εθνο || “Russianness” as the zero-value

Rogers Brubaker хорошо о русских как нации в СССР:

Will this general tendency for ethnic minorities to define themselves in national terms hold for Russians in non-Russian successor states? Will they too represent themselves as differing in nationality—rather than merely in in language, culture, or sub-national ethnicity—from the “titular” nation or nationality? The answer is not obvious. On the one hand, despite—or precisely because of—the hegemony of Russians in and the pervasive “Russianness” of the Soviet Union as a whole, Russian nationality was in some respects less strongly institutionalized than other nationalities. Precisely because what was “Russian” about the Soviet Union was diffused throughout its entire territory and (to a certain extent) its entire population, “Russianness” could not be adequately expressed in or contained by a delimited national territory or a distinct personal nationality. “Russianness” suffused the entire state; it was too big, too general to be encoded in the system of institutionalized nationality as one among many. “Russianness”, like “whiteness” in the US, was in a sense invisible; it was experienced not as a particular nationality but as the general norm, the zero-value, the universal condition against which other nationalities existed as particular, and particularist, “deviations”.

R.Brubaker. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in New Europe. Cambridge University Press, 1997.