Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia's Republics

By Elise Giuliano

Demands for national independence among ethnic minorities around the world suggest the power of nationalism. Contemporary nationalist movements can quickly attract fervent followings, but they can just as rapidly lose support. In Constructing Grievance, Elise Giuliano asks why people with ethnic identities throw their support behind nationalism in some cases but remain quiescent in others. Popular support for nationalism, Giuliano contends, is often fleeting. It develops as part of the process of political mobilization—a process that itself transforms the meaning of ethnic identity. She compares sixteen ethnic republics of the Russian Federation, where nationalist mobilization varied widely during the early 1990s despite a common Soviet inheritance. Drawing on field research in the republic of Tatarstan, socioeconomic statistical data, and a comparative discourse analysis of local newspapers, Giuliano argues that people respond to nationalist leaders after developing a group grievance. Ethnic grievances, however, are not simply present or absent among a given population based on societal conditions. Instead, they develop out of the interaction between people’s lived experiences and the specific messages that nationalist entrepreneurs put forward concerning ethnic group disadvantage.

In Russia, Giuliano shows, ethnic grievances developed rapidly in certain republics in the late Soviet era when messages articulated by nationalist leaders about ethnic inequality in local labor markets resonated with people’s experience of growing job insecurity in a contracting economy. In other republics, however, where nationalist leaders focused on articulating other issues, such as cultural and language problems facing the ethnic group, group grievances failed to develop, and popular support for nationalism stalled. People with ethnic identities, Giuliano concludes, do not form political interest groups primed to support ethnic politicians and movements for national secession.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780801461200

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Preface

This book began as a microstudy about why people in the Russian republic of Tatarstan threw their support behind nationalist movements in the early 1990s. It developed into an investigation comparing all of Russia’s republics. Why did people with minority ethnic identities in some other republics—which were analogous to Tatarstan in so many ways—pass through this period with so little interest in movements calling for national revival? Why didn’t the Russian Federation mimic the Soviet Union’s implosion along ethnic lines? Investigating these questions prompted a set of inquiries into the relationship between mass and elite, individual identity and nationalist ideology, and the role of economic structures versus human agency in the formation of political preferences.

Contrary to popular expectations as well as to the broad attention the subject has received among scholars, nationalism very often fails to take root. Russia, with its fluctuating and ultimately failed nationalist mobilizations across its republics, is a case in point. Throughout the book I show that the usual suspects—cultural difference, religion, language, demographic crises, and levels of regional wealth or poverty—do not lead to nationalism. What does inspire people to respond to leaders calling for nationalist transformation? I argue that people must develop a group grievance—a feeling of resentment about important aspects of their present situation—that they share with other people with the same ethnic affiliation. Grievances are not simply present (or absent) among people with ethnic identities; rather, they develop out of an interaction between people’s lived experiences and the specific messages that nationalists articulate to make sense of those experiences. For grievances to develop, it is not enough for nationalists to define current conditions as unjustly oppressing people with a particular ethnic identity; they must also convince individuals that their personal interests in material success and social status are tied to the fate of the nation. Nationalist leaders try, in other words, to create a sense of nationhood among people by stoking a sense of outrage that current conditions (the status quo) ignore their interests on the basis of their ethnicity.

The nationalist message cannot exist at a purely rhetorical level. It must describe, with a certain degree of plausibility, people’s experience of existing realities. Where nationalism emerged in Russia’s republics, nationalist entrepreneurs depicted an ethnic injustice: inequality in local labor markets. Their message was not entirely accurate, for the labor situation in Russia’s republics actually privileged titular minorities vis-à-vis ethnic Russians in many ways. But the nationalist message resonated with central experiences of the time: rising job insecurity and fear of unemployment in the crisis-ridden economy of the late Soviet era. Thus, nationalism develops out of a dynamic interaction between economic structures, the discourse of political entrepreneurs, and the experiences of ordinary people. This combination suggests that mass nationalist mobilization is far from easy and that the sustained politicization of mass ethnic populations is actually more of a rare than a regular occurrence. This book joins several other recent approaches to the subject of nationalism and ethnic politics to chip away at the expectation—often found among policymakers and other interested observers—that people with ethnic affiliations form distinct interest groups ready to mobilize behind nationalist leaders at a moment’s notice.

