Abstract:

The Soviet Union was one of the largest multi-ethnic states in the world and certainly the largest one in Europe for many years, with more than one hundred different ethnic groups. Russia, as a part of the Soviet Union, has always been the center of the multi-national empires, and they were the only group among the Soviet nations to have linked their national character to the multi-national Soviet identity by supporting the idea ‘Soviet citizen’ (Sovetskii Chelovek) at the highest level. As the core nation of the USSR, Russians did not identify with the state of their residence and the titular nation of the host country. The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 rendered the ethnic Russians living in non-Russian post-soviet successor states as the largest minority groups. Nearly twenty-five million Russians who remained in the fourteen non-Russian successor states have been transformed into the ‘new minorities’ of the post-Soviet world. However, the relations between the Russian co-ethnics and the titular majority relatively differ from one state to another; there have been radical political, economic, and social alterations in the statutes of these communities.

After losing their dominant position overnight in the republics, Russians found themselves in nation-building and ethnic integration processes of those newly independent states in ‘near abroad’ with hubris (pride) and angst (fear). Since then, there has been a myth and stigmatization of the' cause for worry (-ies)’ among the Russian co-ethnics and the ‘hatred of the Russians' among the titular nations.

This study focuses on two post-Soviet countries (Estonia and Kazakhstan), which represent different contextual circumstances for Russian co-ethnics and titular nation relations. This is not only because of differences in numerical presence but also differences in the socio-economic, cultural, political situations, and social distance of Russian minority groups.

In this vein, the main aim of this research is to comprehend inter-group relations by analyzing the political, social, and mental aspects of the Russian minorities and titular nations in Estonia and Kazakhstan. Given that, this study attempts to elaborate how positive and/or negative mutual in-group/out-group ‘imagined’ feelings and perceptions among these groups have been designated and to understand the level of feelings and perceptions by observing prejudice and stereotypes, animosity explicitly, and also ethnocentrism implicitly in every day. The importance of which factors determine the intergroup relations and their social distance from each other are also comparatively analyzed from the social/political psychological perspectives.