. 56 Abdullak Mikitayev, head of the department of citizenship of Yeltsin's administration, publicly stated that "Russia bears the responsibility for every citizen (emphasis added) of the Soviet Union," simply another way of describing the twenty-million-strong ethnic Russian diaspora. 57 Within the Russian Federation itself, the belief grew that ethnic Russians were increasingly unwelcome in certain ethnic republics, particularly as tensions increased in the wake of the Chechen disaster. In Tuva, in fact, the tension became serious enough to lead to an "outflow of embittered Slavic refugees." 58 These images, liberally reported and often exaggerated in the Russian press, only fueled xenophobic resentment and contributed to the popularity of nationalistic politicians such as Zhirinovsky. Meanwhile, "accusations of softness" by these nationalist politicians "prodded Yeltsin into taking a more decisive stance." 59
Part of this stance, as John Dunlop writes, came with the reconstruction of an inner circle of advisors. The actions encouraged by these new elites -- namely the war in Chechnya and the political and economic consolidation of the CIS -- strongly indicate that they were more representative of the "empire principle" than of the "civic" or even "national" principles. Dunlop calls this group the "Party of War" and traces the Chechen debacle directly to Yegorov and his close associates who advised Yeltsin to attack. "His obvious contempt for Russia's minorities, and especially for her Muslim peoples, plus his conviction that they needed to be ruled with an iron hand, served . . . as a major impetus for the invasion of Chechnya." 60 In 1996, Yeltsin appointed Anatolii Semenov as head of a new department of Cossack military units "subordinate to the Russian president." 61 Yegorov, meanwhile, was reappointed to the government as the powerful chief of staff only months after having been among those ministers scapegoated and sacked after Chechen freedom fighters took over 2,000 Russian hostages in the southern town of Budennovsk in summer 1995. 62 Attempting to appeal to the several-million-strong Cossack population, the president blatantly took part in the political refurbishment of the Tsarist empire paradigm.
In addition to Cossack revivalism, Yeltsin has publicly embraced the other great Tsarist symbol of Russian identity: the Russian Orthodox Church. The most striking example of this change was Patriarch Alekseii II's very public presence at the April 1996 signing of the Russian-Belorussian "Treaty on Forming a Community," an agreement that calls for the formation of an integrated political and economic community between the two states. 63 The image of Alekseii standing over President Yeltsin and President Lukashenka of Belarus has become a visual symbol of the infusion of the Church into politics. The Patriarch further highlighted this symbolism with his appeal to other CIS countries, in particular Ukraine, to "follow this good example in restoring the full-blooded ties between all the peoples on what used to be the common expanse." 64 By "common expanse," Alekseii referred not to the Soviet expanse but to the Russian Tsarist expanse, the empire, when the Church was the great bearer of Russian identity, and religion had most clearly delineated nationality under the Tsars. Ukrainians and Belorussians were systematically absorbed into the Russian "nation" for centuries, with the Orthodox Church serving as a main tool in this empire-building process. 65
Current fears in Kiev and Minsk and other CIS capitals that such an identity of Russianness is being revived within modern Russia have only been aggravated by Alekseii's pronouncement and the Russian leadership's rapprochement with the Church. Since the Treaty's signing, meanwhile, Belarus and the Russian Federation have moved towards reunification. Presidents Lukashenka and Yeltsin met in early March 1997 to discuss openly the parameters of the future union. 66 Popular resistance to reunification with Belarus has been visibly increasing along with its probability. On March 15, 1997, 10,000 marchers protested Lukashenka's policies by marching through central Minsk, chanting slogans against Lukashenka, and flying the banned Belarusian independence flag. 67
The moves toward a Russian national identity with implicit roots in an empire principle will continue to have an unsettling effect not just on relations between the Russian state and the new post-Soviet states such as Ukraine, itself struggling to consolidate its own post-Soviet independence and national identity, but may further exacerbate tensions between ethnic Russians and non-ethnic Russians within Russia, particularly in the constituent republics. The bilateral treaties signed with many republics, including Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, have signaled an official transferal of political and economic powers (such as those of taxation) to those republics. As Peter Stavrakis emphasizes, much of this transferal has occurred in the context of an increasingly weakened central authority, which he likens to "soft-states" in Africa whose central governments are forced into agreements with provincial leaders to preserve the integrity of the state. 68 Beyond this purely institutional analysis, however, lies the importance of identity. As Yeltsin's government has continued its policy of reaching power-sharing agreements with the regions, it has signaled a shift towards a much less inclusive conception of Russian identity.
