Russian Nationalist Consensus Today Holds that the Civic Russian Nation is ‘a Poly-Ethnic System Headed by Russians,’ Verkhovsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 21 – A consensus has emerged among those who consider themselves to be Russian nationalists both among the political elite and the population of the Russian Federation that “the civic Russian [rossiysky] nation is ‘a poly-ethnic system headed by ethnic Russians [russkiye]. According to Aleksandr Verkhovsky, head of the SOVA Research Center.

            That understanding, he says, has emerged after intensive debate in the first two decades of post-Soviet Russia, debates that led to a downgrading of the primordialist understanding of nationality that the Soviet government supported and toward the rise of the more inclusive psychological one Putin has promoted (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/01/21/russkii-natsionalisticheskii-konsensus).

            In a lengthy article, Verkhovsky traces the evolution of Russian nationalist activists and the Russian government from the 1990s to the mid-2010s before offering his conclusions as to where Russian nationalists and the Kremlin now stand on what has long been the sensitive issue of the relationship between civic and ethnic nationhood.

            As he shows, these debates were intense largely because the Russian government did not get involved. “But in 2011-2013,” he writes, in opposition to various ethno-nationalisms, including the ethnic Russian, the conception of Russia as ‘a nation-civilization’ consisting of many peoples among whom the ethnic Russians were the system-forming was formulated.”

            The need for clarity on this point was also intensified by developments in Ukraine from the Maidan to 2014 and then even more by Putin’s launch of his expanded war there in 2022. And thus unlike in the Russian population where primordial understandings continued, the Russian authorities and Russian nationalists with few exceptions now define it culturally.”

            There remain, of course, differences “on the degree of inclusiveness of the Russian community,” but these appear to be less the product of theoretical discussions than about the practical issues of how easy it should be for those not born of two ethnic Russian parents to become Russians.