The study is a brief retrospective of the development of ethno-national movements in the Russian Empire, the USSR and the post-Soviet period. Since the second half of the XIX century in the overwhelming majority, they have evolved from small intellectual circles to independent ruling national elites within the framework of independent national (ethno-national) states or national subjects of the Russian Federation. They developed not in the logic of the conflict between the conventional metropolis and the national outskirts, but rather in the dynamics of the context of the political and economic crisis of the center and its relapses. It was in this sequence from the revolutions of 1905-1907, 1917 and the events of Perestroika in 1985-1991. can be traced as representatives of the intellectual elite of the national borderlands from the struggle for equal participation in political processes in the country, moved on to autonomist ideas and then to independence or autonomy.