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This new ultranationalist course adopted by the leading political party was a consequence of the generalized spread of chauvinist ideas in Russian society that had been prepared by the activities of a multitude of extreme right organizations. The political elite’s pursuit of electoral success led to their embracing the prevailing mood of society. The political scientist Vladimir Pribylovsky, director of the critical Moscow-based center for social research Panorama, interpreted the metamorphosis of United Russia as follows:

A segment of the voters in Russia will turn or may turn to parties that do not support the president and the present policy. They are talking particularly about the nationalists. The proportion of the electorate who are receptive to nationalist ideas is, according to some estimates, some 30–40%. That is a significant part of the electorate, and a section of these people votes for the pro-presidential parties, but a section does not vote or votes for the opposition. In the following six months we will see attempts by the party in power to flirt with nationalist and even xenophobic tendencies in society.^[47]

According to another source the stakes could be even higher. Leonty Vyzov, director of the state sponsored social-political research center VTsIOM, said: “Sociologists divide the nationalists into ‘soft’ ones, who limit their existing hatred to migrants, and ‘hard’ ones, worshippers of the slogan ‘Russia for the Russians,’ who are ready to express their views in public.” “The first . . . makes up 40–45 % of the total number of citizens, the second about 10%.”^[48] This meant that, according to these estimates, in early 2007 ultranationalist feelings were prevalent in a majority of the Russian population.

But this adaptation of United Russia to the prevalent ultranationalist mood was not the result only of (electoral) pressure from below. We have seen that as early as 1999 Putin himself was a convinced protagonist of giving patriotism a central place in the new Russian ideology. The decision, taken on electoral grounds, to choose a more nationalistic course coincided with a strategy on the part of the presidential administration to ideologize United Russia. The Kremlin was the cockpit of this change: the captain on board was Vladimir Putin, and his copilots were Vladislav Surkov, the deputy director of the presidential administration, and Aleksey Chesnakov, the deputy director of the Department of Domestic Policy of the presidential administration. Another factor implicating the Kremlin’s central role was the fact that Ivan Demidov, who introduced the new nationalism in United Russia through his Russian Project and who was called by the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, “the incubator of patriotism,”^[49] was in 2009 appointed director of the Department of Human Policy and Social Relations of the presidential administration.

This Kremlin-led policy to make United Russia into the nationalist party of Russia—leaving the other nationalist parties far behind—was a great success. With hindsight this transformation from a conservative law-and-order party into a nationalist party did not even need to be imposed from the top, because all the new clubs within the party, irrespective of whether they labeled themselves left, right, or center, indulged in the newly embraced patriotism. The so called liberal-conservatives, for instance, were organized within the Club of 4 November (Klub 4 Noyabrya). The name of this club was in itself revealing: it referred to November 4, a date that (in 2004) was made by decree into People’s Unity Day, a new national holiday on which Russia’s victory in 1612 over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was celebrated (the choice of this day was not really appreciated by the Poles). The club’s manifesto included the statement that “the real sovereignty of Russia is today, by far, the most important problem”^[50] and that “patriotism is one of the most important values of Russian society.”^[51]

Russia’s Frontiers “Are Not Eternal”