An elegant analysis of some of the existential ‘national’ questions for Moscow’s policy-makers.

How to play up Russian-ness while making non-Russian citizens of the Russian Federation feel welcome? Thus:

“it is impossible to demand from a Chechen that he recognize himself as a citizen of the empire and at the same time not to give him the possibility peacefully and without persecution from the cops to live in Moscow.” For this kind of nationalism, Moscow should be “just as much a capital for the Chechen as it is for the Russian.”

Noble sentiments.

But no easier to make work even in benign democratic environments. How many Scots see London as well as Edinburgh as their capital?