A group of sociologists, political scientists, an historian, and a geographer were asked to write papers on the identity relations between the Russian Center in Moscow and the regions that constitute the rest of Russia. As expected, the topics and approaches varied wildly. The historian, Aleksei Miller, wrote an essay about Moscow’s relations with Belarus and Ukraine over the last 300 years.² The geographer, Nikolai Petrov, created a new map of Russia’s regions based on the symbolism of local vodka labels.³ The sociologists, Leokadiya Drobizheva, Eduard Ponarin, Rushan Galliamov, and Liliya Sagitova, using methods ranging from large-n surveys and in-depth interviews to discourse analysis of local media and content analysis of letters to the editor, investigated the relationship between ethnonational and civic national identities in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, first and foremost, but also farther afield in Orenburg, Sakha (Yakutia), and Alania (Northern Osetia).⁴ Finally, the political scientists, Vladimir Gelman and Evgenia Popova combined statistical techniques, content analysis, and case-studies, to assess how regional political elites use regional identities to enhance their own political power.⁵ The author of this essay, also a political scientist, compared the predominant discourse on Russian national identity in Moscow to that of the discourse of Rafail Khakimov, the chief ideologue of the modern Tatar nation in Kazan.⁶

Despite the wide-ranging topical terrain, there were many common theoretical themes that emerged from these texts. In the essay that follows, I wish to pay attention to only one of them: the effects of official institutional boundaries on the construction and employment of regional ethnonational and civic identities.

First, lets step back to situate this issue in more general theoretical terms. Until the constructivist turn in the study of identity, which might be dated to Berger and Luckmann’s treatise, The Social Construction of Reality,⁷ it was argued that identification with one’s ethnic group was somehow hotwired into one’s genes at birth, or at a minimum, so deeply and profoundly socialized into anyone during the first years of childhood, that we might as well treat ethnonational identity as primordial and fixed. But 30 years of scholarship, most prominently by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, has falsified the primordialist approach as much as any theory can be empirically refuted through repeated observations of evidence that contradicts its claims. Instead, social identities, including ethnonational ones, are now widely believed to be the product of social interaction between individual agents and between them and predominant social structures, the latter often defined as discourses comprised of language and practice.

The work of the scholars here provides both strong confirmation of the constructivist account of social identity construction, and convincing proof that boundaries between political entities created by states for reasons of administrative management, can themselves spur the creation of new identities, but, and critically, not just any new identity, but rather identities that themselves "fit" with prevailing local discourse. Mismatches fail. But they fail not because they don’t resonate with primordial identities; they fail because they do not resonate with the everyday identities being reproduced through daily practice by the local agents themselves. But these vernacular practices themselves are often reinforced through particular institutional arrangements that empower them with respect to available alternatives.

Drobizheva’s work reminds us that popular, journalistic, and scholarly attention to ethnonational identity over the last 15 years has been due more to the grisly salience of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Chechnia than to the fact that ethnic identity is at the top of some fixed hierarchy of identities running from most foundational to most constructed. In a mass survey taken in Tatarstan, Sakha, Northern Osetia, and Orenburg in 1994, to the standard question of "Who am I?" only 6-14% of the respondents answered with an ethnic label, while 50-70% mentioned their humanity, role, place in a family, sex, and employment.⁸ The highest percentage of ethnic self-identification, by Russians and Osetians in Northern Osetia, came at a time when Southern Osetia, located to the south in the state of Georgia, was in armed conflict with the Georgian government in Tbilisi, a situation entailing Osetian refugees flowing north, calls from Osetians living in Georgia to unite their republic with the RF, and Russian politicians in Moscow threatening armed intervention against Georgia. Thankfully, such evocative circumstances are not so widespread. But ethnonationalism was not the only identity made salient by this violence. Significantly, both Russians and Osetians in Alania emphasized their citizenship in the RF and Alania as well, an effect of the official institution of citizenship.

In what follows, I explore how official institutional arrangements affect the play of ethnicity in Russia.