A project that undergoes as many evolutions as this one has incurs a lot of debts along the way. First, I acknowledge the Department of Political Science of the University of Chicago, where this project began, for providing a remarkably stimulating environment. I was very fortunate to have had a trio of brilliant advisers: David Laitin, Ronald Suny, and John Padgett not only offered support through the various phases of the project but also provided specific, valuable, and very diverse criticisms and insights. It is no exaggeration to say that I cannot imagine a better experience, and I am grateful to each of them. I express particular appreciation to David Laitin. He provided an example of how to do political science in so many respects, from conducting field research to carrying out fine-grained, well-documented comparative research across the Soviet space. I am grateful for his consistent support over the years.

I acknowledge and express appreciation to the various institutions that have supported the research and writing of this book, including Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the University of Miami. I am also grateful for financial support provided by IREX and the American Political Science Association, the United States Institute of Peace, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Mellon Foundation–University of Chicago Dissertation Year Fellowship, and the MacArthur Foundation Council for the Advanced Study of Peace and International Cooperation Dissertation Fellowship.

Colleagues and scholars have offered comments on various aspects of my research and book, for which I am very appreciative, including Rawi Abdelal, Dominique Arel, John Breuilly, Dawn Brancati, Tim Colton, Kathleen Collins, Jim Fearon, Tim Frye, Cora Sol Goldstein, Dmitry Gorenburg, Stephen Hanson, Yoshiko Herrera, John Kenny, Tomila Lankina, Alena Ledeneva, Stathis Kalyvas, Cynthia Kaplan, Pal Kolsto, Harris Mylonas, Phil Roeder, Blair Ruble, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Tom Simons, Oxana Shevel, Louise Davidson-Schmich, Stephen Saidemann, Jack Snyder, Josh Tucker, Pieter Van Houten, and Lucan Way. Particular thanks to Dominique Arel and Blair Ruble for their support and suggestions throughout the Kennan Institute’s Workshop series on Multicultural Legacies in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus and the publication of an edited volume from that workshop. The Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes (LiCEP) provided an unparalleled workshop setting for stimulating discussions with other people who care deeply about ethnic politics. I am grateful to all its members for those discussions. In particular I acknowledge the supportive and excellent advice I received about writing and publishing a book from Elisabeth Wood and Michael Hechter. I am also indebted to my research assistants: Alevtina Gavrilova, Antonio Lupher, Garrett Ho, Albert Petichenskiy, and Nick Voitsekhovitch.

Conducting research in Russia would not have been possible without the many kind hosts I met in both Tatarstan and Moscow. I am grateful especially to Guzel Stoliarova, Damir Iskhakov, and Rosa Musina—scholars in Kazan who shared their time and expertise, from recommending interviewees to consistently providing a sounding board when I would return to their offices to discuss the latest information I had learned about Tatarstani politics. Guzel in particular offered her friendship and skilled assistance with my large survey project. I also thank Galia Zakirova of the Tatarstan National Library for stimulating conversations, as well as research assistants and friends: Gulfiya, Marat, Natasha, Deborah Ballard, and Larissa, Julia, and Lev Sumskii. I was particularly lucky to have shared a period of time during my field research in Kazan with my friend and colleague Kate Graney who was always ready to discuss Tatar politics if our telephone lines could maintain a connection. I thank Jeff Kahn for sharing his Kazan interview notes. My research at Moscow libraries and institutes was improved immeasurably by the research assistance of Boris Rubanov and the guidance of Mikhail Guboglo of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as Tania Guboglo.

I express sincere appreciation to Roger Haydon of Cornell University Press for his advice, supervision, and patience throughout the publication process. I am also very grateful to my incredibly constructive anonymous reviewers whose suggestions were both useful and practical. My friends and family eased the book-writing process by always being willing to listen. In particular, Yoshiko Herrera, through Moscow, Chicago, and Boston, offered comments, support, and above all, good friendship. Thanks also to Merike Blofield, Dawn Brancati, Cora Sol Goldstein, Lara Nettelfield, Sherrill Stroschein, Tracy Regan, Nancy Scherer, and my sisters, Rachel and Michelle Giuliano.

Finally, but not least, my family’s encouragement throughout my career made it possible for me to write this book. I am grateful to my parents Rachel and Francis Giuliano for their unstinting moral support and also for providing examples of an engaged professional life. I thank my husband, Grey Seamans, for his optimism, continuous patience and encouragement, and above all for convincing me that our newborn twins, Olivia and Simone, did not really constitute an obstacle to finishing a book. This book is dedicated to him.

