Nationalism in Russian republics: historical and comparative perspective
On November, 10th, 2011 Andrey Scherbak (research fellow at the LCSR) gave a talk on “Nationalism in Russian republics: historical and comparative perspective”.
On November, 10th, 2011 Andrey Scherbak (research fellow at the LCSR) gave a talk on “Nationalism in Russian republics: historical and comparative perspective”.
The 1990-s were characterized by a sudden rise of national movements in almost all Russian ethnic regions. The 2000-s are often presented as a period of political stability. The project carried out by Andrey Scherbak attempts to answer the following questions. How may one explain nationalism in Russian ethnic republics? Should the rise of ethnic nationalism in Russia be treated as kind of a deviation, related solely to the crisis and collapse of the Soviet state and weakness of new Russian state, or it could be regarded as a much deeper phenomenon? Andrey hypothesized that it is a much deeper phenomenon traced back to Soviet times.
Andrey uses the modernist approach to nationalism which considers nationalism to be invented in the modern time. He bases his research on several theories developed by B. Anderson and E. Gellner, Miroslav Hroch, David Laitin, Dmitry Gorenburg. According to David Laitin, nationalism is a privilege of rich societies, because they may afford to invest resources in inventing, maintaining and spreading national traditions, customs, beliefs. Dmitry Gorenburg distinguishes two types of nationalism. Cultural nationalism is defined as support of the titular (national) official language, the expansion of its teaching in schools, introduction of a greater or lesser degree requirements or incentives to teach the titular language representatives of non-titular nation. Political nationalism (separatism) may be defined as demand for declaration of national sovereignty and recognition of the right to national self-determination up to secession. The Gorenburg’s argument about interdependence of cultural and political nationalism is used by Andrey in his work. It implies that under special conditions (e.g. during political crises) political nationalism will be stronger in those regions with the higher level of cultural nationalism.
Applying a comparative historical approach, Andrey expects a path-dependency effect: present nationalism is predicted by developments in the past. The entire period from the Soviet rule (1917-1985) up to now was split it in 5 periods: 1917-25; 1925-40; 1940-1955;1955-1985; 1986-2000. The unit of analysis is an ethnic region. The independent variables in the model are the following: formal status (status of ethnic region in the official Soviet hierarchy), informal status (based on nationality of the first party secretary), industrial output growth rates index (indicator of industrial development), non-orthodox religion. The dependent variables indicate the levels of political and cultural nationalism. They are measured in different ways for the Soviet period and 1990s.
The research has been done on the Soviet period. The preliminary results show that cultural nationalism is positively correlated with industrial output growth rates and slightly with formal status. Formal and informal statuses are also positively correlated; informal status is negatively correlated with non-Orthodox religion. Andrey is planning to extend research to the post-Soviet period and take into account budget statistics on expenditures on ethnic institutions support. New approaches to measuring region’s informal status will be applied. Structure equation modeling will be used to connect political nationalism, cultural nationalism and explanatory variables. The main hypothesis is that cultural nationalism predicts political nationalism.