Nationalism has recently emerged as a significant issue in Russian politics. The ‘Russian Marches’, the 2011 ban on the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (Dvizhenie protiv nelegal’noi immigratsii, DPNI), the persecution of the organisers of the Combat Organisation of Russian Nationalists (Boevaia organizatsiia russkikh natsionalistov, BORN) in 2011–15, and the chain of ethnically motivated riots, from Kondopoga in 2006 to Biriulevo in 2013 – all have made clear the increasing salience of nationalist ideas in Russia. Events after the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas rebellion in eastern Ukraine underscore the importance of the issue and its influence on Russia's domestic and foreign policies. The idea of a larger ‘Russian World’ transcending today's national boundaries to include the territory of other states inhabited by culturally proximate people has been used to legitimise the decision of the Kremlin to include Crimea and Sevastopol among the constituent territories of the Russian Federation.

In our view, however, the idea of the Russian World and the new Russian nationalism associated with it do not correspond to either of the two standard concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ widely applied in contemporary social science (see for instance Calhoun 1993). The ‘civic nation’ is understood as an ‘imagined community’, a construct of the nation-state, a political myth aimed at unifying the population of a specific territory into a relatively homogeneous group with boundaries that coincide with the physical territory of that state (Anderson 2006). That idea does not correspond to the concept of the Russian World, which is seen as having wider boundaries than those of the current state. On the other hand, ‘ethnic nationalism’ is based on the (perceived) historical and cultural background of the people, which results in a more rigid, almost fixed, national selfimage expressed in the myth of common descent (Smith 2013). This latter variety of nationalism is close to the rather narrow understanding of the Russian (russkii) nation that excludes other ethnic groups in the Federation, the kind of nationalism evident among the socially marginalised supporters of the Russian Marches – but it is at least as distant from the ‘Russian World’ idea as is the civic concept.

In this chapter we focus on a third concept – that of imperial nationalism.