At first glance, nationalism and revolution would hardly seem to be connected with each other. Consider the associations that these notions commonly evoke: nationalism targets primarily local or regional problems, with the goal of maintaining the status quo or imitating the past; by contrast, the major features of revolution are often innovation and universal change (together with violence). Shmuel Eisenstadt noted the revolutionaries’ belief in ‘creating a new order – total, cultural, social’ (1978: 685) and listed the consequences of revolution, including the radical break with the past and the far-reaching transformation of all spheres of social life. Contemporary revolution scholars, such as Jack Goldstone, see the use of violence for establishing new institutions as a main element of revolution (Goldstone 2013: 1–9). However, Goldstone admits that, in some revolutions of the late twentieth century and the beginning of this century, violence has not played such a prominent role (ibid.: 104–16). Martin Malia has compared revolutions from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries and comes to the rather pessimistic conclusion that the nature of revolution could never fit into a single, coherent model (Malia 2006: 287–301). Indeed, if we look at the conservative revolution movement in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s or the Iranian revolution in 1978–79, these were hardly consistent with an understanding of revolution as an innovative and international phenomenon. Still, the connection between nationalism and revolution is far from simple and straightforward, whether in a historical or in a cross-national perspective.

This chapter examines the connection between nationalism and revolution in contemporary Russia. In doing so, we briefly discuss some general trends in the mutual development of these two phenomena and the impact they have had on contemporary Russian nationalistic revolutionaries. We then proceed to outline the subscenes of Russian national revolutionaries, discussing the development among national bolsheviks, national anarchists, national socialists and national democrats, before offering some conclusions on the status of Russian national revolutionaries of today.

Trends in the mutual development of nationalism and Revolution

In connection with the first great modern revolutions (1789–1848), nationalism and revolution developed as a consistent unity. Later, however, they separated as many revolutionaries declared internationalism, and conservative nationalism emerged as a counterweight to revolutionary nationalism. Thus, if we imagine revolutionary nationalism of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries (from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Giuseppe Mazzini) as our thesis, conservative nationalism became the antithesis.