Ethnic and political identities and territorialities in the post-Soviet space

The author examines some specific features and the post-Soviet changes of ethnic and political identities. He stresses the existence of supranational, mixed, blurred and `hierarchical' identities and of the complicated overlapping of national (political) and ethnic identities. Factors influencing their evolution in the context of nation- and state-building in the Russian Federation and in the other former Soviet republics are analyzed: language policy, creation of the national informational space, invention of national myths and stereotypes, and economic leverages used by ethnic political elites.