Oxana Shevel

Russian Nation-building from Yel'tsin to Medvedev: Ethnic, Civic or Purposefully Ambiguous?

Abstract This article surveys nation-building efforts in post-Soviet Russia. There have been five main nation-building projects reflecting the dominant ways of imagining the ‘true’ Russian nation but each has been fraught with contradictions and therefore have been unable to easily guide state policies. At the same time, a solution to the Russian nation-building dilemma may be emerging. This solution does not resolve the contradictions associated with each of the nation-building agendas but instead legalises the ambiguous definition of the nations boundaries in the 1999 law on compatriots and the 2010 amendments to it. The fuzzy definition of compatriots in the law allows Russia to pursue a variety of objectives and to target a variety of groups without solving the contradictions of existing nation-building discourses.

The Post-Communist Diaspora Laws Beyond the “Good Civic versus Bad Ethnic” Nationalism Dichotomy

In the 1990s, a number of post-Communist states adopted diaspora laws that defined the target group ethno-culturally, thus seemingly confirming the continued relevance of Hans Kohn’s distinction between ethnic Eastern and civic Western nationalism. This article, however, posits that while Kohn’s dichotomy may be valid, its related implications are often not. The ethnic content of the diaspora laws, and the content of ethnic nationalism behind them, is much more nuanced, and not all ethnically tinted diaspora polices are discriminatory or otherwise contrary to international standards. Using the case of the 2001 Hungarian Status Law and the European organizations’ reaction to it, the first part of the article draws attention to the often neglected fact that international standards do not ban ethnically based policies altogether but allow for some distinctions in treatment based on ethno-cultural criteria. The second part of the article focuses on the case of Ukraine and further challenges the accuracy of the civic-ethnic dichotomy by showing how the politics of the Ukrainian diaspora law was driven not by a clash between civic and ethnic nationalism but by a more complex tension between different variants of ethnic nationalism, a neo-Soviet imperial vision, strategic bargaining, and changes in electoral fortunes for unrelated reasons. The Ukrainian case also shows how, in addition to international norm diffusion, another—and rather counterintuitive—path towards internationally compliant diaspora legislation may be the presence of substantial domestic divisions on the national issue, which forces the elites to compromise on a less ethnic law.

Towards new horizons in the study of identities in Ukraine

These five trailblazing studies make important advances in the study of identity dynamics, sources of conflict and challenges of nation-building in preand post-Euromaidan Ukraine. They challenge some long-accepted measures of ethnonational and linguistic identities and develop and defend analytically defensible and empirically compelling alternatives; document the at-times unexpected relationships between identities and political attitudes; and speak to the all-important questions such as when and how identities change, if the boundaries of identity groups are hardened by conflict, how identities and attitudes are causally related, and if national unity has increased in Ukraine since 2014. The articles also explore sources and prospects for the growth of civic identities and attitudes in Ukraine, and present and explore uniquely valuable data on ethnolinguistic identities, practices and political attitudes of residents in the non-government-controlled territories of the Donbas and of Ukrainian citizens displaced by conflict within Ukraine and to Russia. Theoretical and empirical contributions of these articles are too numerous to list, let alone to engage with, in a short commentary. Given space constraints, in this response, I will focus on three issues that come across in these studies and where authors at times reach different conclusions. One such issue that is the most appropriate way to conceptualize and measure ethnic and linguistic identities in the Ukrainian context. Kulyk and Onuch and Hale, in particular, address this question head on. At the broadest level, they all conclude that treating the natsional’nist’ survey category as a simple measure of ethnic identity is too simplistic, and likewise that language use and native language survey categories contain a variety of meanings and should be further unpacked for a meaningful analysis. More specifically, Onuch and Hale make a compelling argument that when it comes to analysing and measuring ethnicity we need to think not in terms of ethnic groups but in terms of “dimensions of identity, the convergence and overlap of which should be problematized and researched rather than assumed” (7). Their study demonstrates that using different measures of ethnic and linguistic identities can substantially alter the results when it comes to investigating the effects of ethnolinguistic identities on political attitudes and policy preferences. But what are the most analytically appropriate and most relevant dimensions of identity in the Ukrainian context? For the all-important language identity, Onuch and Hale propose a distinction between the category of individual language preference – “the language that an individual would chose to speak if all communication partners were all completely indifferent and no social desirability considerations were at play” (10) and the category of language embeddedness – that is, language choices made under the influence of the social environment one is embedded in. But if essentially from birth language is invariably acquired and used in a social context, is it possible to ever escape the social desirability consideration? Can the “language preference” category even exist as a dimension distinct from “language embeddedness” (these two indicators have the highest degree of intercorrelation in their study)? The authors propose that the purest indicator of the person’s actual language preference is the respondent’s

BELIEVING FACTS IN THE FOG OF WAR: Identity, Media, and Hot Cognition in Ukraine’s 2014 Odesa Tragedy

ABSTRACT How do people form beliefs about the factual content of major events when established geopolitical orders are violently challenged? Here, we address the tragic events of 2 May 2014, in Odesa, Ukraine. There, Euromaidan protest movement supporters and opponents clashed following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the onset of the Donbas conflict, culminating in the worst civilian death toll the city had seen since World War II. Shortly after, we surveyed Ukraine’s population about who they thought had actually perpetrated the killings and relate people’s answers to alternative narratives (frames) that an original content analysis finds were available to Ukrainian citizens through different media. We find evidence, consistent with theories of hot cognition and motivated reasoning, that the Odesa violence triggered emotional responses linked to ethnic, regional, and partisan identity, which then activated attitudes associated with these identities that, in turn, led people to adopt very different (sometimes highly improbable) beliefs about who carried out the killings. Ethnic identity in particular is found to have strongly moderated the effects of television, with Ukrainian television greatly influencing Ukrainians but backfiring among Russians, and Russian television mainly impacting non-Ukrainians. Education and local information are found to reduce susceptibility to televised factual narratives.

The new Russian nationalism: imperialism, ethnicity and authoritarianism 2000–2015

The New Russian Nationalism: Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism 2000–15 is a timely volume that presents readers with a rich and up-to-date analysis of the content of, contestation over, a...