1

ETHNIC ENTREPRENEURS, ORDINARY PEOPLE, AND GROUP GRIEVANCE

This era no longer wants us! This era wants to create independent nation-states! People no longer believe in God. The new religion is nationalism. Nations no longer go to church. They go to national associations.

—Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

In the late 1980s ethnonationalist movements were springing up all over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Initiated by intellectuals but carried out by mass publics through protest cycles, popular referenda, and elections for independence, nationalist movements sought to gain political control of their region away from rulers they considered foreign. As the states of Eastern Europe suddenly dislodged communist rule and union republics in the Soviet Union unexpectedly acquired independent statehood, the federal integrity of the new Russian state balanced precariously. Home to sixteen autonomous republics (ARs) that were ranked just below the union republics (URs) in the USSR’s ethnoterritorial administrative hierarchy, Russia shared the same ethnofederal structure as the Soviet Union and was experiencing the same colossal upheaval.¹ Entrenched ideologies were thrown to the wind, central economic planning was disassembled, and the Communist Party—with its system of political appointments at every level of state administration—disintegrated. Amid these transformations, opposition nationalist movements in the republics were attracting growing levels of popular support. When a struggle for power developed in Moscow between the proreform executive and the conservative legislature, several republics took advantage of central state weakness to accelerate their quest for sovereignty.

Throughout the early 1990s the Russian Federation faced a serious threat of dissolution along ethnic lines. In nearby Yugoslavia, violent ethnic conflict and war loomed. The Russian state, for its part, identified—and as part of the Soviet Union had itself reified over time—more than one hundred ethnic minorities. Russia also contained over twenty ethnically defined subfederal territories. An outbreak of ethnic violence there, given the country’s enormous nuclear arsenal, could have produced untold destruction. At the time, Russian leaders and Western observers alike feared that Russia would follow the disintegration of the Soviet Union along ethnic lines.² Yet such fears were proven wrong. Within a few years ethnofederal implosion had become increasingly unlikely as nationalist separatism in Russia’s republics faded away, with the exception of the Republic of Chechnya. Why did mass publics mobilize behind nationalist movements in certain Russian republics but fail to do so in others?³ Why did some republics mount strong secessionist campaigns against Moscow while others remained quiescent? In this book I examine variation in mass nationalist mobilization and regional secessionism across Russia’s republics in order to address one of the thorniest and most undertheorized issues in the literature on nationalism: why ordinary people respond to the appeals of nationalist leaders calling for radical transformation of the status quo.

There is no shortage of studies on the phenomenon of nationalist mobilization, yet most overestimate the power of ethnicity as a basis of political action. Some accounts view ethnic masses as passive actors who automatically respond to the manipulations of ethnic elites; others treat masses as highly likely to support elites when the right combination of economic and political variables is present. They view people with ethnic identities as members of ethnic groups—and ethnic groups as political actors with interests distinct from those of other actors in the same society. In this approach, ethnic groups exist in multiethnic societies as bounded, self-aware actors prior to an episode of political mobilization. Thus they respond automatically when a political entrepreneur asserts that national independence serves the interest of the group. In this view, nationalist mobilization is a relatively common outcome.

Yet ethnic groups in plural societies are not simply there. People may come to develop a sense of solidarity with others and feel that they are part of an ethnic group, but ethnic groups are not entities in the world with a bounded set of interests.⁴ Because ethnic identities are socially salient categories for the subjects of study and because those subjects themselves reify ethnic groups, analysts tend to take ethnic groups as social givens; they tend to adopt their subjects’ categories as their own.⁵ Ethnic identities are a social reality for many people and have real effects on outcomes, but this does not mean that people with ethnic affiliations constitute a group with common interests and a sense of political destiny prior to a moment of political mobilization. Instead, a sense of groupness⁶ comes into being as a result of a political process. The process of nationalist mobilization transforms previous meanings of ethnic identity in a particular society into something that denotes a cultural community deserving control of its own state. It is political mobilization itself that makes people start to categorize themselves as being on one or another side of a group boundary and to perceive information in terms of how it affects their group.⁷

