ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to provide a mechanism by examining the politics of national identity. It focuses on how Russian elites represent Russian identity to harness the resources of the state rather than on how Russians themselves feel. In Russia, the dispute over boundaries is particularly divisive. Elites in Russia agree that Russia is the successor to a truncated empire and that Russia should retain its dominant influence over the territory of the former Soviet Union. The most pervasive discourses defining Russia's collective identity center on the east-west and north-south geographical axes. These discourses borrow heavily from global understandings of these terms, but they are loaded as well with other, more specific meanings gleaned from Russian history. The extremists' image of the Russian polity converged with the statist image in several respects. Extremists envisioned the legitimate boundaries of the Russian state extending at least to the boundaries of the former Soviet Union.