Some authors who have analyzed the question of ethnicity in Russia have argued that ethnic groups are too dispersed throughout the federation to "coalesce into a credible threat" to its integrity. 69 This argument tends to dismiss the fact that increasing powers have been granted to regions within Russia, regions that were designated on an ethnic basis by the Soviet leadership long ago. Combined with the fact that Yeltsin's government has begun to show clear signs of imperial behavior both within and without Russia, ethnicity will remain a potential threat to state stability. The Russian military's behavior in Chechnya -- its indiscriminate and brutal attack on Chechen civilians and rebels alike -- has resulted in a situation in which most Chechens have come to back the Chechen leadership's drive for independence, even if they had been unsupportive when President Dzhokar Dudaev had first unilaterally proclaimed Chechnya's independence in the spring of 1992. 70 In Beissinger's terms, the treatment of Chechen citizens as Russian imperial subjects has delegitimitized a potential "new Russian citizenship" in the eyes of most Chechens. Undoubtedly, this sets a precedent for other titular ethnic groups, such as the Tatars and Bashkirs. If the federal government were to make any move to strip regions of their newfound powers or self-proclaimed "sovereignty," tensions could potentially erupt along ethnic lines within the republics, as the geographic lines have already been drawn, and Tatars and Bashkirs might openly question their legal (constitutional) incorporation in the "new Russia." The presence of ethnic Russians within ethnic republics could fuel ethnic tensions rather than dilute them, as Allen Lynch and Reneo Lukic suggest. 71 Certainly, the "civic principle" basis for a "new" Russian identity has been overshadowed by the Russian leadership's renewed imperial actions.
Conclusion
In the last few years, the stage has been set within Russia for an epic battle between different political forces, each of which has radically different visions of the direction in which Russia's economic and political transformation should be heading. These different forces have already had a large say in how identity in the "new Russia" is presented and formulated, as represented by the political elite shifts within Yeltsin's inner circle. The Russian political scene is abuzz with "statists," "neo-Soviets," "liberals," and others who share some of the ideals already outlined. President Yeltsin has chosen from each group in constructing and tearing down his inner circle of advisors. This has led to a state- and identity-building process ripe with contradictions and confusion.
On the one hand, Moscow has striven to build bridges with a large number of ethnic republics, such as Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, hoping to avoid future ethnic conflict. At the same time, Moscow has attacked a rogue republic that essentially refuses to share any identity with Russia. Hence, Yeltsin is effectively encouraging an unmanageable dual identity for different nationalities within Russia: a "picking-and-choosing" of citizenship. As Beissinger emphasizes, it is politically illogical to claim "civic" citizenship -- a new rossiiskii identity -- for all Russian nationalities, and then through war treat a whole ethnic group as imperial "subjects" who went too far in their quest for sovereignty. 72 Whether or not the Russian Federation disintegrates, as doom-sayers have predicted, this dual empire-democracy, subject-citizen identity is doomed to fail. The four clashing "imagined identities," to use Benedict Anderson's definition of nationalism, 73 that include the "liberal," "archaic," "statist" and "neo-Soviet" perceptions of Russian statehood and citizenship will continue to weaken Russia in its state-building process, particularly if Yeltsin continues to pick and choose from different identity paradigms and their disciples.
In addition, the "new Russia" is starting from a standpoint in which identity has historically been conceived of in "group rights" terms. In all but one identity paradigm presented above, the group outweighs the individual in the definition of citizenship. This conceptualization also holds in the titular republics, whose very existence has been designated along ethnic lines. This makes an individual-based conception of citizenship (a Russian "civic principle") as Yeltsin and his government originally institutionalized it, rather novel and helps explain how Yeltsin has changed both his inner circle of leadership and his political stance toward one ethnic group that refuses to fall under the rubric of Russian identity.
