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1 1 ETHNIC ENTREPRENEURS, ORDINARY PEOPLE, AND GROUP GRIEVANCE This era no longer wants us! This era wants to create independent nation-states! People no longer believe in God. The new religion is nationalism. Nations no longer go to church. They go to national associations. —Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March In the late 1980s ethnonationalist movements were springing up all over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Initiated by intellectuals but carried out by mass publics through protest cycles, popular referenda, and elections for independence ,nationalist movements sought to gain political control of their region away from rulers they considered foreign. As the states of Eastern Europe suddenly dislodged communist rule and union republics in the Soviet Union unexpectedly acquired independent statehood, the federal integrity of the new Russian state balanced precariously. Home to sixteen autonomous republics (ARs) that were ranked just below the union republics (URs) in the USSR’s ethnoterritorial administrative hierarchy, Russia shared the same ethnofederal structure as the Soviet Union and was experiencing the same colossal upheaval.1 Entrenched ideologies were thrown to the wind, central economic planning was disassembled, and the Communist Party—with its system of political appointments at every level of state administration—disintegrated. Amid these transformations, opposition nationalist movements in the republics were attracting growing levels of popular support. When a struggle for power developed in Moscow between the proreform executive and the conservative legislature, several republics took advantage of central state weakness to accelerate their quest for sovereignty. Throughout the early 1990s the Russian Federation faced a serious threat of dissolution along ethnic lines. In nearby Yugoslavia, violent ethnic conflict and 1. Philip Roeder popularized the term “ethnofederalism” in “Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization ,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (January 1991): 196–233. 2 CONSTRUCTING GRIEVANCE war loomed. The Russian state, for its part, identified—and as part of the Soviet Union had itself reified over time—more than one hundred ethnic minorities. Russia also contained over twenty ethnically defined subfederal territories. An outbreak of ethnic violence there, given the country’s enormous nuclear arsenal , could have produced untold destruction. At the time, Russian leaders and Western observers alike feared that Russia would follow the disintegration of the Soviet Union along ethnic lines.2 Yet such fears were proven wrong. Within a few years ethnofederal implosion had become increasingly unlikely as nationalist separatism in Russia’s republics faded away, with the exception of the Republic of Chechnya. Why did mass publics mobilize behind nationalist movements in certain Russian republics but fail to do so in others?3 Why did some republics mount strong secessionist campaigns against Moscow while others remained quiescent? In this book I examine variation in mass nationalist mobilization and regional secessionism across Russia’s republics in order to address one of the thorniest and most undertheorized issues in the literature on nationalism: why ordinary people respond to the appeals of nationalist leaders calling for radical transformation of the status quo. There is no shortage of studies on the phenomenon of nationalist mobilization , yet most overestimate the power of ethnicity as a basis of political action. Some accounts view ethnic masses as passive actors who automatically respond to the manipulations of ethnic elites; others treat masses as highly likely to support elites when the right combination of economic and political variables is present. They view people with ethnic identities as members of ethnic groups— and ethnic groups as political actors with interests distinct from those of other actors in the same society. In this approach, ethnic groups exist in multiethnic societies as bounded, self-aware actors prior to an episode of political mobilization . Thus they respond automatically when a political entrepreneur asserts that national independence serves the interest of the group. In this view, nationalist mobilization is a relatively common outcome. Yet ethnic groups in plural societies are not simply “there.” People may come to develop a sense of solidarity with others and feel that they are part of an ethnic group, but ethnic groups are not entities in the world with a bounded set of 2. Boris Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs that“the specter of discord and civil war”threatened Russia and the former USSR. Prezidentskii marafon (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo AST, 2000), 62. 3. I rely on John Breuilly’s definition of a nationalist political movement as one “justifying [its] action with nationalist arguments.” A nationalist argument “is a political doctrine built upon three basic assertions: (a) There exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar character...

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