Institutions are often considered the most important force in shaping ethnic identities. This is so because they are seen as defining not just the options available to political actors or the actors' preferences, but also the actors' self-definitions. Institutions are defined as “the formal or informal procedures, routines, norms and conventions embedded in the organizational structure of the polity” (Hall and Taylor 1996, 938). Institutions affect politics in two crucial ways. First, institutions create enforcement mechanisms for agreements, assess penalties for violating the agreements, and control the flow of information, thus constraining the strategies pursued by actors in the political arena. By limiting the realm of the possible in politics, institutions force political actors to choose from a limited menu of options. Second, the institutional context shapes not only the strategies, but also the preferences and goals of political actors. Institutions influence preferences by providing cognitive and moral templates that actors can use to interpret and analyze a situation and possible courses of action. They have great power over political activity because they not only shape the ability of individuals to pursue their interests, but also structure the nature of the interests themselves (Hall and Taylor 1996, Thelen and Steinmo 1992).

The effects of institutions are not limited to shaping preferences. Through their control of information and their ability to set the rules of political competition, institutions also influence how political actors perceive themselves.

On 15 October 1991, the 449th anniversary of the conquest of Kazan by the Russian czar Ivan the Terrible, tens of thousands of Tatars gathered on Freedom Square, across from the Tatarstan Republic parliament. They were there to protest the government's refusal to issue a declaration of independence from the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union. The political situation in the republic had been tense for months, ever since a wave of nationalist demonstrations and hunger strikes in May had forced the government to disavow its support for allowing locals to vote in Russian presidential elections. Passions were further inflamed by the publication in the Tatar-language press of an article by the nationalist firebrand Fauzia Bairamova, which called for all real Tatars to show that they were not slaves to the Russians by demonstrating in the square. The October demonstration culminated in violence when protesters attempted to storm the parliament building and were rebuffed by police. Tensions were defused only when parliament agreed to adopt a declaration that confirmed the republic's sovereignty and to hold a referendum on the republic's independence.

Three months later and seemingly a world away, a few hundred Khakass nationalists gathered in front of the parliament in the newly created republic of Khakassia. They were protesting the election of an ethnic Russian as the chairman of the legislature as well as the legislature's reluctance to approve a sovereignty declaration. This was the first nationalist demonstration in Khakassia.

Support for social movements can be expressed in several different ways. Active supporters join movement organizations and participate in protest activities. More passive forms of participation include voting for the movement's candidates in elections and voicing support for movement goals in polls and surveys. This chapter measures the extent of popular support for nationalist movements by analyzing the full range of these activities. The highest levels of both passive and active support for ethno-nationalist mobilization are found in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, with somewhat lower levels of support in Chuvashia. Nationalism finds the fewest adherents in Khakassia, the former autonomous province.

Protest activity is the most demanding way of demonstrating support for a political cause. Unlike voting and responding to surveys conducted by social scientists, public protest runs the risk of repression by an unsympathetic government or injury in clashes with movement opponents. Therefore, this form of movement activity attracts the smallest number of supporters and is most easily influenced by government and opposition actions. In examining protest activity, I focus on demonstrations, hunger strikes, and violent clashes as the most visible and galvanizing forms of protest.

Because of their novelty and their importance as an immediate and authoritative measure of public support, nationalist movements saw electoral politics as a central arena for testing their strength against other political forces in the regions.

To this point, I have developed the institutionalist explanation of ethnic mobilization on the basis of four ethnic regions of the Russian Federation: Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, Khakassia, and Tatarstan. In this chapter, I seek to test the validity of the theory by applying it to another fifteen ethnic groups in fourteen republics of the Russian Federation. The findings of this chapter further strengthen the ethnic institutions argument by showing that it applies not just to the selected republics, but to all of the major ethnic regions of the Russian Federation.

The rest of the chapter proceeds as follows: First, I discuss the measures of support for nationalism and examine the extent of support for nationalism in the selected cases. Then I use statistical analysis to determine which social groups are more likely to support nationalist ideas. Finally, I discuss the extent to which these data confirm the theory developed in the earlier chapters.

DATA AND EXPLANATORY VARIABLES

This chapter relies exclusively on the Colton/Hough survey described in Chapter 5. In addition to being conducted in Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, and Tatarstan, this survey was carried out in all of the former autonomous republics of the Russian Federation. We thus have an additional fifteen cases in fourteen republics. Unfortunately, the Laitin/Hough survey used to supplement my results in Chapter 6 was not conducted in any of Russia's ethnic republics other than Bashkortostan and Tatarstan.

