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Notes -
It's a bit too simplified. Any empire (and since we're talking about imperial ambitions we're talking about empires) has a few distinct groups with distinct priorities that should be modelled separately:
imperial elite
titular nationals
colonial nationals
colonial counter-elites
The imperial elite is the group that is the most interested in the preservation of the empire, since their prosperity depends on its existence.
Colonial counter-elites are the natural opposition to the imperial elite. When the empire is strong, the counter-elites have no political power and even their cultural power is reduced. When the empire grows weak, they naturally grow stronger and start dreaming of their own nation states.
Colonial nationals have two paths for advancement: imperial service that ultimately gets you promoted into the imperial elite and nationalist resistance that promises much more if it succeeds.
Titular nationals have just a single elite that represents them, the imperial elite, which is a perverse situation, as it doesn't actually represent them, it has its own interests on the mind. Titular nationals are its principal tools: it uses them to enlarge and stabilize the empire; the further a titular national advances through the ranks of the imperial service, the less he has in common with the titular nation.
This explains why there's no political path towards a counter-elite for the titular nation. Why doesn't a national counter-elite form in the cultural sphere? The imperial culture is the culture of the titular nation, a high culture form of it, at least in name only.
Colonial nation, in contrast, are allowed to only have their low culture. What if you crave critical acclaim? If your name is Wilde, you move to London and write in English. If your name is Gogol, you move to St Petersburg and write in Russian. Then you travel to Paris to immerse yourself in the most haute culture. If you write about your native culture, it's only to show how quaint it is. Colonial counter-elites will despise you for making your co-nationals fall in love with the culture of the oppressor.
If you're an artist from a titular nation, your path to acclaim is much less thorny. Your language is the language of balls and battles, courts and conquests, violins and violence, not fiddles and frolicking, bars and brawls. The imperial service drains the titular nation of its bravest hearts and quickest minds, the imperial culture takes over the hearts and minds of the rest.
What does this all have to do with your model? Well, your model adequately reflects the psyche of the imperial elite. But the average Russian's psyche is held hostage by the imperial culture and the aftermath of the generations of the imperial service. He has no ambitions of imperial expansion, but he has a strong sense of cultural superiority. At the same time, he is afraid of imperial contraction, which will leave some Russians left behind in hostile nation states and the rest stuck with either no elites at all or with formerly imperial, now irredentist elites too big for the rump state they've been left in charge of.
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