Nationalism In Post-Communist Russia

Ultranationalism in Post-Communist Russia The social-political status of contemporary Russia is quite the mixed bag. While you have Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party with a vast majority of the vote in nearly every election, there is a large variety of groups who speak out against him. In the days following the recent presidential election, where Putin was elected for a third term, tens of thousands of Russians protested the results of the election. Several different political and social groups make up these kind of protests, but what is interesting that most of these group’s ideologies have one thing in common—Nationalism. Nationalism come in various forms, but the three that are going to be discussed are Social, Imperial, and
Imperial Nationalism is embodied in the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). Despite the groups appellation there is nothing Liberal about the group, as in actuality the group is very right-wing when it comes to its ideologies. The LDPR was founded in 1990 as the first sanctioned opposition party. The first presidential elections in 1991 are considered a success for the party, with its leader coming in third place.4 The LDPR has always had a platform that possessed populist ideas like eliminating taxes for small businesses and doubling the salary of teachers.5 It was populist ideas like this that would earn the LDPR its largest vote received to this day in the 1993 Duma elections. Zhirinovsky and the LDPR managed to secure twenty-three percent of the vote.6 The LDPR has not managed to hold that amount of the vote, and usually their percentage is always below ten percent for the Duma elections since
Radical Nationalism is embodied in one of the largest groups to come out of the post-Soviet period, the now disbanded Russian National Unity (RNU). This group was a paramilitary neo-Nazi movement. Its members bore a modified swastika, and saw themselves as the successors to the pre-Soviet monarchist group, the Black Hundreds.15 The RNU called for the expulsion of all non-Russians from the country, as well as an increase in power of the Russian Orthodox Church. The group was founded by Alexander Barkashov just one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and membership was estimated to get up to