ABSTRACT
Vladimir Putin did not invent ‘managed nationalism’ in Russia. Since the terminal crisis of the Soviet Union, high ranking officials in the Kremlin, regional governments, and the security apparatus had manipulated, courted, and cajoled Russian nationalists. However, the Putin regime’s manipulation of Russian nationalism differed fundamentally from the schemes of his predecessor. During the 1990s, Boris Yel’tsin was locked in conflict with an ‘irreconcilable opposition’ of red-brown forces, which rejected his liberal democratic project, and which vilified his government as an ‘occupation regime’ serving foreign interests and Jewish oligarchs. What lent credibility to the Centrist Bloc was its links to Soyuz, the hard-line faction in the Soviet parliament, which united communist hardliners, Russian nationalists from the ‘Intermovements’ in non-Russian republics, and representatives of the security apparatus. The collapse of the Soviet Union intensified Yel’tsin’s conflict with Russian nationalism. At the same time, the end of the Soviet Union made it easier for Yel’tsin’s fractious opponents to unite around nationalist slogans.
