The article deals with the problem of the evolution of ethnonational politics in
the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as the subject of research. The purpose of the study
is to reconstruct the history of ethnonational politics using modern interdisciplinary historiographical
discourse. The source base of the article is represented by historiographical sources,
legislative and constitutional acts, programs of political and national parties, and publicistics.
The theoretical basis of the new work was historiographic methods and interdisciplinary approaches
developed in historiography. The study showed that scientists have set the task of
identifying the continuity and differences in the ethnonational policies of the Romanov Empire
and the USSR. In relation to the Russian Empire, it might be argued that the main trend of this
policy was “Russification,” which included a wide range of actions in accordance with the diversity
of the country’s population. The empire failed to develop an integrating national ideology.
The revolution of 1917 showed the exhaustion of the possibilities of the assimilatory and
integrating policy of the autocracy. The transition to the party-Soviet organization of the state
took place on a new ideological and theoretical basis and gave rise to a practice of national

politics that was significantly different from the Romanov Empire. The national policy of the
Bolsheviks meant acting in line with the general trend of modernization, which caused the
emergence of nation states, and underwent an evolution in the direction from internationalism
to “indigenization”, and then to Russification and “national Bolshevism” of the 1930s. There
was a return to Russian nationalism and faith in a new “tsar”. The Bolsheviks returned to the
imperial model of “all-Russian unity.”