Table Of ContentRace and Racism in Russia
Mapping Global Racisms
Series Editor: Ian Law, Professor of Racism and Ethnicity Studies in the School
of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, UK
Titles Include:
Ian Law
RED RACISMS
Racism in Communist and Post-Communist Contexts
Ian Law
MEDITERRANEAN RACISMS
Connections and Complexities in the Racialization of the Mediterranean
Region
Mapping Global Racisms
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Race and Racism in Russia
Nikolay Zakharov
Södertörn University, Sweden
© Nikolay Zakharov 2015
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Global Racism s and Racism in Russia: An Introduction 1
From historical legacies to sociological challenges:
the Russian case 4
Mapping the previous research 10
Outline of the book 16
2 Race and Racism in the Russian Past 21
Racism in Russian history, or racialization
of the past? 22
Race and racism in Imperial Russia 29
Soviet representations of otherness and
discourses of race 34
3 Race, Racialization and Racism: A New Theoretical
Framework 46
Racism as the contested attribute of modernity 50
Black asses and bright souls: ontologies of race 58
Racialization as making, doing, and becoming 65
Racial knowledge in Russia: hybridity, the Third
World, and human material 70
4 Making Race in the Russian Academia 79
Against ‘political correctness’: racial knowledge in the
works of Alexander Zinoviev and Victor Kozlov 81
Valeriy Solovey and Vladimir Avdeev: the search
for racial ‘Russianness’ 89
Rasovedenie against rasologiya: physical anthropology’s
concept of ‘race without prejudices’ 97
From the ethics of authenticity to the new biopolitics 101
5 Rioting for Whiteness: Doing Race on the
Squares of Moscow 109
Understanding the anti-immigrant movement and its
collective action 114
Healing the trauma: the authorities’ responses to
Manezhnaya Square and Biryulevo riots 120
‘Doing race’: in search of racists 127
v
vi Contents
6 Becoming Racial: Race as a New Form of Inequality 134
The new economic order: from racialized capital
to racialized labor 138
Representation of migrants as a security problem 149
Becoming racial, doing race: negotiations of ‘blackness’ and
‘whiteness’ by racialized minorities in Russia 154
7 Geopolitics of Racism and the Nation-Building Processes 163
Empire and whiteness: symbolic economies of difference 163
‘Postcolonial in a cold climate’: Russia as a
colonized colonizer 170
The nation-building processes: ambivalences in
the uses of racial knowledge 175
8 Concluding Discussion 184
Notes 196
References 199
Index 223
Acknowledgements
This book is a product of years of research, and therefore it is difficult to
mention here every person whose input I wish to acknowledge.
First of all, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Ian Law
(University of Leeds), whose interest in the project encouraged me from
its very outset. This book would not have been possible without Ian’s
help.
I am also indebted to Sven Hort (Seoul National University) and
Vessela Misheva (Uppsala University) who have been supporting me
ever since 2008, when I began to work on the new theory of racializa-
tion. I am grateful for these two academics’ concern and insight.
This book could not have been published without the help by highly
professional and friendly staff of Palgrave Macmillan. I wish to express
my special thanks to Philippa Grand, Chris Grieves and Emily Russell.
My thanks also go to Andrew Blasko for helping me to find right
words when writing in English as well as to Aleh Ivanou for his help in
compiling the index. Nick Brock has followed the highest professional
standards as editor of the final manuscript.
I would like to thank all my colleagues at the Sociology Institute of
Södertörn University in Sweden – an institution and where I have the
honor to work.
Liv’s patience gave me the strength to continue with all my projects.
My parents defined and nurtured my interests from my early years. The
family’s love and support are invaluable and mean a lot to me.
vii
1
Global Racisms and Racism in
Russia: An Introduction
The last two decades have been marked by a wide range of critical
changes in Russia, the largest country of the former Soviet Union. A new
name, borders, political and economic systems affirm the emergence
not only of a new state, but of a new nation as well. These changes
have been so profound and overarching that they affect both the social
order as a whole and also the self-identity of each citizen, transforming
daily practices, hopes, worldviews, and how people regard one another.
Among the most striking changes is the wide dissemination of ideas of
racial hierarchy, practices of racist exclusion, and racist violence. While
biological conceptions of race are no longer an acceptable scholarly
framework in the West for the analysis of differences, there has been a
genuine renaissance in Russia of ‘scientific’ racism. Recent attempts to
revitalize the ‘science of race’ that utilize proposing a new name for it,
rasologiya (a rough analogue of Nazi Germany’s Rassenkunde), the issu-
ing of numerous books and other texts on the subject, and translations
of certain more ‘classical’ scholarly works, cannot be ignored. Even
though they comprise – it goes without saying – an ad hoc conflation
of alarmist resentment and tendentious pseudo-scientific theories,
they nevertheless have had a very strong influence on both public and
intellectual discourses. For example, Alexander Tkachev, the governor
of Krasnodarskiy kray in the Kuban’ since 2001 and a head of the
Committee of the State Duma on Nationalities Issues, declared in 2002
that ‘surnames ending in “ian,” “dze,” “shvili” and “ogly” are as illegal
as their bearers’ (quoted in Shnirelman 2011(2), p. 35). Belikov (2011,
pp. 38–9) estimates that the membership of skinhead racist gangs in
Russia has risen to 50,000, which Arnold (2009) judges to be roughly
half of the total skinhead movement in the world today.
1
2 Race and Racism in Russia
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the identification of belong-
ing in respect to Russia found itself hovering in both economic and
political terms between the so-called First World and the Third World.
It is noteworthy in this regard that the notion of ‘civilized country’
was and remains in Russia a synonym for racial whiteness. In addition,
Mikhail Gorbachev’s idea of ‘entering world civilization’ implied that
the realization of the Soviet project had led both the country and soci-
ety away from the path of civilization. Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin
have unreservedly defined the Russian Federation as a ‘great power’,
but the great power image and the ongoing process of nation-building
under the conditions of globalization have been accompanied by the
exploitation of racial universals. Since the disintegration of the Soviet
Union in fact, race imagery has been used as the reliable anchor keep-
ing Russia firmly within the ‘family of civilized peoples’. Against this
background, the main thesis of this book identifies the discourse of race
as the point of reconciliation between the understanding that Russians
participate in the achievements of the West and the necessity of cling-
ing to authenticity.
Although victims, journalists, and human rights advocates alike
interpret physical and symbolic violence against individuals who are
‘visually different’ as racially motivated, invocations of ‘race’ become
problematic for sociological analysis when there is little agreement
about whether ‘race’ correlates with skin color, ethnicity, citizenship, or
social status. In addition, prospects for understanding and interpreta-
tion are made more difficult by virtue of the great sensitivity of the issue
of racism and the fact that much of what is discussed today in connec-
tion with race and ethnicity is in fact related more to political rhetoric
or moral issues than to scholarship. John Rex (2009, p. 174) has noted
that ‘the problem of race and racism challenges the conscience of the
sociologist in the same way as the problem of nuclear weapons chal-
lenges that of the nuclear physicist’. Scholars have thus been motivated
to avoid use of the word ‘race’ as well as the ideas and feelings under-
lying it. While such avoidance can be either temporary or permanent,
the goal has been to develop a new strategic vision and thereby obtain
a greater capacity for and purposefulness in research.
The first step in this regard was to focus attention on the processes
through which social groups have been formed, particularly the social
mechanisms associated with these processes and the causes for the
prominence of certain racial or ethnic attributes during a given period
of time. The next step was the abandonment by the academic com-
munity of the essentialist understanding of race and of the notion
