A short history of the Russian Revolution

Abstract

policies to counteract Russian imperialism and incorporate the people of the former Russian Empire into the new Soviet Union. These aspirations took place amid periods of profound transformation, upheaval, and violence, and, as Avrutin argues, the Soviet internal passport, with one’s nationality designated on line five, “facilitated the systematic identification, removal, and, in some cases, physical execution of entire populations by ethnic criteria” by Stalin and by the Nazis during World War II (65). While racial violence decreased after World War II and Stalin’s death, Avrutin writes that everyday experiences of racism persisted, despite Soviet disavowals of race and racism. In the final chapter, Avrutin analyzes the rise in xenophobic attitudes and racial violence in post-Soviet Russia. While he contextualizes these changes with respect to the socioeconomic trauma and demographic transformations of the 1990s, this period still seems like a sudden break between the Soviet disavowal of race and celebration of diversity and the turn towards white power that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Serguei Oushakine’s The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (2009), Viktor Shnirel′man’s “Porog tolerantnosti”: Ideologiia i praktika novogo rasizma (2011), and Vladimir Malakhov’s body of work provide insight into this period, but there is a gap in the literature more broadly on understandings of race and ethnicity during the late Soviet period (for an exception, see Jeff Sahadeo’s Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow, 2019). Finally, while beyond the scope of Avrutin’s book, paying attention to shifting notions of Russianness and its relationship to whiteness is especially important as a future line of research, as made only too clear by Russia’s recent acts of violence and genocide against Ukraine. Throughout the book, Avrutin captures the complexities of processes of racialization, balancing how Russia fits within global discourses while also paying attention to local dynamics. Short and accessible, yet rich with detail, Racism in Modern Russia would therefore work well in a variety of Russian and Soviet history courses as well as in social science courses that focus on contemporary Russia or on comparative studies of race globally.