This article examines how the annexation of Austrian (East) Galicia emerged as a distinct political—and ultimately military—mission in St. Petersburg before the First World War. The Russian nationalist project to recover the “lost lands of Rus΄ became an extension of the domestic agenda formulated by Peter Stolypin to promote Russian political and cultural hegemony in the western provinces of the empire. The campaign to liberate Subjugated Rus΄ and defeat “Ukrainian separatism” in Galicia led St. Petersburg to become ever more deeply engaged in the complex borderland politics of the Habsburg empire in the years before the war. By 1914, the idea of Subjugated Rus΄ and “four million persecuted Russians” came to inform the whole of St. Petersburg's understanding of its relations with Vienna and created an expectation that war with Austria-Hungary was inevitable.

The article dwells upon the use of the symbol of the “Motherland” in the legitimation and delegitimation of power. The Motherland symbolizes the matters that are essential for legitimacy-seeking: the unity of Russia, its territory and sacredness of its borders, the most important events of its history, the “authentic Russianness,” and multi-ethnic peace in the country. The author argues that the Motherland serves as an important factor of the legitimation of power in contemporary Russia, which allows the authorities to have high popularity both in domestic and foreign policies. This symbol is also actively exploited by the opposition; one mode of the delegitimation of power through using the symbol of Motherland (the “populist” mode) implies the symbolic struggle for possessing this symbol, or for the right to speak on behalf of the Motherland, while another one (the “liberal” mode) implies the desacralization of the “Motherland” and deconstruction of the practices of employing the symbol by the authorities.

How to cope with the end of utopia? How to move from making history on a day-to-day basis to capitalizing on a legend? That is the dilemma Russian veterans of the Donbas insurgency have faced since the exalting atmosphere of Novorossiya faded away. In this article, I trace the transformations of the Novorossiya utopia from the point at which Russian volunteer fighters began to return to Russia and found themselves compelled to reinvent themselves in a new context. I first look at the difficult reconversion from war to politics of Donbas heroes such as Igor Strelkov and Aleksandr Borodai and how their efforts to launch new structures based on their war legitimacy have succeeded or failed. I then turn to investigate the birth of new heroes, such as the writer Zakhar Prilepin, who wave the metaphorical flag of Donbas at a time when exaltation of the war has declined. After that, I explore how Novorossiya has become a literature genre that occupies the shelves of Russian bookstores, spanning from Novorossievedenie—the “science of Novorossiya”—to the rich subgenre of war memoirs and veteran diaries.

This article focuses on ideological constructions of contemporary nationalism shaped by the influence of Dmitrii Galkovskii. At the dawn of the Russian Internet, Galkovskii’s website, Samizdat, became the birthplace for intellectuals of contemporary Russian nationalism who emerged around Voprosy natsionalizma magazine and the online magazine Sputnik i Pogrom. Enemification strategies described in this article are understood as forms of self-representation of contemporary Russian nationalism. The goal of this article is to characterize one of the ideologies of contemporary Russian nationalism, which serves as a moral justification for some odious manifestations—xenophobia and racism. Three forces are characterized by contemporary Russian nationalists as the most dangerous challenges for the nation: the West, internal enemies, and migrants. Traditional and fundamental anti-Western rhetoric has turned into Anglophobia in the ideology of contemporary Russian nationalism. The most profound evidence might be found in Galkovskii’s conception of the history of international relations. This idea is also used when defining the internal enemy. Caucasians have taken the place of Russian nationalism’s previous main internal enemies, Jews, and are treated as representatives of the British colonial administration. The third enemy of modern Russian nationalism is migrants. They are seen as tools of the degradation policy toward Russians.

This article focuses on the shaping of the aesthetics and ideology of Eduard Limonov's National-Bolshevik Party (NBP) through the pages of the radical newspaper Limonka. In order to study the making of the NBP as a political and intellectual community, the piece discusses Limonka's editorial line, its graphic style, and the alternative cultural canon that this radical publication promoted, as well as several interviews with National-Bolshevik activists involved in this process. During its first years of existence, Limonka proposed a selection of controversial artistic, literary, and political role models, and the creation of an alternative fashion and lifestyle. The article argues that by provocatively combining totalitarian symbols, the aesthetics and posture of the historical avant-gardes, and Western counterculture, Limonka produced a collective narrative that contributed to the shaping of a new language of political protest in post-Soviet Russia. This resulted in a complex combination of stiob, a form of parody that involves an over-identification with its own object, and a neo-romantic impulse. This new discursive mode, which the article defines as “post-Soviet militant stiob” should be seen as part of a series of tactics of radical resistance to what the National-Bolsheviks saw as the dominant neoliberal discourse of the mid-1990s.