Official boundaries privilege some axes of identification over others

Official boundaries, whether between the Russian Federation (RF) and other sovereign states or between regions and oblasts within the RF create incentives for identity construction.⁹ The discussion of this issue brings to the fore the way in which official institutional arrangements can select for some identities over others. Gelman and Popova, for example, show how elections for regional governors conducted within oblast and republic boundaries create incentives for local politicians to create local identities that stand in relationship to the Moscow Center and other regions. The effects of this official institution are a combination of borders and rules. An election district can match perfectly to the borders of a non-Russian ethnonational unit, can encompass several ethnonational communities, or be dominated by Russians. The Russian system of proportional representation for parliamentary elections creates an institutional incentive for politicians to find identity markers, such as ethnicity, that they can use to give people an ingroup with which they can identify, and with which they can identify her. Had Russia a winner take all system, such as in most US elections, the institutional identity incentives point to the median voter rule instead, with each politician trying to find an encompassing center, reducing any incentive to accentuate ethnic difference for electoral gain.¹⁰

This may, or may not, have the effect, depending on the ethnonational composition of a particular region, of making electorally rewarding the cultivation of a local ethnonational identity in opposition to the ethnonational Russian center, or to ethnonational Others in neighboring regions. In Petrov’s analysis of the relative strength of the regional identities of all 89 federal subjects within the RF, it turns out that having an ethonational titular plurality is not necessary to produce a strong regional identity. Of the 19 regions ranked highest, only five—Northern Osetia, Tatarstan, Tuva, Chechnia, and Chuvashia—have titular pluralities. If we expand the list to include the next strongest cohort, ethnonational pluralities only account for eight out of 41 in total. Meanwhile, five other regions with ethnonational pluralities—Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkesia, Mari-El, Aginskii-Buryatia, and Komi-Perm—have weak regional identities. In sum, a strong regional identity does not need an ethonnational basis, and an ethnoational basis is not sufficient to create a strong regional identity.

Gelman and Popova, in their analysis of the regional identity projects pursued in 77 elections over the last decade, in only eight of these campaigns did an ethnonational identification of the region predominate over other ways of constructing a regional identity. Differentiating the republic on economic grounds, in relationship to the Center, and by cultural or geographic markers, were each more important. These alternative axes of identification, themselves institutionalized by official boundaries, end up reducing the political salience of ethnicity in most of the regions, much of the time. Because of the centrality of economics, for example, regional politicians, when comparing their own region to neighboring regions, Russia in general, and to the Center, do so through indicators of relative wealth and by whether or not they are net contributors to the federal budget. So, the governors of Sverdlovsk, Murmansk, Krasnodar, and Volgograd all bragged about Moscow’s dependence on them, on their status as donors to the RF’s common weal. Moreover, Gelman and Popova find that what ethnonational appeals there were, peaked in the 1991-94 election cycles, and abated in 1996 and 2000.¹¹

Indeed, the fact that there are multiple official boundaries, between federal subjects, or regions; between these subjects and the Moscow Federal Center; between the regions and foreign sovereign states; between the regions and the seven recently created federal districts (Petrov; Belokurova, et.al.)¹²; and between the RF and Europe, it is not possible to say with any certainty which of these boundaries, or which combination of them, will exert effects on identity construction in any particular site. In the case of Tatarstan, for example, while it is an officially established vehicle for Tatar ethnonational identity, its simultaneous identification with Europe entails a commitment to an official civic Tatar identity with full citizenship rights for all non-Tatar residents, most notably Russians. Moreover, its desire that the RF itself adhere to European standards of civic national identity, so that Tatarstan has a place within a majority Russian state, additionally pushes Tatar identity away from a narrow ethnonational focus toward a pluralist multinational civic understanding. (Hopf)

If identities were to emerge at the level of any of the seven federal districts they would have to transcend ethnonational particularities, given their size and varied ethnic composition. Gelman and Popova describe how the creation of the Volga federal district undermined the regional identity project of the Saratov governor, Ayatskov, who until the 2000 institutional reform, argued that Saratov was the capital of the Volga. Problems for that project arose when not Saratov, but Nizhnii Novgorod, became the capital of the new federal district.

Regions also may have regions as signficant Others. For example, in Tatarstan and Sakha, they compare themselves (favorably) to regions which, unlike them, are not net contributors to the federal budget in Moscow, but rather are recipients. In Alania, they compare themselves favorably to their more violence-ridden neighbors in Chechnia and Ingushetia. In Orenburg they compare themselves to Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, believing that the latter two negotiated better deals for themselves with the Center. (Drobizheva) Tatarstan compares itself to Chechnia, crediting itself with having a more modern and reformed version of Islam, a multinational civic culture, and peaceful resolution of inter-national disputes. (Hopf, Drobizheva)

Moreover, regions, as sites of governance with their own budgetary resources, laws, courts, bureaucracies, and administrative apparatuses, are possible sources of local loyalties. For example, Drobizheva finds quite consistently that regional populations, independent of ethnic identification, actually trust their regional governments more than Moscow Center to rule effectively on matters of interest to them. This has the effect of reducing the attractiveness of ethnonational appeals from Russian politicians, both from the Center and in regions where Russians are a minority, as in Tatarstan.¹³

