Post-Soviet States Engaged in Building Nation States Not in Ethnic Nation Building, Iskandaryan Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 10 – Aleksandr Iskandaryan, who has lived in the Republic of Armenia since 2002 and now heads that country’s Institute of the Caucasus, says that Armenia like the other post-Soviet countries is engaged in the process of building a nation state rather than in forming an ethnic nation.

            Those are two very different things, he points out. The first involves creating a set of institutions and ideas about the relationship of the state to its population while the latter is all about defining an ethnic nation, two processes that may occur together but must not be confused (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/04/10/natsiia-stroisia).

            The former is better captured by the English words “nation sate, a government of citizens” than in Russian where “in the word ‘nation’ is the component of ‘an ethnic state,’” something that is incorrect. For example, ‘the construction of a nation state is translated as state construction and not nation building.”

            “Before modern times,” the Armenian scholar says, the normal state was an empire; but the residents of an empire did not have the identity which they have now. Individuals defined themselves by religion or sometimes subject status, that is by saying who was their tsar or their hehshah.”

            Iskandaryan says that he doesn’t think that the Chechen national project has failed because “ever more of them consider themselves to be a nation in the contemporary sense of this word” and act accordingly in ways that are very different from other parts of the Russian Federation. “I would call Chechnya a proto-state.”

            Elsewhere in Russia processes are taking place “like those we saw in the Soviet Union earlier,” he continues. “The present day North Caucasus as regards the birth of nationalist ideologies is similar to the South Caucasus of the 1970s and 1980s. We see the same processes in Tatarstan and Sakha.”

            “But this doesn’t necessarily mean,” Iskandaryan concludes, that this process will be rapid or lead in only one direction. After all, “we have seen Scottish nationalism for 700 years;” and it is not yet an independent country.