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construction under the Soviet regime and reveal how Marx, Lenin and Stalin addressed
the “nationalities question” and consequently how the latter two sought to ameliorate the
matter by institutionalizing the idea. Furthermore, I will evaluate the relative success of
this process and the centralized attempts to construct individual identities around the
idealistic conception of the “New Communist Man” and explore what place internal
Muslims had in the system. Second, I will chronicle how the non-ethnic Russian
autonomous republics pursued their particular national pathways “out of socialism” and
inspect how the idea of national identity and who did or did not belong in the collective
changed during the tumultuous transition phase under Boris Yeltsin. This period was
marked by the materialization of myriad new identities which ranged from exclusionary,
vitriolic Russian nationalism to moderate and radical political Islam to Western/liberal
conceptualizations of self. The final empirical period will look at how current President
Vladimir Putin has addressed the issue of national identity and how he constructed an
essentialized “other” to the new Russian “self” as both an internal and external “them”. It
should be noted that in conducting this study I will avoid any in depth treatment of
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet polities after the disintegration of Communist rule
and will instead focus exclusively on the Russian Federation.
Literature Review
The consensus among social scientists is that identities are not inherited but rather
constructed and as such are always subject to reconstruction. This defies popular
assumptions that social categories are natural, inevitable and static, and are fixed by
human nature rather than by social conventions and practices; this is called “everyday
primordialism” (Fearon and Laitin, 1999:849). But what does it mean to claim that
Convention