This means that whereas certain political and economic conditions may establish an environment that offers incentives for political leaders to play the ethnic card, mass nationalism does not automatically spring from these conditions. Rather, nationalist mobilization occurs when political and economic conditions become imbued with particular kinds of meanings at the microlevel. These meanings are not self-evident; it takes intentional action by political entrepreneurs to portray a given set of conditions in a way that connects to the lived experiences of ordinary people. Nationalist entrepreneurs must define the ethnic group that they seek to represent as an organic body that is a victim of forces beyond its control. They must attribute blame for that victimization to current circumstances or political authorities. Nationalists must articulate a position that makes the solution to the problem—establishing a nation-state—look like the only and essential way to redress group victimization and an unjust status quo. Finally, this message has to resonate with people’s lived experiences. When it does, a sense of nationhood can develop rapidly and nationalist mobilization may occur. But it is also possible, or even likely, that people who identify with a particular ethnic identity never come to see themselves as part of a victimized group. They do not place blame on other actors for conditions facing the group and thus do not view control of the state as a necessity. In this case, support for nationalism never gets off the ground. Both of these phenomena—mass nationalist mobilization and the absence of mass mobilization despite the appeals of nationalist leaders—took place in Russia’s republics. In short, mass nationalism is a political process, not a fixed set of preferences on the part of people who maintain ethnic identities. Nationalism can come and go while ethnic identities remain strong and deeply felt.

In several of Russia’s republics, mass nationalism developed out of the interaction between people’s experiences in local labor markets and issue framings articulated by ethnic entrepreneurs. Nationalist entrepreneurs articulated issues about what I call ethnic economic inequality. They described obstacles to economic achievement facing members of titular ethnic groups⁸ by claiming that ethnic Russians held the most prestigious jobs and enjoyed access to desirable resources, while titulars were concentrated in low-status jobs or rural economies. At first glance this looks like a standard story of nationalist politics: inequality develops among communities in a given society; one community becomes aware of its subordinate position and mobilizes to rectify the inequality by establishing its own nation-state. A closer look at labor markets and Soviet state policies, however, indicates that not only did people with titular identities face relatively few obstacles to achievement, but in fact titulars had achieved considerable occupational success during the Soviet era. Thus titular nationalities in the late 1980s could be considered either subordinate to or more privileged than Russians. On the one hand, titulars were subordinate: they held a larger portion of rural agricultural jobs than ethnic Russians while Russians occupied the most prestigious positions in republican economies. On the other hand, titulars were privileged: they had undergone significant socioeconomic mobility as a result of the Soviet state’s korenizatsiia, or affirmative action policies, and had moved into urban factory jobs and white-collar positions. So economic conditions in the republics during the late glasnost period and early post-Soviet period can be (and were) interpreted in multiple ways.⁹

In republics where nationalist entrepreneurs articulated issues concerning ethnic economic inequality, they were able to attract a substantial degree of popular support even though their claims did not accurately portray the socioeconomic opportunities open to titular nationalities. However, in republics where nationalists focused on articulating other issues, including cultural and language issues, they failed to win popular support. Mass nationalist mobilization took place only in those republics where nationalist entrepreneurs put forward ethnified framings of economic issues.

The experience of nationalist leaders in Russia suggests that ethnic entrepreneurs face considerable constraints. They cannot easily or mechanically attract support from ordinary people who share their ethnic identity by assuming that as coethnics they have common interests. Yet at the same time, economic issues do not work mobilizational magic. There are limits to the kinds of claims nationalists can make about economic inequality. Nationalist leaders in Russia were able to attract mass support in certain republics because their framing of issues of ethnic economic inequality resonated with people’s anxieties about job insecurity in an economy undergoing severe crisis.

In the late 1980s the Soviet economy entered a massive recession. Economic production began to contract throughout the country. At the same time, perestroika-era reforms introduced shortages of consumer goods, long lines for food, and the beginnings of unemployment.¹⁰ Soviet citizens who had become accustomed to state-provided educations, jobs, and occupational security in an expanding economy found the new conditions tremendously unsettling. As more citizens than ever before were obtaining education and training to work in an industrialized economy, people began to sense a tightening of labor opportunities. Massive fear of unemployment set in. Against this background, the nationalists’ story of titular underrepresentation and blocked opportunity in local economies persuaded people with titular identities to interpret their experiences and feelings of job insecurity in ethnic terms—as something related to the fortunes of the ethnic group. Nationalist entrepreneurs alleged that titulars were socioeconomically subordinate to Russians and depicted them as victims. Then they placed the blame for this situation on a discriminatory state. Finally they offered a solution by claiming that attaining republican sovereignty would eliminate oppression and restore justice.¹¹ Nationalists connected people’s ethnic identity to their material interest in a desirable job and to their sense of self-worth concerning their socioeconomic status. They helped to define individual interests by linking personal life chances to the fate of the nation. Even though the frame of ethnic economic inequality was not entirely accurate, the fact of rising job insecurity in a contracting, centrally planned economy made people receptive to it. Thus a group grievance developed, crystallizing a sense of ethnic nationhood among people with titular identities and inspiring them to support the call to replace the status quo with a new, national order. The framework developed in this book focuses on how a dynamic interaction between economic structures, the experiences of ordinary people, and the discourse of political entrepreneurs produces group grievances that inspire support for nationalist transformation.

