Abstract
The ostentatious merging of national and imperial identities in modern Russian consciousness is considered one of the main reasons for the failure of Russian nation-building. The assumption that in Russia empire-building obstructed nation-building and that "nation" and "empire" were (and, from the point of view of many observers, still are) mingled in Russian national consciousness dominates contemporary historiography.
The main goal of this article is not to refute this assumption, but to show that the conflict between these two categories had a more complex dynamism than is presented in most of the studies and to demonstrate how the analysis of such a controversial and subtle matter as national identity in a multiethnic empire may suffer from insensibility to historical nuances and careless generalizations. First of all, I analyze the new factors that cast doubt on the established relationships between "national" and "imperial" in scholarly literature and in previous theorizing on national identity in general.
Secondly, referring to the period of late imperial Russia, I am trying to show that the simplified application of such dichotomies as "russkii versus rossiiskii" or "national versus imperial" is evidently ill-suited to the analysis of formation and development of Russian national identity and that the traditional ideal-typical models of the "empire" and the "nation-state" appear to be inappropriate for the description of a Russian specific situation, if one assumes the two concepts to be mutually exclusive.