One Russia, many worlds: balancing external homeland nationalism and internal ethnocultural diversity

For many years, diversity management in post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe was viewed through the prism of the multilateral minority rights “regime” developed through the OSCE, Council of Europe and EU. With all OSCE participating states asserting the importance of the concept during the early 1990s, minority rights were initially understood as a shared political field that could transcend rival nationalisms. This field, however, encompassed widely varying and competing definitions and was created in a context of unequal power relations between West and East. Russia – never wholly embedded within this concept of normative space – has increasingly challenged the multilateral framework rhetorically and in policy practice, as part of a more general shift toward instrumentalization of minority issues by “kin-state” actors within the region. Using new data from a 2014–17 project on practices of national-cultural autonomy (NCA) within Russia, this article demonstrates how today’s Russian state – hailing its own approach to diversity management as superior to that of the West – seeks to co-opt minority NCA bodies in Russia in the service of external policy and geopolitical competition. The article assesses how minorities respond to this strategy and the implications it might hold for ethnic relations within Russia