ABSTRACT
In 1986 the new Soviet Communist Party programme adopted under Mikhail Gorbachev declared that ‘the nationalities question, as inherited from the past, has been successfully resolved in the Soviet Union’.1 Five years later the Soviet Union had disintegrated under the weight of demands for sovereignty from the national minorities and indeed the Russians themselves and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism had seemingly been replaced by strident nationalism. The main aim of this chapter is to examine the relationship between Russian and Soviet identity in the Soviet period and analyse the way in which the concept of Russia emerged out of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It will be argued that the Soviet system at one and the same time exploited, controlled and attempted to supersede Russian nationalist sentiment. Eventually as the Soviet system began to weaken under Gorbachev it was Russian nationalism which emerged both from within and outside the Party/state to deal the final blow. In the politics of these final years of the USSR and in the subsequent period conservative communists and ardent nationalists could often find common ground. The chapter will seek to illustrate the basis of this strange alliance. Finally it will be seen that while the emergence of Russia may have played a crucial card in bringing the end of the Soviet Union the question of Russia’s existence as a modern nation-state remains unresolved.