Regional ruling elites have additional institutional resources at their disposal. The main newspapers, radio and television are often under the control of the republican administration and/or his ruling party apparatus. Students in elementary and high schools will most likely be exposed to courses on local history and (local area studies), both of which will impart an official spin to regional identity and its history, culture, and folklore. (Petrov)¹⁴ Saratov’s governor, Ayatskov, opened a special museum in the capital, Yekaterinburg, devoted to Petr Stolypin, a native son of Sverdlovsk. This was part of his campaign to identify his region of the Urals with its putative "golden age" at the turn of the 20th century. (Gelman and Popova)

But regional governments do not always control all the institutions which play a significant role in the production of ethnonational identity. In Tatarstan, for example, there is an open and intense political struggle going on over control of religious education in Moslem medreses. While President Shamiev and his chief ideologue, Rafail Khakimov, have a particular version of EuroIslam in mind, a reformed modernized religious identity, outside actors, especially from Saudi Arabia, are competing to establish their own brand of Islam in Tatarstan through the financing of schools, mosques, and public services.¹⁵ Moreover in Kazan, the government-controlled press offers the more modernized civic version of Tatar Islam, while it is the independent Tatar press that is suffused with ethnonational imagery and identification against Russians in Tatarstan and a Russian Center in Moscow. (Sagitova)

Regional identity projects do not operate in isolation from the national project being pursued from Moscow. A continuum of relationships suggests itself, ranging from conflict to mutual reinforcement. To the extent that the Center’s identity project is one of propagating a civic national, or identity for all, this disempowers ethnonational appeals, both by Russians and non-Russians, and reinforces local projects that are themselves aimed at transcending, rather than accentuating, ethnonational difference. Drobizheva finds this Rossiskoe identity to be widespread among her national sample of respondents and it is combined with republican civic identities. For example, in Tatarstan, over half the ethnic Tatars who identify themselves as Tatar citizens also identify as Rossiiskie.

This observation directs our attention back to political institutions such as political parties. Partisan identification with or against the Center should play a role in either reinforcing or undercutting local civic and ethnic identity projects by local politicians. Gelman and Popova observe that national-patriotic parties on the neo-fascist Right are the most consistent articulators of a regional identity directed wholly against an oppressive Center in Moscow. But again, this is a Russian center, despite their efforts to Judaicize it in their rhetoric.

Moreover, the Center’s clear need for local politicians with whom it can work (and this was as true in the 18th and 19th centuries, as shown by Miller’s work, as it is today, as noted by Drobizheva) creates institutional incentives for compromise solutions, the Center permitting more ethnonational identification at the local level than it would otherwise permit being the most likely outcome. But this in turn should reassure local ethnonational entrepreneurs that the Center is not out to suppress, but rather to accommodate.¹⁶

Official institutional boundaries themselves only go so far in telling us about local identities. There are other axes of identification, including, especially important in post-Soviet lands, the Soviet past itself. Identification with or against what the Soviet Union was is a most significant Other for many. In general, those who still identify with the Soviet past tend to also regard its supranational internationalism as a successful project that transcended ethnonational differences. For non-Russians this means a lack of interest in any ethnonational identity for themselves today, indeed, an impatience with its constant invocation by local political figures. For Russians, it often means a substantially self-serving view of Soviet history such that there is no recognition of any legitimate grievances by non-Russians against Moscow, then or now.

Meanwhile, those who identify against the Soviet past tend to recognize that the Soviet project repressed, rather than transcended, ethnonational identity. For nonRussians this has resulted in a focused effort to recover and reproduce their ethnonational identities and associated practices, including institutionalizing them at whatever level can be politically achieved, most often in republics such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. (Galliamov, Drobizheva, Sagitova, Hopf) Russians, on the other hand, are split in their rejection of the Soviet past. Perhaps a majority regard the Soviet project as repressive of Russian ethnonational identity as of non-Russian, and so, while sympathetic to local ethnonational identity projects, are simultaneously anxious about them going too far. A plurality of Russians, however, believes non-Russians bore a disproportionate brunt of the Soviet homogenization effort.

And not only the Soviet past is a signficant Other for regional identity projects. Gelman and Popova point out that the local past often is raised as the signficant other in gubernatorial party programs, either as a golden age to which to aspire (Stolypin in Saratov) or as a period which should be overcome (Soviet rule in Chechnia).


Different relationships with Significant Others

As is reflected in the discussion of identity relations with the Soviet past, these relationships vary. It is widely accepted that people identify themselves in terms of their significant Others, i.e., understand themselves through those characteristics they believe constitute the main features of that Other.

