The practices of the official identities functioning in different state systems are best viewed as an attempt to answer the call of time from the position of political culture. Finding out the type of responding for every certain society, they gain operative space in situations, when the changing character of power requires a new (or a renewed) legitimation. The Russian history gives a contradictory, but very informative material for the purposes of finding out the instrument sense of identification practices functions.

An important sign of the civilization level, sense competency and elitary reflectedness of bureaucracy ethno-confessional management, can be seen in the success extent of the official identification in the context of Russian Imperial, Soviet and post-Imperial state system. This managing activity is aimed at hampering the shocks, inevitably manifesting themselves in cases of conflict between the "lower" of vernacular identities functioning in the power framework of the imperial universalism.

Bureaucracy of the Russian Empire solved the problems of ethnics and confessions, using cynic, but effective way of maximizing the advantages of foreign and domestic politics. The methods of functioning and the aims achieved showed this tradition to be quite logic, simple and clear. Vernacular identities were included in the framework of the imperial priorities nomenclature, and were contented depending on their position in the Imperial politics hierarchy. The traditional amorphity and viscid sluggishness of the vernacular identification routine practice were "comfortable" for the authority. As C. Levi-Strauss mentioned, the communities, using the mythological idea of universe construction, are marked with a remarkable stability and endurance, because an non formalized tradition wouldn’t let the knowledge die away. So that all authorities’ attempts of constructing new identities in the modernization epochs were "locally" considered to be coercion.

For the Soviet bureaucracy, with the identification practices (and the national politics too) formed under the rationalist speculations of the modernity, the Imperial tradition of ethno-confessional management seemed to be too archaic and complicated. The restoration of the certain Imperial traditions of forcing universalist identities in the Soviet epoch, should no drive attention away from the innovational character of discourse formation itself.

Transforming themselves and generating a new tradition, Soviet practices of forcing new identities, ensured regime’s certain stability. But the problem of the Soviet period lay not only in strict mobilization context of such "identification creativity", but also in 70-years of attempts to rewrite the history and, "by the way", change the view on the old identities. As the result, the ethno-confessional management in the Soviet Union turned out to be unsuccessful because of efficiency lack.

As it is noted in Dmitry Liukshin’s (participant of the "geography group" of the Russian part of the project), the Soviet dynamics of the identification processes lay in the mental-intellectual mastering the legitimacy of the new social organization and hierarchy. That’s why the dysfunction of the new etatism, simulating alien-cultural identity of labor ethics of Protestantism, peculiar to the social hierarchy of the Euro-Atlantic societies, inevitably led to desocialization of the society and total crisis of identities.

However, it would be a mere simplification to consider the collapse of the Soviet Union to be the total of the official and vernacular identity crisis. (As the world experience shows, it’s hardly possible for the nation-state to solve these problems satisfactory, also because this social institute is not made for solving the problems of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional identities harmony).

Exhibitional, the post-Soviet regimes reject to solve the problems of ethno-confessional management in "near-foreign" framework is also a declarative one, accompanied by avalanche-like growth of such management problems inside Russia. This required to find out the parameters of new identities and techniques of their translation to the sphere of state politics.

However, the question of country’s national unity, reflected in some clear universalizing identities, is still unsolved, because of 1) collapse, 2) mutation, 3) uncritical borrowing, 4) careless construction of the identification practices under the circumstances of the transit.

Certainly, the process of the new identities construction in the contemporary Russia takes place not only in the official discourse framework with the initiative imposed from above. Social initiatives, which, in case of the Orthodoxy, as one of the sense-forming phenomena’s of Russian spiritual tradition, can be called "vernacular" being on the periphery of the official identities. It’s all about persistent attempts of some groups of the modern society to "renew" their spiritual identity, forcing the Orthodoxy into the liberal-conservative mix, turning faith into a mass-used ideology.

Traditional Orthodox identity does not evade innovations and does not struggle against them, but prefers defining a clear framework, in which the innovation can act without trespassing its borders. The confidence in that kind of framework and its protection is an essential difference between traditionalist and modernist consciousness types. This difference is the key to the divergence between the practices and technologies of Orthodox spiritual identity and the "hybrid" identity of those possessing liberal-conservative consciousness, mainly in the transit periods of socium existence.

