Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Russian nationalism is back – but precisely what does that mean?
- 1 The ethnification of Russian nationalism
- 2 The imperial syndrome and its influence on Russian nationalism
- 3 Radical nationalists from the start of Medvedev's presidency to the war in Donbas: True till death?
- 4 Russian ethnic nationalism and religion today
- 5 Everyday nationalism in Russia in European context: Moscow residents’ perceptions of ethnic minority migrants and migration
- 6 Backing the USSR 2.0: Russia's ethnic minorities and expansionist ethnic Russian nationalism
- 7 Rallying ’round the leader more than the flag: Changes in Russian nationalist public opinion 2013–14
- 8 How nationalism and machine politics mix in Russia
- 9 Blurring the boundary between civic and ethnic: The Kremlin's new approach to national identity under Putin's third term
- 10 Russia as an anti-liberal European civilisation
- 11 Ethnicity and nationhood on Russian state-aligned television: Contextualising geopolitical crisis
- 12 The place of economics in Russian national identity debates
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Rallying ’round the leader more than the flag: Changes in Russian nationalist public opinion 2013–14
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Russian nationalism is back – but precisely what does that mean?
- 1 The ethnification of Russian nationalism
- 2 The imperial syndrome and its influence on Russian nationalism
- 3 Radical nationalists from the start of Medvedev's presidency to the war in Donbas: True till death?
- 4 Russian ethnic nationalism and religion today
- 5 Everyday nationalism in Russia in European context: Moscow residents’ perceptions of ethnic minority migrants and migration
- 6 Backing the USSR 2.0: Russia's ethnic minorities and expansionist ethnic Russian nationalism
- 7 Rallying ’round the leader more than the flag: Changes in Russian nationalist public opinion 2013–14
- 8 How nationalism and machine politics mix in Russia
- 9 Blurring the boundary between civic and ethnic: The Kremlin's new approach to national identity under Putin's third term
- 10 Russia as an anti-liberal European civilisation
- 11 Ethnicity and nationhood on Russian state-aligned television: Contextualising geopolitical crisis
- 12 The place of economics in Russian national identity debates
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
From May 2013 to November 2014, Russia's domestic and international environment underwent a tectonic shift. As hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens in neighbouring Ukraine rose up against the Moscow-backed and increasingly authoritarian government of Viktor Yanukovych and ultimately ousted him in early 2014, the Kremlin and the media it controls ratcheted up anti-Western rhetoric, dramatically increased its use of nationalist themes, and even employed military force in a sudden operation to annex the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and its port of Sevastopol, which Ukraine had since independence rented out to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The Kremlin then expanded its activity with a separatist insurgency in parts of eastern Ukraine. The Russian state, after almost a quarter century of retreat and recovery, finally appeared to be striking back to restore what many Russians saw as its rightful place in the world.
Theories of nationalism indicate that such events would have a profound effect on Russia's national and state identity among the general public – particularly given the intense use of state-backed symbolic politics (Suny 1993; Billig 1995; Kaufman 2001), the invocation of emotive mythology and rhetoric (Breuilly 1993), the direct contestation of state borders (Brubaker 1996), the putative need to respond to invasive international influences (Greenfeld 1992), the mobilisation of nationalist collective action (Hechter 1995; Wintrobe 1995), and changing social categorisations (Horowitz 1985). With these factors suddenly becoming more prominent during 2013 and 2014, one would expect significant shifts in support among the Russian public for various ‘institutionalized forms of [nationalist] inclusion and exclusion’ (Wimmer 2002: 9) – that is, attitudes as to which groups to include or exclude from the nation or the state. Indeed, there is a significant literature that argues state leaders often anticipate such upswells of nationalist and patriotic sentiment and sometimes even launch wars precisely in order to generate ‘rally-around- the- flag’ effects that can squelch dissent and boost support for a leadership whose popularity is flagging (see Levy 1989).
- Type
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- Information
- The New Russian NationalismImperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism 2000–2015, pp. 192 - 220Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016