Global Racisms and Racism in Russia: An Introduction

Abstract

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 issuing 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.