Footnotes
Note 1: Robert Hayden, "Constitutional Nationalism in the Former Yugoslav Republics," Slavic Review 51, no. 4 (Winter 1992), 655. Back.
Note 2: Edward W. Walker, "Federalism--Russian Style: The Federal Provisions in Russia's New Constitution," Problems of Post-Communism 42, no. 4 (July/August 1995), 10. Back.
Note 3: As cited in Peter Rutland, "Costs of the Chechen War," OMRI Daily Digest , April 3, 1996. Back.
Note 4: Mark R. Beissinger, "The Persisting Ambiguity of Empire," Post-Soviet Affairs 11, no. 2 (April/June 1995), 179. Back.
Note 5: See Chapter 7, "The Right to National Self-Determination," in Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1995). Back.
Note 6: Denis V. Dragunskii, "Imposed Ethnicity," Russian Social Science Review 36, no. 2 (March/April 1995), 71. Back.
Note 7: For an example of this stereotype of Moscow-based Caucasians and Chechens in particular, see Aleksandr Zhilin, "The Caucasian War: The Scene from Moscow," Prism 2, no. 6 (March 22, 1996). While careful not to sound overly racial in his presentation of the Chechen gang situation in Moscow, Zhilin emphasizes that the most "influential" groups are ethnically non-Russian, especially Chechen. Back.
Note 8: Sergei Kovalev, "On the New Russia," New York Review of Books 43, no. 7 (April 18, 1996), 10. Back.
Note 9: See Hayden and Matthew Rhodes, "National Identity and Minority Rights in the Constitutions of the Czech Republic and Slovakia," East European Quarterly 29, no. 3 (September 1995). Back.
Note 11: Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 141. Back.
Note 12: As cited in Majorie Mandelstam Balzer, "From Ethnicity to Nationalism: Turmoil in the Russian Mini-Empire," in James R. Millar and Sharon L. Wolchik, eds., The Social Legacy of Communism (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Press, 1994), 60. Back.
Note 13: Steven Solnick, "Federal Bargaining in Russia," East European Constitutional Review 4, no. 4 (Fall 1995), 52. Back.
Note 14: Peter J. Stavrakis, "The Soft State and the Emergence of Russian Regional Politics," in Michael Kraus and Ronald Liebowitz, eds., States and Regimes in Transition: Russia and Eastern Europe After Communism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, forthcoming), cited with the author's permission. Back.
Note 15: In a speech given on Moscow Television, as quoted in Roman Laba, "How Yeltsin's Exploitation of Ethnic Nationalism Brought Down an Empire," Transition 2, no. 1 (January 12, 1996), 8. Back.
Note 17: Stavrakis, 8-9. Back.
Note 18: Tibor Varady, "Collective Minority Rights and Problems in Their Legal Protection: The Example of Yugoslavia," East European Politics and Societies 6, no. 3 (Fall 1992), 262. Back.
Note 20: Lilia Shevtsova outlined this bureaucratic devolution into "cartels" in a talk entitled "Russian Political Elites and Key Features of Internal Policy Agenda in Russia," delivered to Volodymyr Zviglyanich's advanced seminar "Russia Area/East European Affairs" at the Elliott School of Internationals Affairs, George Washington University, April 2, 1996. Back.
Note 23: Vladimir Todres, "Bashkortostan Seeks Sovereignty -- Step by Step," Transition 1, no. 7 (May 12, 1995), 58. Back.
Note 24: Stephen D. Shenfield, "Post-Soviet Russia in Search of an Identity," in Douglas W. Blum, ed., Russia's Future: Consolidation or Disintegration (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 6. Back.
Note 27: Vera Tolz and Elizabeth Teague, "Russian Intellectuals Adjust to the Loss of Empire," RFE/RL Research Report 1, no. 8 (February 21, 1992). Back.
