ABSTRACT
Introduction In the 1990s, Russian identity discourses were dominated by various quests for the Russian Idea (Sieber 1998). Since the turn of the millennium, however, Russian Civilisation has arguably taken over as the most-central conceptual tool in the creation of a post-Soviet national identity. The increasing belief in the existence of an independent, self-sustained Russian Civilisation is now described by scholars as ‘civilisational nationalism’ (Verkhovskii and Pain 2010). It is furthermore part of a broader ‘civilisational turn’, at the centre of which stands the ‘civilisational approach’, which has been tremendously influential in post-Soviet academic and public discourses. It sees the world as made up of separate, unique cultures or civilisations as its constitutive units (Shnirel’man 2007; Scherrer 2013).