The Puzzle of Nationalism in Russia’s Republics

On a campaign swing through Kazan, Tatarstan, in 1990, Boris Yeltsin told that republic’s residents, Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.¹² At the time, demands for sovereignty were radiating from the autonomous republics inside the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to Moscow. The Soviet Union collapsed a year later, and Yeltsin, who had since become president of the new Russian Federation, inherited one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s most intractable problems. As he struggled to consolidate control of the central state, several of Russia’s republics stepped up their demands on Moscow for sovereignty. They asserted control over natural resources, defied federal laws, and introduced republican presidencies. The decisions some republics made to boycott federal elections, stop paying federal taxes, and hold referenda on state sovereignty lent momentum to a process that seemed likely to end in Russia’s disintegration.

In several republics, opposition nationalist movements were attracting rising levels of popular support. Crowds grew at street demonstrations, the status of nationalist opposition leaders was rising, and local parliaments adopted legislation that directly challenged Moscow’s sovereignty. Nationalist organizations in some of the republics announced that they sought nothing less than independent statehood. Soon radical wings broke off from the main nationalist organizations to promote ethnically exclusivist agendas, sometimes hostile to Russians living in the republics. It looked as if an ethnic outbidding scenario was under way in which ethnic politicians would win mass support by advocating a more ethnically exclusivist program than other politicians and then, once in power, oppress ethnic minorities. Russia’s republics seemed about to transform from peaceful, multiethnic societies into ethnically divided, conflict-ridden ones.

The Republic of Tatarstan was one of Russia’s most nationalist republics in the early 1990s. With its large population and relatively high level of economic development, it was home to a very popular nationalist organization, the Tatar Public Center (TOTs), which had explicitly modeled itself on the Baltic popular-front organizations. TOTs began by calling for the protection of Tatar culture and ended up championing full independence for Tatarstan. In 1991 a radical wing broke off from TOTs and formed Ittifak (Alliance), which promoted an exclusivist nationalist agenda openly hostile to Russians in Tatarstan. As Ittifak attempted to win support away from the moderate Tatars, pro-Russian federalist groups organized in response. Ethnic outbidding by nationalist leaders was taking place, and within Tatarstan secession was being debated as a serious option. Moscow politicians feared that the separation of this republic would produce a domino effect leading to the ethnic unraveling of the fledgling federation. At one point, rumors circulated within Tatarstan that federal troops were being massed at its borders. Yet despite Tatarstan’s early and strong mass nationalist mobilization, neither ethnic outbidding nor nationalist secession ultimately took place. Popular support for the nationalist movement weakened. By the mid-1990s, Mintimir Shaimiev, a Soviet-era communist leader, born again to some extent as a Tatar nationalist, managed to consolidate control over republican politics. With the 1994 conclusion of a bilateral treaty between Tatarstan and Moscow, the republic backed away from national secession.

In addition to Tatarstan, only a few of Russia’s republics—Tuva and Chechnya, and to a lesser degree Bashkortostan and Yakutia—experienced nationalist mobilization at the mass level. In other republics very little popular nationalist mobilization took place at all. Why? What can account for the short-lived development of mass nationalist mobilization in certain republics, and its virtual absence in others? This book examines these questions through both an in-depth analysis of politics in Tatarstan and a comparative analysis of Russia’s fifteen other autonomous republics. Soviet leaders had established the ARs as homelands for certain ethnic groups, although large populations of ethnic Russians lived there as well. The republics looked considerably more like states than the ethnic regions ranked lower in the Soviet Union’s administrative hierarchy—the autonomous oblasts (regions) and autonomous okrugs (districts)—because they had their own legislatures, executives, and judiciaries, as well as flags, constitutions, and some national language education.¹³ Also, compared with the lower-ranked ethnic territories, the ARs were allowed greater, albeit symbolic, representation in the federal government and limited rights to set local administrative policy. In this book I compare only those Russian regions that held the status of AR before 1991 in order to hold constant these factors of rights, privileges, and institutional development. I also focus on the ARs because they, like Russia’s oblasts, were politically more important than lower-level ethnic territories. Thus, I exclude republics that were elevated from autonomous oblast to republic in 1991: Adygei, Gorni Altai, Khakassia, Karachai-Cherkessia, and Ingushetia, which split off from Checheno-Ingushetia in 1992. These republics displayed very little nationalism and therefore add no variation to the original sixteen ARs. The republics analyzed in this book are depicted in Map 1.1.¹⁴

