Abstract
There is a tendency among scholars to understand political developments in post-communist states within the framework of nation-state building. Thus, as far as Russia is concerned, the dominant approach among Western scholars as well as many Russians is to see the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the emergence of the independent Russian Federation as a new chance for the Russians to build a nation-state. Some Russians imagine their new state in rather exclusive ethnic terms, others advocate a civic (rossiiskaia) nation-state of fellow citizens regardless of their ethnicity.
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These tendencies are not entirely new. The idea that peoples of the Caucasus and Muslims were Russia’s main others and even ‘traditional enemies’ of the Russian people started to be articulated by Russian nationalists in the late 1960s.
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Tolz, V. (2004). A Future Russia: A Nation-state or a Multi-national Federation?. In: Slater, W., Wilson, A. (eds) The Legacy of the Soviet Union. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524408_2
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