Explores the momentous changes that have taken place in the Russian nationalism since Putin’s return to the presidencyRussia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 marked a watershed in post-Cold War European history and brought East West relations to a low. At the same time, by selling this fateful action in starkly nationalist language, the Putin regime achieved record-high popularity. This book shows how, after the large-scale 2011 13 anti-Putin demonstrations in major Russian cities and the parallel rise in xenophobia related to the Kremlin’s perceived inability to deal with the influx of Central Asian labour migrants, the annexation of Crimea generated strong ‘rallying around the nation’ and ‘rallying around the leader’ effects. The contributors to this collection go beyond the news headlines to focus on overlooked aspects of Russian society such as intellectual racism and growing xenophobia. These developments are contextualised with an overview of Russian nationalism: state-led, grassroots and the tensions between the two.ContributorsHelge Blakkisrud, Senior Researcher and Head of the Research Group on Russia, Eurasia and the Arctic, at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Oslo, Norway. J. Paul Goode, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Russian Politics at the University of Bath, UK. Robert Horvath, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Philosophy at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Eleanor Knott, Fellow in Qualitative Methodology, and from September 2017 an Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics, UK. Pal Kolsto, Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Oslo. Michael Komin, Senior Expert at the Centre for Strategic Research in Moscow, and holds an MA degree in Political Science from the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St Petersburg, Russia. Alexandra Kuznetsova, PhD candidate at the Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political and Social Studies, Kazan National Research Technological University, Russia. Andrey Makarychev, Guest Professor at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Science, University of Tartu, Estonia. Emil Pain, Director General of the Centre for Ethno-Political and Regional Studies, Moscow, and Professor of Political Science, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Eduard Ponarin, Director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research and Professor of Sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Caress Schenk, an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan.Sergey Sergeev, Professor and Head of the Department of Social and Political Conflict Studies at Kazan National Research Technological University and Professor at the Political Science Department, Kazan Federal University, Russia.Yuri Teper, Israel Science Foundation (ISF) postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Sofia Tipaldou, Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. Alexander Verkhovsky, Director of SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, Moscow. Alexandra Yatsyk, Alexander Herzen Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden.