Political Mechanisms of the Integration of Russian Nationalism into Crimea’s Political Area

Abstract

In the article the author defined the peculiar properties and structure of the political mechanisms for the integration of Russian nationalism into Crimea’s Political Area in 1991-2014. It is proved that Russian nationalism formed a political strategy of integration into the political space of the Ukrainian autonomy on the principles of creating a manageable set of actors and subjects of the regional political process and civil space, as well as the incorporation of its agents of influence into the institutions of political power of the ARC. It is substantiated that the essence of the political component of the strategy of the activities of Russian imperial nationalism in the Crimea consisted in the creation on the basis of the Russian national minority (by status) of an independent ethno-social organism with a claim to its own state-territorial formation.

In the conclusions, the author notes that structurally, the process of using the political mechanisms for the integration of Russian nationalism in the ARC is presented in three consecutive stages. At the first stage, the political goals of Russian nationalism in the Crimea were identified, which were of an imperial nature, and therefore included the definition of key directions and a system of organizational measures that were oriented toward the political, economic, ethno-national, sociocultural and information spheres of life in the Crimean peninsula. At the second stage, the political institutes of the Russian Federation developed a system of advanced initiatives aimed at weakening the influence of the institutions of Ukraine's political power on the territory of the autonomy and a set of tactical methods that enabled them to react quickly to the actual challenges of pro-Ukrainian initiatives. At the third stage, a system of effective mechanisms of lobbying, institutional interaction, forms, methods and methods of reproducing the meanings of Russian imperial nationalism in the ARC at the level of all levels of the given social space – political, ethnonational, socio-cultural and economic – was formed.

Keywords: Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Russia, Russian nationalism, political integration, integration mechanisms, political meanings