Moscow’s Nationality Policy to Promote Ethnic Russians and Counter Threats From Others

Executive Summary:

• The newly released draft of Moscow’s new nationality policy strategy document devotes far more attention to ethnic Russians as the “state-forming” nation than the document it will replace and far less to developing non-Russian nations in the Russian Federation.
• This document will likely lead Moscow to take actions that will encourage ethnic Russians to think of themselves as the real masters of the situation and to lead non-Russians to conclude that their only reasonable option is to seek independence.
• Instead of producing the national unity the document’s authors hope for, the new strategy document will likely have the opposite effect, increasing ethnic tensions and possibly leading to the disintegration of the country.

Russia’s Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs (FADN) released the draft of a new nationality strategy document for the period up to 2036 prepared on June 11 that, when signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, will replace one that has been in place since 2012 and will run out this year (President of Russia, December 19, 2012; Natsionalniy Aktsent, June 16). That document was modified in 2018 at Putin’s request. [1] Compared to both the 2012 original and its amended version, the new document devotes far more attention to boosting the status of the ethnic Russians as the “state-forming” nation and the need for unity around them. At the same time, it devotes far less to the traditional focus of Soviet and Russian nationality policy, the management of the non-Russian portion of the population. When discussing the latter, the new strategy paper focuses on how non-Russians, either on their own or under the influence of foreign sources, may threaten the country’s unity and the steps Moscow needs to take to integrate them into the Russian nation. (For the complete text of the new document, see Garant.ru, June 20.)

Such language will undoubtedly encourage ethnic Russians to think of themselves as the only real masters of the situation, given that it establishes the “state-forming” role of the Russian nation, a topic that remains in debate. This is something Putin was unable to get into the Russian Constitution in 2020 but has subsequently insisted upon (Window on Eurasia, May 11, 2024). The new document, in other ways, reverses what had been the Kremlin’s earlier course, one based on fears of what unrestrained Russian nationalism could lead to, while at the same time defining non-Russians more as threats than as allies (see EDM, June 11, 2012). (For evidence that this is already occurring, see EDM, October 15, 2024.) Such attitudes, in turn, will lead even more non-Russians, who now form more than a quarter of the population, to conclude that their only reasonable option is to seek independence for themselves (see EDM, June 5). As a result, instead of producing the stability and national unity that the document’s authors claim they want, the new document will have exactly the opposite effect, increasing ethnic tensions within the Russian Federation and leading to the country’s disintegration (Kommersant, June 13; Izvestiya, June 20).

The draft document, comprising 57 sections and exceeding 6,200 words, is now being discussed throughout the Russian government and expert community (Garant.ru, June 20). That could lead to changes and delay its final adoption. Igor Barinov, the FADN head and chairman of the expert group that prepared it, however, says he is confident Putin will sign it before the end of the year. He cites two reasons for his stance. First, many of the draft’s provisions repeat what earlier strategy documents stated. Second, the changes reflect both increased tensions between Russia and the West because of the war against Ukraine and the impact of immigration on Russian society, which pose challenges that Moscow must respond to. Both reasons reflect the Kremlin leader’s own statements and the amendments to the Russian Constitution he pushed through earlier (Izvestiya, June 20). Barinov adds that “not a single ethnos or religious group remains beyond the attention of our opponents.” He also states that “this pressure” is greater on the non-Russian portion of the population, and as a result, Moscow must counter it, because the only salvation for even the smallest non-Russian groups is a closer relationship with the ethnic Russian majority (Izvestiya, June 20).

Barinov and other authors of the new nationality policy document stress, in the words of Kommersant, that “the preservation and development of the Russian people ‘as the state-forming’ community has become the key task.” This task involves “raising the level of civic identity and achieving a stable state of inter-ethnic relations” by countering threats arising in non-Russian groups and from foreign actors who want to split up Russian society to try to maintain the dominance of the Western powers (Kommersant, June 13). Moscow can only be pleased by the fact that the civic identity of the residents of the Russian Federation is high, Barinov says. This figure, however, must be “no less than 95 percent” by 2036, something that will be possible only by means of “the preservation, development and defense of the Russian language,” a goal that means something very different to ethnic Russians than to non-Russians (Kommersant, June 13).

In his comments on the draft, Academic Valery Tishkov, the former head of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology and former Minister of Nationalities, explains what he sees as the underlying reality that explains why Russians and non-Russians view things differently. “If the 20th century can be called the century of minorities, now in Russia and in other countries, there is a tendency to devote greater attention to ‘the demographic, historical-cultural and social-political’ majority,” he says (Kommersant, June 13). In Russia, he argues, those people are “Russian, and more than 99.5 percent of its population knows the Russian language,” adopting as it were Putin’s own linguistic understanding of nationality. That pattern must only be strengthened. Moreover, while some have talked about the withering away of the Russian nation, getting ever more non-Russians to identify as Russians not just in the civic but the ethnic sense means that the ethnic Russian share of the population of the Russian Federation can remain at 80 percent or even increase, he suggests. Despite Tishkov’s assurance that the policy of supporting various other peoples will continue; that the creation of a single ethnic Russian nation encompassing all the peoples of the country will not happen; and that therefore “there is nothing radically new in the strategy document,” both Russians and non-Russians will view its provisions as opening the way to wholesale Russianization and even Russification. The former would generally be encouraged by that, and the latter would be fearful of what its implications would likely be for their futures (Kommersant, June 13).

At the end of Soviet times, Russians and observers in the West noted that the most dangerous time for a country in trouble is when it decides to reform itself. That is certainly true, but it is also true that a particularly dangerous time arises in a multi-national state when the regime shifts from trying to balance the interests of the largest nation with those of the smaller ones. If the center allows a free hand to the largest, it will alienate the smaller ones. If it gives the latter too much, it will alienate the biggest. Maintaining that balance is not easy, but when it is violated, as Moscow’s new nationality policy strategy document appears to do, the prospects for stability and even the maintenance of territorial integrity in the absence of a totalitarian system not seen since Stalin’s death are vanishingly slim. 

Notes:

[1] That document was subsequently modified at Putin’s request in directions that anticipate those introduced now, as Russian experts like Emil Pain, Sergey Arutyunov, and Margarita Lyange predicted would lead to problems (Window on Eurasia, October 27, 2018).