Russian Politics Today Stability and Fragility

Russia is a multiethnic and multireligious polity, with a long history of managing ethnic and religious identities and group allegiances. This chapter first briefly introduces the Russian Empire’s multireligious and multiethnic structure before proceeding to the critical transformations of ethnic and religious identities in the Soviet period. Soviet policies promoted and ideologically reformulated ethnolinguistic identities as the building blocks of a multiethnic federation. Soviet official policies toward religion were also a central element of a great transformation that elevated ethnicity and imbued it with socialist content as a primordial social identity, while persecuting and downgrading religious identities. The chapter then addresses the post-Soviet period and the changes in ethnic policies that took place from Yeltsin to Putin. In the Yeltsin years, the pendulum swung between two extremes of ethnic policies, represented by Yeltsin’s call for ethnic republics to “take as much sovereignty as [they] can swallow” in 1990 and his decision to invade Chechnya in 1994. During this period, majority and minority religions experienced a significant revival. After the 2000s, official policies accelerated processes of assimilation, and the revival and salience of ethnic and religious identities are related to domestic power struggles and foreign policy. Putin has used the Russian Orthodox Church in support of his domestic and international political goals in a way no Russian leader has done since the tsars, and he also relied on ethnic Russian nationalism in legitimizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea.