National-state identity in modern Russia: formation specificities and evolutionary scenarios

The article examines the peculiarities and key scenarios for the national-state identity evolution in modern Russia. The author's understanding of national-state identity as a multi-dimensional representation-con-struct, centered on an integrative image of “Us”, is formulated. Based on empirical studies four tendencies of transformation of the Russian national-state identity have been allocated. The first trend is the stability of the basic attitude of national-state self-identification, its weak dependence on changes in other semantic and symbolic components of the «matrix» of Russian identity. The second trend consists in the simultaneous differentiation of the symbolic field of Russian identity and its event focus around the image of the Great Patriotic War. The content of the third trend is related to the slow pragmatization of the image of Russia while maintaining its fragmentation. The fourth trend is a growing negative perception of the image of the «collective West», of the increasingly distinct attempts by Russian society to comprehend itself through the prism of the image of the «significant other». Four possible scenarios for the transformation of the Russian national-state identity are allocated: mobilization, conservative, crisis-conflict and modernization; implementation of the latter is connected with the further formation of the Russian civil nation.