The mutation of the religion sense, as a feature of another forced Russian modernization "from above", leads to the aberration of the religious ideas (and of the ideas of individual identity). This often manifests itself in simple ignorance. The Christian religious truth can not be laid out in the system of dual oppositions of the mentioned secular ideologies. Historically, the Church can and should conquer such oppositions (no one can "slightly" canonize, "a little bit" excommunicate, or "find a compromise" with heretics).

Ambiguity of such a phenomenon inside "the church’s fence" and out of it is possible only as an unconfessed sin, but not as a part of Orthodox behavior. That’s why the Orthodox identity, adequate to the spirituality, the "logos" and the symbol of faith, can represent itself by accepting identification practices of the modernity only as the technologies of the modern societies, not as ideology. Here the border between "officiality" and "vernacularity" of techniques and is inevitably erased. "The Dominating Church" doesn’t only borrow the tools from modern liberal civilization arsenal of marginal ideologists of the "Orthodox renewal", but it also does use methods and ways of presence in actual social life, peculiar to the alien-confessional (catholic) social practice.

The acceptation of the "Basis of the Russian Orthodox Church’s social doctrine" on the Archereysky Sobor of August, 2000, can be commented, in this way, as a borrowing of the modernist practice (Orthodox paraphrase of "Rerum Novarum") in context of returning to the traditional theological identity ("The power of the state is secondary to the spiritual one and can’t absolutize itself, spreading it’s framework up to the full autonomy from God and his law"—the text says).

Therefore, the official identities with their mutual framework formulated as "state and organized religions" (question N1), in their renewed legitimacy, tend to borrow the practices, peculiar to the vernacular identities, freeing them of their confrontation nature (this aspect of new local identities functioning was specially underscored by Ludmila Gatagova and Janet Sturgeon in their texts), but functionally using their changeability and vitality.

The experience of getting acquainted with the materials of "geography" and "history-religion studies" groups of the Russian part of the project leads to the conclusion, that such parameter, as the practices of cultural-historical identifications in the context of the post-Soviet framework, must be included in the studies. It’s about using new study books, informational network and electronic space that create multiple different (and opposing each other) views on the past, forming not only the sense of the national history and geography, but also the present self-identification (a very contradictory one) in the modern Russia. Lobbing the images of the past to promote the own projects of future is innovation neither for the authorities, nor for the opposition. But never had such a way been executed as instrumentally, evidently and contradictorily in the sphere of the renewal practices, construction and demolition of the identities, as it was in those 10 years of post-Soviet Russian History.

This conclusion approves the original theoretical preset-hypothesis of this project’s theoreticians, underscoring the following in one of their conceptual texts: "The principle underlying our approaches is that official narratives of identity are continuously transformed, despite their protestations of deep, essential lineage, which, of course, they posit as natural and necessary. Modernity’s attempts at normative stabilization are, therefore, continuously being undermined by identifications that are at root situational, if not oppositional. But it also needs to be observed that strategically and instrumentally deployed identifications often "stick", that is, they are accepted as affective markers of group belonging".

It’s remarkable, that the official identities "strategically" and "instrumentally" developed in the Imperial and Soviet epochs, tend to "stick" to the socium once again, because on the new stage they are accepted (both in the loyalty and opposition discourses) as affective markers of group belonging.

So on, the revenge of the old (not to say archaic) identities becomes a product of new identification practices. The popularity of the neo-Imperial thematic in this context is especially demonstrative not only because of the XXI century’s state patriotism, power symbols and old emblems restoration fashion. John Gray in his Enlightenment’s Wake. Politics and Culture at the Close of Modern Age underlined that in some cases, such as post-communist Russia, the aim to restore the civil peace may require the building of the neo-imperial institutes, and if so, then these institutes should satisfy Herder’s request on peoples’ and cultures’ co-existence.

It is evident, that the practices of restoring traditional imperial or Soviet quasiimperial identities rely both on the charm of real imperial discourse advantages, such as universalism, stability and "safety" in a framework of powerful state system, and on the imaginary prospering paternalist state under the hand of "The White Tsar". Now wonder, that a following boosted modernization pressing on Russia’s social organism will grow the affection of this imaginary (preconstracted) identity of "bygone unity" and "the apotheosis of might". Especially mentioning than the reproduction of the most advanced (modernized) cultural practices of transmitting Imperial identity and Imperial management of the modernization epoch is still out of the instrument interest sphere of both state and opposition, framed up themselves with the decorative meaning of the old imperial power symbols.