First draft only Ethnic and Political Identities and Territorialities in the Post-Soviet Space

There are a lot of theoretical models explaining the outburst of nationalism in the post-Soviet space since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some authors stress that nationalism in East Europe is in principle different from relatively liberal and «inclusive » nationalist traditions of West Europe, where the membership of an individual in a nation became a function of his civil behavior, and of countries of immigration, where tolerance towards an ethnic «other » has been a natural feature of state-building. It was argued that ethnic nationalism in East Europe was based on traditions of the local life in communities which meant that the membership in them was grounded on the feelings of kinship, collectivism and solidarity, which prevented the formation of a civil nationalism (Greenfeld, 1993). This hypothesis is not confirmed with empirical studies, in particular, in Russia, showing that a large part of citizens identify themselves with both their ethnic group, the state and the region even during the period of painful transition and that self-identification changes are rapidly enough and to an increasing extent concern the values of civil rights and of political freedom (Chernysh, 1995; Drobizheva et al., 1996)