In Legitimating Nationalism, Katie Stewart opens a window into one of the most important phenomena of the Vladimir Putin era in Russia, namely the rise of state-sponsored Russian nationalism. The book begins with the premise that understanding how state efforts to create a sense of Russian national identity requires understanding of how those efforts play out in the regions, and in particular in the ethnically non-Russian republics. The book focuses on monuments, holidays, museums, and textbooks in Moscow as well as the republics of Kareliia, Tatarstan, and Buriatiia. The book is timely because although there is a general appreciation for the rise of some kind of state-sponsored nationalism in the Putin years, much of that work has focused on the efforts by the Putin regime and the contradictions within understandings of what it means to be Russian, and there is much less work explaining the success of national identity strategies in the regions.Footnote 1
Stewart’s empirical analysis in Legitimating Nationalism takes up the call from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, one of the most important theoretical works on the formation of nationalism and national identities. Stewart’s theory, with its emphasis on regional leverage and the interplay of center and regional resources taps into other important works on nationalism and center-periphery relations in Russia.Footnote 2
One of the biggest puzzles of the Russian Federation of the 2000s in comparison to Russia of the 1990s is the radical turn-around in support for the center, especially in the ethnically non-Russian republics. When the Russian Federation was formed following the collapse of the USSR, it took Boris Elʹtsin more than a year to negotiate a federation treaty. The republics of Tatarstan and Chechnya were serious holdouts, but even the ethnically Russian regions were vying to get more sovereignty vis-à-vis the center.Footnote 3 Eventually Yeltsin authorized the invasion of Chechnya to reassert federal control and put a stop to its sovereignty movement, leading to the first Chechen war (1994–96), which ended in disaster for the Russian military.
Only three years later, it was a priority for Vladimir Putin to retake control of Chechnya, which he did with brutal force in 1999, beginning the second Chechen War right from the start of his presidency. That destructive war ended with the installation of Ramzan Kadyrov, a cruel and violent regional dictator, who is completely dependent on and loyal to Moscow. However, Chechnya is not the only region whose leadership came around to strongly supporting Putin: Tatarstan had been, after Chechnya, the second most vocal advocate of greater regional sovereignty in the 1990s, and other regions whose governors had fought for the ability to be independently elected in the 1990s completely capitulated to Putin’s end to regional executive elections in 2004. Moreover, if we look at vote totals over time for Putin and his governing party, United Russia, some of the non-Russian ethnic republics like Tatarstan are the federal regime’s biggest supporters. This colossal reversal in federal relations in a very short time is an unusual comparative perspective and it is consequential for the governance and capacity of the Russian state today.
The context of Russia’s anti-migrant campaigns, its wars in Georgia and Ukraine, including the Crimea invasion and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, only heighten the question of how a multi-ethnic, multi-religious federation manages to both be at war with ethnic non-Russians and also be able to capture the loyalty of ethnically non-Russian regions. This is all the more salient with the need for military mobilization (conscription) owing to Russia’s war on Ukraine, for which casualty estimates have exceeded 700,000 people, many reported to be from Tyva, Buriatiia, and other ethnically non-Russian regions. How has the regime developed a sense of Russian national identity across the federation and how does it work in ethnically non-Russian regions? Stewart’s book addresses these timely questions.
The puzzle of non-Russian republican support for the Putin government and the federal Russian state is one of the key questions that Legitimating Nationalism explicitly takes up. Using original survey data, Stewart does an analysis of three ethnically non-Russian regions (Kareliia, Tatarstan, and Buriatiia) and also three Russian regions (Murmansk, Samara, and Irkutsk) in terms of the determinants of the sense of pride in belonging to the Russian nation, the probability of voting for United Russia, as well as regional pride. The findings show differences across regions and contain some surprises.
Stewart argues that some regions, such as Tatarstan, are able to combine regional identity with support for the Russian state, a strategy she calls “inclusive,” while Buriatiia has had to adopt an “accommodative” strategy that preserves some aspects of regional identity but does not promote it explicitly, and Kareliia has an “assimilationist” strategy in which regional identity is subsumed by the larger Russian national identity. The book also covers a lot of ground in theories of nationalism and the factors that might allow regions to be more assertive in promoting or including their regional identities.
The empirical chapters in the second part of the book provide much needed detail and information on the actual process of nation building in Russia. There are chapters on monuments, holidays, regional museums, and regional history textbooks. These chapters provide insight into how the state actually operates at the regional level and how citizens interact with state nation-building strategies.
Despite making great strides towards a more nuanced understanding of national identity and nation-building in regions of Russia, Legitimating Nationalism is more of the beginning of a research agenda rather than the end. Future work might take up the question more explicitly of how regional identity construction has changed from the Soviet to the Elʹtsin to the Putin eras. After all, the early Soviet policy of korenizatsiia and the processes of non-Russian nation building outlined, for example by Ronald Suny in his classic book, The Making of the Georgian Nation, highlighted this contradiction between the central Soviet state project and the contradicting regional identities,Footnote 4 and it would be interesting to understand how this process has changed systematically over time, or whether there are similarities in the Soviet and Putin era nation-building projects in the republics. Another extension of this work would be to consider all twenty republics in Russia and the extent to which they follow the patterns that Stewart found for Kareliia, Tatarstan, and Buriatiia.
Another question with regard to Putin’s national identity strategy is to interrogate to what extent it is actually is a purposeful strategy, versus just something the regime tried out and it seemed to work. This has been a question of governance under Putin for some time, and I think applies equally well to the question of nation building. To some extent Stewart addresses this in the second part of the book, but more explicit attention to the question of purposeful or planned strategy is something future scholarship might interrogate. Finally, and this is almost impossible in today’s Russia, understanding more of the agency and strategy not only of central state identity entrepreneurs, but also of regional actors, including more interviews with museum curators, city planners, and school administrators would be helpful is filling out the process of regional actors creating and adapting regional identities to the context of central plans.
Legitimating Nationalism is a welcome and timely addition to scholarship on national identity and nation building in Russia and its regions. It provides much needed insight into the way in which the Putin regime, despite literally destroying Russia as country economically, socially, and politically for decades to come and inflicting genocidal damage on Ukraine and other neighboring states, still manages to command majority support among its multi-ethnic, multi-religious population of Russian citizens.
