Majority and Minority Xenophobia in Russia: The Importance of Being Titulars

Abstract

Given increases in hostility and violence targeting Russia's migrant minorities since the late 1990s, local and international scholars, human rights groups, and others have focused predominantly on relationships between the ethnic Russian majority and the non-Russian ethnic minorities. The emergent xenophobic activism among ethnic minorities, or inter-minority xenophobia, has received much less attention. Mass survey data from the Russian Federation is used in a systematic comparison of attitudes toward migration among ethnic Russians vs. ethnic non-Russians. Attitudes are also compared across select ethnic non-Russian groups to address this growing, if counterintuitive, problem in Russia's ethnic relations arising from migrations.