The article offers a schematic representation of the politicization of ethnicity and ethnic mobilization as the theory and practice of one of the most important fragment of ethnopolitical history of the peoples of Russia on the eve and in the first decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its strategic goals were the doctrinal justification of entrance of ethnic elites into power on the basis of the mandate of the voters' trust in order to preserve the identity of people and its right to self-determination under the unintelligible slogan of «national revival». The study of ethnic mobilization is an important contribution to the formation of the subject area and problems of ethno-political science as a new interdisciplinary direction of knowledge in the sphere of ethnic-state relations.