Racism in Modern Russia

Eugene M. Avrutin is the Tobor Family Endowed Professor of Modern European Jewish History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is the author and co-editor of several award-winning books, including Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (2010) and The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian Town (2018). Most recently, he edited, with Elissa Bemporad, Pogroms: A Documentary History (2021).

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.”

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1. The Empire’s Races2. Boundaries of Exclusion3. “The Most Hopeful Nation on Earth”4. White RageSelected BibliographyIndex