Most simply, one can identify with or against a significant Other. For example, in Moscow’s predominant discourse, Liberals identify with the US, Conservatives identify against it. (Hopf) In this case, those identifying with the US define themselves in terms of the features they either have or aspire to acquire. The regions of Bashkortostan, Perm and Udmurtiia identify themselves with the Urals. Arkhangelsk claims to be part of the North, and so tied to Moscow, and not of the Northwest, so denying ties to Novgorod.¹⁷

Those who identify against the US differentiate themselves from those elements of the US that they hope to avoid acquiring. Tver and Novgorod identify themselves against Moscow or, as Petrov put it, they "exaggerate the Moscow-fighting pages of their history." It is important to note that a hostile identity relationship with Moscow, the Russia Center, most often does not evoke an ethnonational axis of identifcation, but rather an antipathy based on other, usually historical and economic, dimensions.¹⁸ But it may, as in Tatarstan, where Tatars generally consider Moscow to be the Russian, not Rossisskii, Centetr. (Sagitova)¹⁹ And the most extreme case of ethnonational identification against Russians comes from Chechnia.

Perhaps one of the most consequential identity relationships is with one’s closest Other, i.e., the Other that is considered most similar to oneself. While one might expect that this relationship would be the least conflictual and most durable, in fact it is the relationship most fraught with potential danger. Alexei Miller writes of how Russians in Moscow in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regarded Ukrainians as Russians. This apparently seamless identification with a significant Other was only so when Ukrainians did not assert any difference from Russians. But as soon as they did, Russian identity was fatally threatened. Russian fears were expressed in the proverb: "One Ukrainian more means one less Russian." Had Ukrainians been a more different significant Other, such anxieties would not have appeared among Russians, and Russian attitudes toward Ukrainian ethnonational identities, both then, and now, would have been far less fraught.

Drobizheva suggests another possible identity relationship or, more precisely, a non-relationship, between identities that neither conflict, nor reinforce, nor even find themselves in each other, but rather just are compatible with each other. This is how she characterizes the contemporary positioning of a Rossisskoe identity with ethnonational ones.


Beyond official boundaries

The effects of official boundaries on ethnonational identity construction operate in combination with other enduring factors. Three that arise most prominently in the work here are differences produced by age, place of residence, and material means. Drobizheva and Galliamov find, for example, that older, poorer people living in rural areas are far more likely to have strong ethnonational identities than younger, more prosperous people living in cities. Sagitova offers a still more differentiated observation, finding that those Tatars who have only recently moved to Kazan are the most strongly inclined to identify with an ethnonational Tatar identity. These kinds of broad findings help to bound any conclusions we can draw based on official institutional factors alone. Moreover, they raise questions about the possibility of critical differences between the daily practices of Tatars in town and country, such that the latter are consonant with ethnonationalism, and the former not.²⁰

Petrov elaborates a most unusual combination of institutional incentives and daily practice: the regional vodka market. At his count there are more than 1300 vodka brands, each with a distinct name and label. Because almost all of them are distilled for a local market (75 of the 89 regions have vodka makers), and are not "exported" to other regions, local entrepreneurs have a market incentive to come up with brands that "warm the hearts of local patriots." This means that they try to develop words and symbols to evoke local identities. It turns out that these particular market incentives do not work in favor of ethnonational symbolism. Instead of ethnic labeling, local rivers and mountains dominate, followed by local industries and other products, architectural sites, historical events, and place names.

Gelman and Popova also theorize about how markets, as enduring institutions, affect regional identity projects. Their model assumes regional political elites respond to two primary markets: an internal regional market for votes, and an external market, both in the Center and abroad, both for material resources, such as foreign investment and contributions from the federal budget, as well as political support from Moscow. One can imagine how foreign investors, worried about the image of their brand in the world market, would shy away from investing in a region, ceteris paribus, in which an exclusive ethnonational identity project prevailed. It is similarly hard to imagine Moscow Center, with its predominant discourse on civic national identity, rewarding ethnonational projects with either revenue or political technology.

Besides vodka, Petrov identifies other vernacular symbols that are not part of officially institutionalized identity projects. Among these would be butter from Vologda, SS-20 intermediate range nuclear missiles and Kalashnikov automatic rifles from Udmurtiia, amber festivals in Kaliningrad, the chess tournament of Velikii Novgorod, the various regional mafias operating in Moscow from Krasnodar, Krasnoyarsk, Sverdlovsk, etc., and criminal groups from Kazan, Kurgan, Tambov, and other regions. Relying on the work of L. Smirnyagin, Petrov further points out that people in the regions are increasingly referring to themselves as inhabitants of "natural geographic" locales, rather than ethnic groups. These "extra-institutional" identities are in competition with more official efforts, whether ethnonational or civic.