Note 28: Vladimir Krasnov, Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 46-56. Back.
Note 32: See Vasily Andreev, "Nationalism in Russia: Past, Present, and Prospects for the Future," Prism 2, no. 7 (April 4, 1996). Back.
Note 35: Krasnov, 158-9. Back.
Note 37: Walker Conner, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 197. Back.
Note 38: Maria Todorova, "Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Communist Legacy in Eastern Europe," in Millar and Wolchik, eds., 90. Back.
Note 39: Beissinger, 159. Back.
Note 40: Dragunskii, 74. Back.
Note 41: Irina Livezeaunu, "Defining Russia at the Margins," Russia Review 54, no. 4 (October 1995), 496. Back.
Note 42: Theodore R. Weeks, "Defending Our Own: Government and the Russian Minority in the Kingdom of Poland, 1905-1914," Russian Review 54, no. 4 (October 1995), 546. Back.
Note 44: Gerald Holden, Russia after the Cold War: History and Nation in Post-Soviet Security Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 143. Back.
Note 46: Beissinger, 162. Back.
Note 47: Dragunskii, 74-5. Back.
Note 49: Volodymyr Zviglyanich, "Russia, the Specter of Integration and Ukraine: A Look at New Realities," Ukrainian Weekly, March 31, 1996, 2. Back.
Note 50: The Russian Radio poll was reported in "Little Russian Enthusiasm for Restoration of USSR," Monitor 2, no. 67 (April 4, 1996). Back.
Note 52: See Stavrakis and Maryanne Ozernoy, "Russian Bureaucratic Power and Current Political Developments," Prism 2, no. 8 (April 4, 1996). Back.
Note 54: Dragunskii, 80. Back.
Note 55: Andranik Migranyan, "1995: Year of a Great Turning Point or The Final Collapse of Russian Statehood?," Nezavisimaya gazeta, January 17, 1995, 1-2. Translation in Foreign Broadcast Information Service (London), January 18, 1995, 22-28. Back.
Note 56: Beissinger, 166-67. Back.
Note 57: ITAR-TASS, April 26, 1994, as cited in Beissinger, 170. Back.
Note 59: Beissinger, 165. Back.
Note 60: John D. Dunlop, "The `Party of War' and Russian Imperial Nationalism," Problems of Post-Communism 43, no. 2 (March/April 1996), 31. Back.
Note 61: Robert Orttung, "Yeltsin Designates Cossack Leader," OMRI Daily Digest, April 3, 1996. Back.
Note 62: See Steven Erlanger, "Yeltsin Solicits Resignations From 4 Top Ministers," The New York Times, June 30, 1995, and Lee Hockstader, "Yeltsin Retools His Image With Weapons, Words: Russian Leader Courts Support of Hard-Liners," The Washington Post, January 20, 1996. Back.
Note 63: Scott Parrish, "Terms of the Russian-Belarusian Treaty," OMRI Daily Digest, April 3, 1996. Back.
Note 64: Quoted in "Patriarch Seconds the Motion," Monitor 2, no. 75 (April 16, 1996). Back.
Note 66: Sergei Solodovnikov, "Belarusian President Arrives in Moscow, OMRI Daily Digest, March 7, 1997. Back.
Note 67: Increasing numbers of Belarusian protestors have associated Lukashenka's growing authoritarianism with his desire to reunite with Russia. Demonstrators have openly linked the Belarusian president's crackdown on the Belarusian parliament and the illegal changes in the country's constitution with a loss of statehood. See "10,000 in Belarus Protest Moves by President," The New York Times, March 15, 1997, 11. Back.
Note 69: Allen Lynch and Reneo Lukic, "The Russian Federation Will Remain United," Transition 2, no. 1 (January 12, 1996), 17. Back.
Note 70: Paul Goble, "Chechnya and Its Consequences: A Preliminary Report," Post-Soviet Affairs 2, no. 1 (January/February 1995), 23. Back.
Note 71: Lynch and Lukic, 17. Back.
Note 72: Beissinger, 179. Back.
Note 73: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 6. Back.
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