MAP 1.1 Autonomous areas in Russia

Competing Explanations of Nationalism in Russia

Political scientists have devoted much attention to explaining the emergence of ethnonationalist separatism across the Soviet space, as well as its ultimate failure in Russia. Historical institutionalist explanations, for example, demonstrate how the Soviet state’s nationality policies and ethnofederal structure created ethnic elites in the republics and furnished them with identities, territories, and institutional resources that they would use to forge campaigns for autonomy against Moscow.¹⁵ Another set of studies focuses on macroeconomic factors to explain variation in nationalist separatism across the republics. In this approach, leaders of resource-rich, economically developed republics were motivated by their republics’ wealth to demand greater sovereignty, while leaders of poorer, economically dependent republics remained quiescent.¹⁶ One variant of these wealth hypotheses argues that the Russian Federation, unlike the Soviet Union, survived as an ethnofederal state because Moscow appeased the wealthiest, most separatist republics with economic transfers and bilateral treaties granting increased autonomy.¹⁷ Still other studies account for the weak degree of nationalism in most Russian republics by pointing to factors such as ethnic demography and the administrative status of federal regions. Demographic explanations maintain that the proportionally larger number of ethnic Russians in Russia’s republics than in the union republics made the former less likely to support nationalism.¹⁸ The administrative-status approach contends that Russia’s lower-status ARs had fewer privileges, rights, and ethnic institutions than the URs and thus were less likely to identify as independent states.¹⁹

Although most of these explanations have advanced our understanding, they share three main shortcomings. First, many studies focus on the presence or absence of structural variables, arguing that the right combination of variables or the correct set of economic and political conditions will spark mass nationalism. This approach reifies ethnic groups and overestimates the likelihood of nationalist mobilization. Second, most accounts focus almost exclusively on elite actors and especially on the role of regional leaders. They valuably delineate how regional leaders manipulated ethnic identify for strategic reasons yet assume that these leaders acted autonomously within the republics and fomented mass nationalism to strengthen their negotiating position with Moscow. In this view, leaders act strategically while masses act out of a sincere commitment to nationalism—an approach that essentializes ethnic populations. Third, few studies sufficiently account for empirical variation in levels of separatism across all the ethnic republics of either the Russian Federation or the Soviet Union.²⁰ Studies that focus on structural economic and political variables to explain empirical variation fail to recognize how the massive political transformations occurring at the time affected both mass and elite actors within the republics and therefore republican relations with Moscow. They overlook how popular mobilization in certain republics pressured regional leaders and drove secessionist campaigns toward Moscow.²¹ Finally, virtually no existing studies offer a comparative account of the rise of mass nationalism across all the republics, though ethnic politics continues to be a central issue in Russia.²²

Much of this critique is not unique to post-Soviet politics. Generally, in analyses of multiethnic societies, observers tend to naturalize the existence of bounded ethnic groups and view them as easily triggered into political action along ethnic lines. Though most observers now recognize the constructed origins of ethnic groups, some erroneously treat these groups as coherent actors moving forward through time from the moment of their construction, typically thought to have occurred in the early twentieth century. My argument in this book, by contrast, is that people with ethnic affiliations do not constitute an interest group that endures over time.

In Russia, people with Russian and titular identities were not separate, self-enclosed communities who got along at some points in time and came into conflict at others. Like most ethnically heterogeneous societies around the world, Russian republics were not societies divided along ethnic lines. To assert that boundaries enclosing ethnic groups are porous and blurry means, first, that individual members of ethnic groups have many experiences in common with members of other groups. For example, titulars and Russians attended the same schools, lived in the same neighborhoods,²³ and shopped for the same consumer goods.²⁴ They worked in