Legitimating Nationalism: Political Identity in Russia’s Ethnic Republics by Katie L.Stewart. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2024. 293 pp. $89.95. ISBN 978‐0‐299‐34770‐3

Russia is more than Moscow; most Russians live their lives elsewhere. Accordingly, while the priorities of Russian nation-building strategies are developed in centralized decision-making bodies located within the capital’s Garden Ring, most Russians encounter these policies in a local context, one that is often very different from Moscow realities. Regional leaders will therefore have to translate and adapt Moscow’s decisions to better align with local conditions and needs. Although Putin for a quarter of a century has promoted an image of Russia being governed via a hierarchic “power vertical,” there is still a good deal of variation in how the decisions of the central government hit the ground. This has not least been the case in the implementation of the Kremlin’s attempts to introduce a unified national identity across the ethnofederal structure that underpins the Russian Federation. In her recent book, Legitimating Nationalism: Political Identity in Russia’s Ethnic Republics, Katie L. Stewart zooms in on three of Russia’s ethnically defined republics—Karelia, Buryatia, and Tatarstan—to examine how regional leaders have navigated the intersection between federal demands for national unity and local particularities. Whereas recent years have witnessed substantial efforts to decipher various strands of Putin’s top-down nation-building strategy, studies examining how the Kremlin's messaging and policies are received, accommodated, or contested at the regional level remain few and far between. Stewart’s book therefore fills an important gap in the literature by providing a comparative analysis of how Moscow's nation-building strategy is implemented in some of Russia's multiethnic locales. After theorizing “legitimating nationalism,” Stewart develops a typology of regional nation-building strategies that may be adopted when federal designs clash with local demands for a more inclusive national identity (chapter 1). Tatarstan, Buryatia, and Karelia were thus selected based on predicted variation in expected outcomes: Tatarstan was anticipated to promote an inclusive strategy (due to its bargaining power as well as the large community of Tatars living outside the republic’s borders), Buryatia an accommodative strategy (although it lacks bargaining power, it potentially commands the loyalty of coethnics in neighboring regions), and Karelia an assimilationist strategy (this republic is perceived to have no bargaining power and no mobilizable diaspora). The book draws on fieldwork in the three republics during 2014 and from 2015 to 2016 and original survey data from a survey conducted in 2016. While Stewart’s research focuses on the domestic dimension of Russian politics, the worsening geopolitical context nevertheless had direct implications for her project: during her fieldwork in Buryatia, Stewart was arrested and deported from Russia due to alleged visa violations. The remaining work had to be carried out at a distance from the localities she had intended to immerse herself in. In the qualitative analysis (chapters 3–6), Stewart compares how monuments, holidays, museums, and school history textbooks are mobilized across the three ethnic republics to promote assimilation, accommodation, or inclusion—how local authorities in Stewart’s words mark the nation by erecting monuments, celebrate the nation through public holidays, curate the nation in exhibitions at the local museum, and teach the nation at schools. Stewart provides rich empirical evidence to support her discussion of how the Kremlin's attempts at unifying nation-building have fared in the meeting with realities on the ground. She generously shares from her field observations: of surveying various monuments dotting the cityscape, participating in festivities surrounding national holidays, joining museum tours, and reading local school history textbooks. Through her analysis, she captures the multifaceted realities of regional identity building in contemporary Russia—at least as they unfolded prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Importantly, the book also includes a chapter on how these messages were received and interpreted by the local population, based on a survey conducted in the three republics and in three “regular” regions: Murmansk, Samara, and Irkutsk (chapter 2). While the survey offers an aggregate overview of local attitudes, I would have liked to see more local voices included in the qualitative chapters. A larger number of in-depth interviews would have helped contextualize both the survey findings and the field observations. Overall, in her assessment of the effectiveness of legitimating nationalism, Stewart finds that “different regional contexts condition the effects of ethnicity, symbols, and socioeconomic status on Russian and regional attachment. A tactic designed to promote legitimating nationalism in one region will not necessarily work in another” (pp. 85–6). There is no one-size-fits-all. Against the backdrop of increasing pressure to accommodate or assimilate, and at a time when access to the field is largely closed off to most researchers, Stewart’s book offers a rare glimpse into nation-building strategies in Russia’s ethnic republics.