ABSTRACT
The problems of shaping a new collective identity in Russia have been actively discussed since the 1990s. At present, the concept of the “Russian nation” has come to dominate the official discourse of national identity. Both civil and ethno-cultural meanings of the notion are being used. In the first case, the Russian nation is “the community of the citizens of the Russian Federation, of various ethnic origins, united by the state, with shared interests and spiritual values”. In the second case, national identity is associated with the “multi-national Russian nation”, with the Russian “super ethnos” at its core (Tishkov 2007, Zvereva 2010). Regardless of the scale and ideological orientation of the practices of collective identification in Russia, all contain markers of “one’s own” space and the border between the “self” and the “foreign/other/alien” (Goudkov 2004, Doubin 2011).
