Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin By Eugene M.Avrutin. Russian Shorts. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 160 pp. $16.15 (paper). ISBN 978‐1‐350‐09728‐5

Abstract

Only in the last decade or so has racism undergone serious inquiry by scholars of Russia. Western academics had long taken at face value the words of Russian ethnographers and anthropologists that Russians themselves, as a people on the margins, had an innate understanding of the non-White societies they encountered and, in many cases, conquered. The Soviet Union, of course, portrayed itself as a bastion of anti-racism. Eugene Avrutin's slim volume attempts to synthesize new scholarship that finds race in important places in Russian politics and culture from the tsarist period to the present. Racial thinking, and racialization, developed in uneven ways in the multiethnic tsarist empire and Soviet Union. Even at the height of racist attacks in the Russian Federation a decade ago, the state, as well as its predecessors, never openly embraced racist rhetoric, unlike so many governments in the West. But racism lurked behind encounters that ended in mass violence as well as those that produced feelings of isolation among non-Slavic subjects or citizens. The book's opening chapter is its strongest, as Avrutin offers a nuanced and concise discussion of the appearance and development of racial theories in Russia, and how the color line in the region was “inherently messy” (p. 6). Racialization—the process of turning peoples into fixed others, culturally or biologically—underwent continual shifts within modern Russia, depending on the nature of encounters, the ideology of the regime and many other factors. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the author's previous publications and expertise, much of the focus of this volume is on anti-Semitism. Racial theories and practices had a particular resonance for Jewish peoples of the tsarist empire. Racial theorists worked to attribute them with all types of unfavorable attributes. Whereas racial categorizations appeared more complicated given long interactions between peoples who mixed, for example, on Slavic and Turkic frontiers, Jews were seen as a people apart. As part of Bloomsbury's “Russian Shorts” series, this volume has to be extremely selective in its examples. It was unfortunate, however, that the largest minorities in tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, or the Russian Federation are barely mentioned. We do not hear anything of substance on the Turkic peoples, from Tatars to those of Central Asia, or peoples of the Caucasus or Siberia. In addition to his focus on Jewish populations, the author spends a significant amount of space on the tiny number of African-Americans in the USSR. Black activist W.E.B. Dubois's observations are highlighted, even if it could be argued his thoughts on Russia are mainly used to underscore his views on racial relations in the United States. African-Americans had a particular status in the Soviet Union, due to their place in Cold War maneuvers. Avrutin does discuss the more central issue of substantial numbers of African students who passed through Soviet universities and faced significant racial prejudice even as the USSR was working to portray racism as a phenomenon linked to capitalism and the United States. The last chapter, which focuses on the Russian Federation, details the sharp rise in violent racism in the 2000s. Extremist groups felt a degree of impunity in attacking non-Whites. Putin's regime proved complicit in foregrounding Slavic superiority even as it made no overtly racist appeals. Avrutin sees Russianness and Whiteness as mutually reinforcing each other over this period, though it is hard to talk about a single “white power movement” in Russia (p. 92). What is missing in this chapter is a discussion of the sharp decrease in racially motivated attacks since the mid-2010s. The book does briefly mention that most ethnic Russians were neither active nor complicit in racist behavior, but the question of broader attitudes and context still lingers, and how and why things change over time. This volume offers a succinct portrayal of how racialization worked at different times and places from the late tsarist period to the mid-2010s. Its selective nature and focus on Jewish and African-Americans as on, supposedly, opposing poles of racist treatment means that we miss much about how racism worked in the vast majority of interethnic encounters in modern Russia.