Ethnic and political nationalism: institutional factors of Tatar nationalism in the Volga-Urals republics

This paper addresses the problem of nationalism, an important factor affecting social and political processes within the Russian Federation. The particular issue analyzed here is the relationship between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism in the Volga-Urals region of Russia. The institutional design of the Russian Federation may affect this relationship; Russia's ethnic federalism assumes the existence of so-called "titular" and "non-titular" ethnic groups in its autonomous republics. We take the case of ethnic Tatars in the republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan to explore the differences in the levels of their nationalist attitudes, as well as in the factors of their development. In the introductory section, we provide an institutional summary of Russia's current federal design and also highlight various historical factors which could affect it - including the legacy of ideology and practice of solving the "national question" in the Soviet Union. Then we discuss the role of regional separatist movements in the post-Soviet Russian politics, with an emphasis on utility of ethnic and civic nationalism for the elite groups in autonomous republics as an instrument of achieving certain political goals. A whole section of this paper is specifically devoted to an explanation of developments in the Tatar national movement after 1991, the role of political Islam in this process, and the policies of the administration of Tatarstan in their relationships with nationalist activist groups. We choose the social dominance theory as the main theoretical framework of our research as it fits very well to describe the situation of unequal access to social and economic resources based on membership in ethnic group. In our case, this logic is applied to people of the same ethnic origin, Tatars, who are the titular group in Tatarstan and - at the same time - are considered a non-titular population in the neighboring republic of Bashkortostan. Drawing on this theory, we formulate a number of hypotheses with respect to possible predictors of nationalist attitudes among Tatars within the two republics which are then tested by means of quantitative analysis. For the empirical part of our analysis we used the data from our mass surveys carried out in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan in 2005 and 2011; these data have not been yet published. The main method of our statistical analysis is structural equation modeling; it allows testing of relatively complicated analytical models close