| Summary: | National state construction in the post-Soviet space was launched and is being implemented within the framework of institutional and symbolic legacy of the Soviet modernization project. Relying on theoretical resources of historical macrosociology and nationalism studies the article seeks to delineate the role of the Soviet legacy in the construction of post-Soviet national identities. It puts particular emphasis on conceptualizing a defining influence of the Soviet policy of positive discrimination and its outcomes on the emergence and behavioral patterns of elite groups in the course of implementation of post-Soviet projects of a nationalizing state. The article argues that disorganization of the Soviet infrastructure created conditions for implementation of the extraction strategy that resulted in seizing resources of the disintegrated state and turning them into various assets of the emerging post-Soviet elites. Theoretical optics of the "reversed Tillyan perspective", the term introduced by the Bulgarian scientist and politician Venelin Ganev, makes it possible to claim that such elite behavior weakened the institution of the state dramatically and defined the institutional context of various patterns of nation-state building in the post-Soviet space. The logic of positive discrimination, inherent to the Soviet format of nation-state building based on the principle of institutional isomorphism, led in its turn to the emergence of the diverse proto-state infrastructure of the national republics. It is concluded that, to a large extent, new post-Soviet polities were being formed as a result of appropriating that infrastructure. In these conditions, the disintegration of the supra-ethnic Soviet macro-political identity was accompanied by active emancipation of those symbolic policy strategies that were directly based on the resource pool that had emerged as a result of the Soviet national policy and more broadly, of the Soviet modernization project overall.
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