Racism in Modern Russia

Well written, combining a synthesis of the most recent historiography with the author’s original research, this book is long overdue. Despite many conceptual and archival innovations in the field of Russian imperial and Soviet history, race and racism have always remained the last bastions for those who insisted on Russia’s special historical path. Avrutin helps the reader to think about race in Russian and Soviet imperial formations as a form of rationalizing, organizing, and controlling messy human diversity. This concise book covers the science of race, politics of race, ideologies of race, various racialized social experiences, and racial violence, but it does not offer a linear narrative. Instead Avrutin shows how different combinations and applications of the above depended on a specific context (“the Jewish question”; “Yellow peril”; Soviet nation-building; post-Soviet racism with its fixation on whiteness, and so on). Avoiding using the sophisticated analytical apparatus of critical race theory in the text, Avrutin nonetheless embraces its intersectional approach to race, explicating how social, gender, and class differences were construed and experienced as essentialized qualities of particular imperial and Soviet subjects. In addition, the reader is constantly reminded about the global nature of “race,” especially in the Soviet part of the narrative, which features protagonists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and other Western and “third world” travelers to the USSR and dwells on their politics of comparison. The combination of quality of analysis, style, and size makes this book a great source for educators like myself, who until now have had very little to offer our students on a topic as politically pertinent as race and racism in the Russian and Soviet past and the post-Soviet present. This book is also an inspiration for professional researchers interested in exploring Russian and Soviet experiences through the lens of “race.” * Marina Mogilner, Edward and Marianna Thaden Chair in Russian and East European Intellectual History; Associate Professor of History, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA *
Racism in Modern Russia is a welcome contribution to the field … Avrutin has succeeded in writing a book that poses interesting … questions about the place of racism in modern Russia. … Racism in Modern Russia will surely be of interest to professors, graduate students, and undergraduates interested in understanding Russia’s place in, and construction of, a “white man’s world.” * H-Net *
Written by a leading expert on the issue of race in Russia, this innovative book treats ‘race’ as a lens through which to investigate fluctuating discriminatory and exclusionary discourses and practices, thus going beyond the understanding of race as a stable biological category. In so doing it offers an excellent overview of the discourses and practices of race in Russia from the imperial era to the post-Soviet period. * Vera Tolz, Professor of Russian Studies, University of Manchester, UK *