Nationhood and the national question in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Eurasia: An institutionalist account

Abstract

The Soviet nationality regime, with its distinctive and pervasive manner of institutionalizing nationhood and nationality, has transmitted to the successor states a set of deeply structured, and powerfully conflicting,expectations of belonging. Successor state elites, with their deeply institutionalized sense of political ownership and entitlement, see the polities that bear the names of their nation — above all the territory and institutions, but also, with some ambivalence, the population as well — as “their own,” as belonging, in a fundamental sense, to them. National minorities, above all Russians, with their institutionally supported, basically ethnocultural understanding of nationhood, see themselves as belonging, in a deep if not exclusive sense, to an “external” nation; this cannot help but color and qualify, even if it does not exclude, their belonging to the would-be nation-state in which they live, and of which they (or most of them) hold citizenship. Russian state elites, finally, whose national self-understanding was not in the Soviet period embedded in, and is now only very imperfectly contained by, the institutional and territorial frame of the Russian Federation, see the Russian minorities in the non-Russian successor states as belonging, in an ill-defined yet potent sense, to the emerging Russian state. These deeply rooted and powerfully conflicting expectations of belonging — interacting, of course, with conflicts of interest engendered by state-building, regime change, and economic restructuring — will make the dynamic interplay between non-Russian successor states, Russian minorities, and the Russian state a locus of refractory, and potentially explosive, ethnonational conflict in coming years.