States derive legitimacy from diverse sources. Democratic states derive legitimacy not least through liberal institutions and procedures. Lacking such institutions, authoritarian states compensate with reliance on other means to gain acceptance in the population. Very often, nationalism is one such source, and this is the case also in Putin's Russia. However, complicating the task for the Kremlin is the fact that Russia is a multinational state, with many of the larger ethnic minorities having their own political entity, a “republic,” within which they can pursue rival nation-building projects. While the danger of state disintegration was averted under Yeltsin in the 1990s, the federal structure of the Russian state has been retained, and as Katie L. Stewart argues in her book Legitimating Nationalism, local minority leaders may still use them to mobilize for strong identities in the population at substate levels.

These local identity projects do not necessarily create much of a headache in the Kremlin. Their strength and direction depend upon a number of factors: what kind of local nationalism is being pursued, by which means, and how the nationalist strategy is perceived by the population. Stewart has designed a theory to analyze possible outcomes, of which she distinguishes between three: inclusion, accommodation, and assimilation. S