Nationalism in Russian Ethnic Republics
Andrey Shcherbak gave a talk on the regular seminar of LCSR.
On the 22nd of March, 2012, Andrey Shcherbak, LCSR research fellow, presented a report «Nationalism in Russian Ethnic Republics in Comparative and Historical Perspective» at the regular seminar of the Laboratory. His research is devoted to nationalism in Russian ethnic republics.
Andrey has been working on this topiс for a long time. Presenting progress report on this issue at the seminar in November, 2011, he has already coved theoretical framework of this project. This time Andrey briefly recalled the main concepts his research is based on.
As a researcher, Andrey adopts modernist approach of studying nationalism according to which this concept was invented in modern era. The study is based on several theoretical works: B. Anderson & E. Gellner, M. Hroch, D. Laitin and D. Gorenburg. According to David Laitin, nationalism is a privilege of rich societies that can afford investment in creation, maintaining and spreading of national traditions, customs and beliefs. Gorenburg distinguishes two types of nationalism: cultural and political. Cultural nationalism implies support of titular (national) language, school education in this language, and implementation of requirements of various degrees of severity for the representatives of other nations to study this language. Meanwhile political nationalism is one of the requirements of proclamation of national sovereignty and the recognition of the right to national self-determination up to the complete separation. Andrey follows the idea of Gorenburg that cultural and political nationalisms are interdependent. This thesis means that in specific conditions (e.g. during the political crisis) political nationalism becomes stronger in the regions with higher level of cultural nationalism.
Applying comparative historical approach, Andrey Shcherbak anticipates the effect of continuity: the level of nationalism nowadays is defined by its development in the past. For the aim of checking this hypothesis the period from the Soviet era to modern times was divided into five periods: 1917-25; 1925-40; 1940-1955; 1955-1985; 1986-2000. The subject of analysis is ethnic region. The independent variables in the model are formal status (the status of district in official Soviet administrative-territorial system), informal status (nationality of the first Secretary of the party in the region in the Soviet times), index of the industry growth rate, affiliation of the population to the religion other than orthodox Christianity. Dependent variables reflect the level of political and cultural nationalism. They are measured differently for the Soviet period and for 1990-s.
In order to reveal the dependencies between different types of nationalism in various periods of time SEM analysis was conducted. Six different models were built and two of them were found the most efficient.
After the report, several questions about constructed indices were asked. Besides, some attempts of interpretation of revealed links were made.
by Olga Basmanova