How did it come about that a regime that had experienced virtually no political opposition suddenly was faced with powerful protest movements that threatened the country's integrity? How did nationalist organizations appear, gain strength, and spread throughout each republic in societies with no history of independent political associational life, and where nationalism was condemned? Even in states that have strong civil societies and do not suppress nationalism, political organizers face formidable obstacles. Since Mancur Olson first described the free-rider problem in The Logic of Collective Action (1965), the formation of groups for the purpose of achieving political goals has been seen as a puzzle that needs to be solved. Proposed solutions have included the provision of selective benefits to movement activists (Olson 1965, Hardin 1995), the presence of interpersonal or civic trust and other psychological factors (Ferree 1992, Putnam 1993), and the presence of social networks in the community or workplace (Snow et al. 1980)

Minority nationalist mobilization in the Soviet Union during the late perestroika period was characterized by its rapid spread throughout the region and by the organizational similarities shared by the nationalist movements of a wide variety of minority groups. In this chapter, I show that the existence of a common set of ethnic institutions among all the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union ensured that the newly formed nationalist movements in the various regions were initially organized along similar lines and had roughly similar agendas.

Creation of Explanatory Variables

With several important exceptions, the explanatory variables used in the statistical analysis are either indexes or dichotomous variables. The latter are used to identify respondents who belong to particular occupational groups or who share particular social characteristics or beliefs.

Occupational Groups

1. Intellectual: This category includes all respondents who identified themselves as working in the field of science, culture, or education.

2. Student: This category includes all respondents who identified themselves as either full-time or part-time students.

3. Industrial worker: This category includes all respondents who, when asked about the group to which they belonged, identified themselves as workers.

4. Agricultural worker: This category includes all respondents who, when asked about the group to which they belonged, identified themselves as workers at a collective farm (kolkhoz) or state farm (sovkhoz).

5. Leader: This category includes all respondents who, when asked about the group to which they belonged, identified themselves as managers or supervisors.

Social Characteristics

1. Community size: The value of this variable is based on the respondent's place of residence at the time of the interview. The values were initially arranged as follows:

1. 1 = capital,

2. 2 = city,

3. 3 = town,

4. 4 = village.

1. Migrant: This category includes all respondents who had spent the majority of their childhood in a rural area but were living in a city at the time that the survey was conducted.

2. Education: This variable represents the respondent's level of education. The values were initially arranged as follows:

1. 1 = illiterate or primary,

2. 2 = incomplete secondary,

3. 3 = secondary,

4. 4 = specialized secondary,

5. 5 = higher education,

6. 6 = advanced degree.

1. Age: This variable represents the self-reported age of the respondent, divided by 100 for ease of comparison.

2. […]

Responses to the nationalist message varied not only by region but also by social group. The strongest support for the nationalist message came from social groups whose members felt that they could benefit from the nationalist movement's success. Although political and economic benefits played some role in determining support for nationalism, supporters responded most strongly to the psychological benefits of higher group status inherent in a successful cultural revival or an increase in regional autonomy. The extent to which individuals responded to these psychological benefits depended primarily on the extent of their exposure to the culture, traditions, and language of their ethnic group; such exposure was greatest among people who grew up in the largely mono-ethnic rural areas and/or received an education in the ethnic group's native language.

Scholars of nationalism have paid little attention to which social groups within an ethnic group are more likely to support nationalism and why they do so. The one major exception has been Miroslav Hroch's study on The Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (2000). Examining the development of nationalist movements among small European ethnic groups during the nineteenth century, Hroch showed that the strongest support for nationalism invariably came from the intelligentsia and students. Members of the elite, including the ruling classes and the industrial bourgeoisie, tended to assimilate to the majority group and therefore were not much involved in the movement.

This book seeks to explain how state institutions affect ethnic mobilization. It does so in the context of examining the widespread surge of nationalist sentiment that occurred through the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s. My analysis of the development of minority nationalist movements during this period in four republics of the Russian Federation shows that even during this period of institutional upheaval, preexisting ethnic institutions affected the preferences and tactics of movement leaders. These Soviet institutions shaped the messages that were used to appeal for popular support, the form that ethnic mobilization took, and the reaction of both elites and masses to the nationalist message.

The story of nationalist mobilization during the perestroika period presents both interesting similarities and interesting variations across cases. The institutional explanation is strengthened by the fact that members of virtually every ethnic minority in the Soviet Union organized nationalist movements that were initially similar in form and goals. These movements differed greatly, however, in their ability to attract popular support. Furthermore, the uniformity in message did not last long – some movements began to articulate radical demands while others remained moderate. The burden of this study is thus to show that the institutional explanation can account not only for the similarities in nationalist mobilization throughout the Russian Federation, but also for the differences across cases.

In the course of discussing ethno-nationalist mobilization in Russia, this book pursues two other objectives.