The story of racism in any society is complex. In the case of Eugene Avrutin's intention to provide some context for understanding it in Russia over the last four-plus centuries—“Romanovs to Putin”—the task is a prodigious one. But, as Avrutin states: “I have no intention of providing a seamless narrative… I raise exploratory questions about the meanings and functions of race. What did racial identifications and categories mean in Russia? What was the relationship between race, whiteness and geography? How did Russia fit into the global dimensions of the color line? When and why did skin color emerge as an important element…. in identity formation?” (8). Starting with the last two Romanovs (Alexander III and Nicholas II), Avrutin stretches 150 years through the Soviet era and up to Vladimir Putin's Russia in 2017.
Racism, on a global scale, is more malleable than the United States’ black-white dynamic. It is shaped around real and perceived differences in religion, geography, language, culture, and social class. Color is only one feature. Furthermore, “otherness” has been used by ruling elites to redirect the attentions, of those they control, from their discontents with the powers-that-be to focus on scapegoats.
Since Russia did not participate in the slave trade or in the “scramble for Africa,” conventional thinking was that she was late to develop the biologically-based perceptions seen in other countries (4). But, as Avrutin observes in Chapter 1, “racial thinking existed long before the vocabulary came into being” (9). Russia had already developed her own justifications for discriminating against others. And thanks to negative popular culture imagery, not only the scientists but ordinary people believed that perceived differences and deficiencies were fixed (20). Russian serfs, Poles, Germans, and Jews to the west were targeted, as were the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese to the east. Some could blend into the ethnic Russian population over time; others, such as the Jews and Asians, could not.
Chapter 2 explores the ways the tsars controlled people deemed a threat to the society. The Jews were crowded into certain city districts or restricted to the Pale of Settlement region (24). While antisemitic violence was left unchecked. Over 3000 people died in pogroms in the early 1900s (33). The Chinese and Koreans were limited in numbers (34), but labor shortages were such that mine owners and railroad builders circumvented the laws (41), while public concern erupted in violence and harassment (46).
Chapter 3 considers the contradictions of racism, geo-politics, and the search for allies. The new “Soviet” Russia of the 1920s and 30s attracted American Blacks. Severely denigrated at home, these visitors embraced the Soviets’ call for internationalism and building a new, non-racial society (55). Meanwhile Jews were being persecuted for “disloyalty” (70). Following World War II, the Soviet Cold War-era outreach to students from Africa and other parts of the world attracted thousands eager to rebuild their societies. “By 1989, 36,000 students from sub-Saharan Africa, and 39,600 students from Latin America” benefited from professional and technical training (80). But they and increasing numbers of people from the country's southern and eastern provincial areas, appearing in the large urban centers, provoked concern. “Non-Slavic migrants from the peripheries [were seen as] racial outsiders. Anyone who looked or spoke differently could be labeled as ‘black’” (96). “Blackness—a marker of foreignness and exoticism, if not alienation—increasingly occupied a conspicuous place in Soviet society” (82). As blackness denoted the “other,” whiteness marked “belonging.” By the collapse of the USSR, “People who identified themselves as ‘Russian’ became increasingly conscious of the outsized role skin color played in elevating their place” (83).
Chapter 4 considers how this sense of “whiteness” fanned conflicts in post-Soviet Russia. The social and legal checks and balances of the Soviet era were gone. Poverty and mortality rates soared. Social and formal media warned that the ethnic Russia population was under threat and their cultural ethos could disappear (86) because of these “blacks.” From 2000 to 2017, “458 people died and thousands were attacked by extremists (87). “The slogan ‘white power’ in Russia… [was] the rallying cry” (88). Avrutin notes, while polls show that support for extremist groups is relatively low, xenophobia remains high (103), and he cautions, “an important shift took place in how ethnic Russians viewed themselves and the world around them… [now through] the prism of race and whiteness (107).”
This slim volume raises useful questions. But, it is best included alongside more detailed explorations of racism in Russia.
