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«Nationalism in Russian Ethnic Republics in Comparative and Historical Perspective»

Andrey Shcherbak's report at the LCSR regular seminar.

Andrew Shcherbak, «Nationalism in Russian Ethnic Republics in Comparative and Historical Perspective» at the regular seminar of the Laboratory on the 15th of November, 2012.  

This is the third Andrey’s progress report. The previous two took place in November 2011 and March 2012. In his project Andrey aims to explain the rise of ethnic nationalism in Russia in 1990-s. Whether it was a kind of deviation, related to the socio-economic crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet state, or this phenomenon is much deeply rooted in history of Russian ethnic regions?

Conceptual framework of this research is based on a theory developed by Dmitry Gorenburg, who defined two type of nationalism: political nationalism (separatism) and cultural nationalism (expansion of titular language). Following the idea that cultural and political nationalisms are interdependent, Andrey tries to answer two main research questions. The first question is whether cultural nationalism affects political nationalism and the second one is what predicts the higher level of cultural nationalism.

Applying comparative historical approach, Andrey anticipates the effect of continuity: the level of nationalism nowadays depends on its level in the past. Structural equation modeling is the most relevant approach to test this effect. The subject of analysis is ethnic region so the sample contains only 21 cases. It doesn’t allow using latent variables in analysis, so indices of cultural and political nationalism are constructed for different time periods. 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.

Five models were presented and preliminary conclusions were made. Cultural nationalism is successive in historical perspective, reflects inheritance of Soviet national policies and does affect political nationalism in 1990-s. Analysis shows that political nationalism is caused by many factors. However, religion is not the most powerful predictor. Formal status affects political nationalism directly, not through cultural nationalism. The most important predictors explaining cultural nationalism in several periods are informal status and industrial growth rate.

Now the main problem of research is small sample size and if chosen methods are applicable. However, Christian Welzel highly appreciated scientific potential of the project. He also agreed that the best subject of analysis is region. Kirill Zhirkov and Serban Tanasa suggested some sophisticated statistical techniques for checking robustness of results like jackknife and bootstrap.

by Irina Vartanova

Presentation