ABSTRACT
Since the disintegration of the USSR, Russia has experienced massive social, economical and geopolitical transformations. The advent of the Western principles of democracy and market economy integrated Russia into the world system-a revolutionary development for a country which over the previous seven decades had invested enormous fi nancial and ideological resources into preserving a radically different political order and isolationism. The breakdown of the communist regime based on the idea of unity between ethnically and linguistically different but ideologically friendly nations discredited the political organisation of the Soviet state. This development paved the way for nationalism-the idea that the nation and the state should be congruent. It provided ethnic groups living on the territory of the former USSR with grounds to claim national sovereignty and led to the primacy of the national project on the political agendas of the newly independent states.
