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In October 2013, one of the largest anti-migrant riots took place in Moscow. Clashes and arrests continued late into the night. Some in the crowd, which grew to several thousand people, could be heard chanting "Russia for the Russians" with their animus directed towards dark-skinned labor migrants from the southern border. The slogan "Russia for the Russians" is not a recent invention. It first gained notoriety in the very last years of the tsarist regime, appealing primarily to individuals drawn to the radical right. Analyzing a wide range of printed and visual sources, Racism in Modern Russia marks the first serious attempt to understand the history of racism over a span of 150 years. A brilliant examination of the complexities of racism, Eugene M. Avrutin's panoramic book asks powerful questions about inequality and privilege, denigration and belonging, power and policy, and the complex historical links between race, whiteness, and geography.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
About the author
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).
Summary
In October 2013, one of the largest anti-migrant riots took place in Moscow. Clashes and arrests continued late into the night. Some in the crowd, which grew to several thousand people, could be heard chanting “Russia for the Russians” with their animus directed towards dark-skinned labor migrants from the southern border. The slogan “Russia for the Russians” is not a recent invention. It first gained notoriety in the very last years of the tsarist regime, appealing primarily to individuals drawn to the radical right. Analyzing a wide range of printed and visual sources, Racism in Modern Russia marks the first serious attempt to understand the history of racism over a span of 150 years. A brilliant examination of the complexities of racism, Eugene M. Avrutin’s panoramic book asks powerful questions about inequality and privilege, denigration and belonging, power and policy, and the complex historical links between race, whiteness, and geography.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Additional text
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.
