How the Russian Nationalist Movement is Splintered by Ukrainian Maidan? Identifying ideological determinants by means of empirical data & mixed methods

Abstract

This paper addresses questions concerning the Russian nationalist movement in light of the Ukrainian Maidan revolution and its political and cultural consequences. We argue that these questions have been rarely raised by an academic community in spite of the relatively large amount of works focused on the Ukrainian crisis. Furthermore, we show how the Ukrainian events caused profound changes in the Russian domestic politics which should not be overlooked. This paper considers how the organizations belonging to the Russian nationalist movement reacted to the Ukrainian events. The types of their reaction vary from supporting Maidan and decrying the Russian policy in Ukraine to decrying Maidan and supporting the Russian policy in Ukraine. We tried to identify those organizations’ ideological basics, which explained differences in the types of their reaction. Information concerning these processes was gained by means of mixed methods. We combined a qualitative flexible interview format and text analysis with their formalized analogues. After organizing the raw data into the matrix, we used log-linear analysis, which showed that only four ideological basics out of the six explored ones played the statistically significant role as predictors. These basics are the standpoints regarding the USSR and type of their nationalism, the adhering to racism and preferences regarding the Russia’s territory.