Yet another important unofficial axis of identification that confounds ethnonational identity is the ubiquitous provincial-center, urban-rural, center-periphery discourse. This is perhaps one of more universal discourses of identity across history and geography. The "country cousin" seems to appear in most people’s folktales. In Russia, its meaning is conveyed by the very word used to describe it, literally, "the depths," signifying a dark, distant place of premodernity and ignorance. Flashing forward to the 21st century, it turns out that many Russian regions today identify themselves as "provinces" in inferior relationship to the more modern Center, embodied by Moscow. Gelman and Popova report that "the most frequently-used characterization of a region is as a province," and, importantly, politicians acknowledge this is a negative identity they will work to overcome. Nikolaev, governor of Yakutia in 1996, declared in his campaign that Yakutia "was isolated, estranged , living by the unwritten humiliating laws given by the state " But now the construction of a "new Yakutia" has begun. Perhaps the most imaginative, more encouraging, spin was put on provincial status by Tumanov, governor of Pskov: "We are not the periphery of Russia, but its beginning."

The bottom line here is that a plethora of institutional arrangments makes a clear cut case of an institutionalized ethnonationalism extremely rare, if not impossible, to achieve. Alas, when it is achieved, as in Chechnia, the consequences can be terrible. But that tragic outcome should not obscure a more universal, and complex, set of realities. Both conflict and compatibility occur along many different axes of identification, both officialized and vernacular.

1. A response mostly to Q5, but partly Q3, as well. [Back to text.]

2."
(Center and periphery. Metamorphoses of the problem in the 18th-21st centuries in the example of the relations between authority and public opinion in Russia toward Ukraine and Belarus." [Back to text.]

3."
(Formation of regional identities in Russia’s regions: general principles and approaches to research.) " [Back to text.]

4. Leokadia Drobizheva, "
(Russian civic, ethnic and republican identity: competition or compatibility." Eduard Ponarin, "The Bashkort and Tatar Identities in the City of Ufa: An Exploration,"
Rushan Galliamov, "
"Ethnic and religious aspects of republican and civic identity in Bashkortostan."
Liliya Sagitova, "
Regional identity: social determinants and constructing activities of the mass media (the example of the Republic of Tatarstan)." [Back to text.]

5. Vladimir Gelman and Evgeniia Popova, " Regional political elites and strategies of regional identity in contemporary Russia." [Back to text.]

6. Ted Hopf, "Why Kazan and Moscow Need Each Other: Rafail Khakimov and the Tatar Center." [Back to text.]

7. Notably, this 35 year-old text was cited by more than one participant in this project. [Back to text.]

8. Drobizheva’s extraordinarily rich work has many different ways at getting at questions such as these that I have no room to reproduce here. But they all speak to ethnicity’s relative, daily, unevoked unimportance. [Back to text.]

9. Nikolai Petrov hypothesizes a pyramidal identity structure: local, subregional, regional, macroregional, national, and global. [Back to text.]

10. See also Petrov on regional symbolism used in elections in Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Bryansk, and Khabarovsk in 1993 and 1996. [Back to text.]

11. Sagitova finds the same waning of ethnonational discourse in the Tatar-language press in Kazan, although it remained at signficant levels into 2000. [Back to text.]

12. Petrov remarks on former RF Prime Minister Sergei Kireinko’s efforts to create a regional identity for his Volga District. Elena Belokurova, Maria Nozhenko, and Natalya Yargomskaya are investigating whether a Northwestern Federal District is emerging. [Back to text.]

13. Although not explored here, it could be the case that donor republics to the federal budget are more likely to witness republican civic patriotism that transcends ethnic difference, as in Tatarstan, than recipient republics. [Back to text.]

14. On local education projects in Tatarstan and Sakha, see Drobizheva. [Back to text.]

15. See Sagytova, Drobizheva, and Hopf. [Back to text.]

16. Although there is local resistance to this "mankurtizm." See Sagitova. [Back to text.]

17. Although Arkhangelsk is in the Northwest Federal District with Novgorod, and not the Central Federal District with Moscow. [Back to text.]

18. See the evidence from Gelman and Popova discussed above. [Back to text.]

19. Although, there is doubtless some ethnic differentiation in the efforts of Volgograd, Astrakhan, and Kalmykia to distance themselves with an identifcation with the northern Caucasus. (Petrov) [Back to text.]