The article examines some generic traits of the “new” Russian ethnic nationalism, namely, de-ideologization of the nationalist milieu and its inclination for civic activism. It results from a case study of the Frontier of the North (FN – Syktyvkar), an ideologically ambivalent organization that combines dual Russian/Komi ethnic nationalism, anti-migration sentiments, white racism, and fragments of other ideologies. The article demonstrates that, unlike nationalists of the previous generation, FN is not hostile to public authorities and is ready to cooperate with them. FN's grassroots activism, as well as sports and healthy recreational activities, attracts young people. The organization tackles the most acute social problems, often neglected by everyone else, and has become a working civil society institution. The authors argue that these tactics win the “new” nationalists sympathy among ordinary people and makes the groups politically stronger and more influential than the previous nationalist generation. However, state anti-extremist policy hampers the advancement of nationalists into mainstream politics.

This article examines the reverberations in Russia of the Euromaidan protests and the fall of the Yanukovych regime in Ukraine. It shows how the events in Kyiv provoked a major crisis in the Russian nationalist movement, which was riven by vituperative denunciations, the ostracism of prominent activists, the breakdown of friendships, the rupture of alliances, and schisms within organizations. Focusing on pro-Kremlin nationalists and several tendencies of opposition nationalists, it argues that this turmoil was shaped by three factors. First, the Euromaidan provoked clashes between pro-Kremlin nationalists, who became standard-bearers of official anti-Euromaidan propaganda, and anti-Putin nationalists, who extolled the Euromaidan as a model for a revolution in Russia itself. Second, the events in Ukraine provoked ideological contention around issues of particular sensitivity to Russian nationalists, such as the competing claims of imperialism and ethnic homogeneity, and of Soviet nationalism and Russian traditionalism. And third, many nationalists were unprepared for the pace of events, which shifted rapidly from an anti-oligarchic uprising in Kyiv to a push for the self-determination of ethnic Russians in Crimean and southeast Ukraine. As a result, they were left in the uncomfortable position of appearing to collaborate with the oppressors of their compatriots.

This article examines the rise of Russkii Obraz, a Russian ultranationalist organization whose leaders cultivated a neo-fascist ideology and collaborated with skinhead gangs. Despite its extremism, Russkii Obraz played an important role in the Kremlin's “managed nationalism,” a set of measures to manipulate the nationalist sector of the political arena. During 2008–2009, Russkii Obraz collaborated closely with pro-Kremlin youth organizations and enjoyed privileged access to Russia's tightly controlled public sphere. This article argues that the key to Russkii Obraz's brief ascendancy was its duality, its capacity to project moderation in public and extremism in private. For several years, this duality enabled Russkii Obraz to participate in public life while building a support base in the skinhead subculture. But the two projects collided when the security organs exposed Russkii Obraz's links to an ultranationalist death-squad. Nevertheless, official indulgence of Russkii Obraz cannot be attributed merely to ignorance of its violent potential. This indulgence also reflected the fact that it was precisely those at the neo-fascist limits of the political spectrum who were most willing to collaborate in the regime's efforts to suppress demands for democratization.

Influential scholarship on the Brezhnev era has described the instrumental official support for Russian nationalist themes and pre-socialist imagery in public discourse as a deliberate “politics of inclusion,” designed to co-opt certain nationalist intellectuals and the sympathies of the state's core of ethnic Russians for the purpose of popular mobilization. How this policy related to and interacted with the ubiquitous official commemoration and mythologization of the Great Fatherland War during this period, however, has remained unexplored. Based on a number of the most important Russophilic publications in the censored press - the writings of the so-called “Chalmaevists” - this article contends that despite unambiguously russocentric, single-stream readings of history in general, when it came to the war in particular, nationalist intellectuals tended to muffle their russocentrism through opaque language or an avoidance of the war's larger significance, or conformed to the war's official (supra-ethnic, socialist) reading. It was only in samizdat that the essentially Russian, primordial nature of victory in 1945 could be fully articulated. The present study thus probes the limits of the concept of inclusionary politics and underscores the party leadership's apparent commitment to maintaining the war myth's predominantly supranational, socialist significance as a means of fostering all-Soviet, rather than Russian national, solidarity.