Russian Identities

It must be irresistible: once they achieve a certain seniority, Western historians of Russia feel the need to have a go at the problem of Russian identity. This was not always so, but national identity has recently become an academic growth area; and the end of the Soviet Union has fuelled, even among Russians themselves, a reassessment of their people and country, and its place in the scheme of things (sometimes leading to bizarre nationalistic manifestations). Western specialists often seem goaded by a sense that, if only the key unifying factors could be isolated, the character of a people and its 1200-year history—with all its dislocations and contradictions—could be explained, or explained away. The concerns, however, are not new, though the terminology may have changed: identity-questions suffuse early Russian literature (especially the chronicles), recur frequently in each new set of circumstances and were much discussed in the fin-de-siècle period which witnessed the popularisation of that elusive entity, the ‘Russian Soul’. A curious gloss on this (unremarked by commentators) is that the Russian language appears to have no equivalent for the expression ‘national identity’

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