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Ideology

During the late Soviet period, Yeltsin's ideological worldview began to shift. Colton argued that populism and "a non-ethnic Russianism" had begun to enter Yeltsin's thinking while he was First Secretary of Sverdlovsk. In the late 1980s, Yeltsin told the Athens daily newspaper Kathimerini that "I regard myself as a social democrat", adding: "Those who still believe in communism are moving in the sphere of fantasy."

Linking Yeltsin with "liberal Russian nationalism", Alfred B. Evans described Yeltsin as having "exerted a crucial influence on the development of Russian nationalism". Yeltsin helped to channel the aspirations of Russian nationalism in ways that did not lead to clashes with the nationalisms of other national groups within the Soviet Union. As head of the Russian SFSR, he stressed the specific interests of the Russian republic within the broader Soviet Union. Evans compared Yeltsin's turn away from the "empire-building" of the Soviet Union to the ideas of the writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had called in the 1980s for Russia to extricate itself from the Soviet Union. However, Evans thought that Yeltsin still appeared to believe by 1990 that the Ukrainians and Belarusians, as fellow East Slavic nationalities, would want to remain politically united with Russia in federal form. By 1991, it was obvious that this would not occur as the Ukrainian population favored full independence. Over the course of his presidency, he made increasing concessions to right-wing ethnic Russian nationalism by expressing growing concern over the fate of ethnic Russians in neighboring countries.