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Racism, the Highest Stage of Anti-Communism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

Rossen Djagalov
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Abstract

There are many and different types of racism in contemporary Russia: institutional racism, far-right racism, everyday (bytovoi) racism, and a fourth kind to which this essay will be devoted, the racism of the liberal intelligentsia. Russian liberal media's reaction to the BLM protests of 2020 has offered abundant material for the study of its social base, main tropes, and underlying logic. This article attempts to historicize it, locating its origins in the anti-Soviet pro-western dissidence of the stagnation era and illustrating its workings through some statements made by Joseph Brodsky and his milieu. Furthermore, the article identifies the intersection of two main ideas from which this racism emerges. In the first place, this is Cold-War rejection of real or perceived Soviet alliances with newly decolonized countries of Africa and Asia or with African Americans during the Civil Rights era. In the second place, this is dissident civilizational hierarchies that placed the west at the top and saw the east or the south as a backward space best avoided.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum on Race and Bias
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 290 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Ilya Kliger, Maxim Matusevich, Artem Kirpichenok, and Meredith Roman for their generous advice and insights into this topic.

References

1. A small number of self-described liberal intellectuals such as Alexander Arkhangelsky, Dmitry Dubrovsky, and the left liberal Sergei Abashin have at various times spoken out against this kind of racism, but their voices are genuinely drowned by this chorus.

2. The list is too long to reproduce here and the (anti-anti-)racism of their statements has been subjected to an excellent analysis elsewhere. See, for example, Ilya Budraitskis, “Konets voobrazhaemogo zapada,” OpenDemocracy-Russia at https://www.opendemocracy.net/ru/konets-voobrazhayemogo-zapada (June 12, 2020); Karina Orlova, “Chuzhoi protest: Pochemu rossiskaia oppozitsiia e podderzhala dvizhenie BLM,” Coda at https://www.codastory.com/ru/russianliberals-blm/ (July 8, 2020); Ivan Aleksandrov, “Rossiia v zerkale Black Lives Matter,” Eurasianet at https://russian.eurasianet.org/россия-в-зеркале-black-lives-matter (June 18, 2020); Kirill Kobrin, “Liberal΄naia intelligentsia i postputinskii consensus,” Open Democracy-Russia at https://www.opendemocracy.net/ru/liberalnaya-intelligentsiya-i-postputinskiy-konsensus (September 12, 2020); Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, “The Curious Case of Russian Lives Matter,” Foreign Policy at https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/11/the-curious-case-of-russian-lives-matter (July 11, 2020).

3. Part of the confusion stems from the difference in meanings between the Russian terms for “liberal”/“liberalism” and the European or North American usages of the terms. For the specificity of Russian liberalism, see the interview with Gregory Yudin, “Scratch a Russian Liberal and You’ll Find a Well-Educated Conservative.” LeftEast at https://lefteast.org/scratch-a-russian-liberal-and-youll-find-an-educated-conservative-an-interview-with-sociologist-greg-yudin (March 23, 2017).

4. Abashin, Sergei, “Migration Policies in Russia: Laws and Debates.” in Heusala, Anna-Liisa and Aitamurto, Kaarina, eds., Migrant Workers in Russia: Global Challenges of the Shadow Economy (London, 2017), 16–34Google Scholar.

5. See the Sova Center statistics for racially-motivated murders and attacks in Alexander Verkhovsky, ed., Xenophobia, Freedom of Conscience and Anti-Extremism in Russia in 2019 (Moscow, 2020), 8.

6. To learn more about “for Slavs only” housing ads, see Deminsteva, Ekaterina, “Labor Migrants in Post-Soviet Moscow: Patterns of Settlement,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43, no. 15 (February 2017): 2560Google Scholar. The everyday racist language labor migrants of color encounter in Russian cities, which does date back to the late-Soviet period, has been described in Sahadeo, Jeff, Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Ithaca, 2017), 93–115Google Scholar.

7. This article will draw on the excellent popular writing done on the subject: in addition to the texts mentioned in n2, see Artem Kirpichenok, “Joseph Brodsky: Skromnoe obaianie rasizma,” Liva: internet-zhurnal at https://liva.com.ua/iosif-brodskij-skromnoe-obayanie-rasizma.html (June 7, 2020); and Maxim Matusevich, “The Red and the Black: The Riddle of Post-Soviet Racism” LeftEast at https://lefteast.org/red-black/ (June 25, 2017). Significantly, the scholarship on east and central European intelligentsia racism is significantly more extensive. See, for example, James Mark, Bogdan Iacob, and Tobias Rupprecht, and Ljubica Spasovska, 1989: a Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 2019), 125–72; and József Böröcz, “Whiteness: Race, Capitalism, US, and Eastern Europe,” LeftEast at https://lefteast.org/whiteness-race-capitalism-us-eastern-europe/ (June 27, 2020).

8. The Soviet state’s checkered history with race is important to this essay as it provides the historical background against which anti-Soviet racism emerged. In recent years there has been an abundance of excellent scholarship on the topic, to which we can refer the curious reader. For wide-ranging accounts of race and Russia that extend beyond the Soviet period, see Zakharov, Nikolai, Race and Racism in Russia (Basingstoke, Eng., 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Rainbow, David, ed., Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context (Montreal, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For early Soviet anti-colonialism, see, Fredrik Petersson, “We Were Neither Visionaries, Nor Utopian Dreamers: Willi Münzenberg, the League against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925–1933.” (PhD diss., Abo Akademi, 2013); Riddell, John, ed., To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920-First Congress of the Peoples of the East (New York, 1993)Google Scholar. For American and other non-white visitors to the USSR, see Baldwin, Kate, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC, 2002)Google Scholar; Roman, Meredith, Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928–1937 (Lincoln, NE, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lee, Steven, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the effects of Soviet Cold-War propaganda on the success of the US Civil Rights movement, see Dudziak, Mary, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar. For Stalin- and post-Stalin-era racialization, see Weitz, Eric, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges.” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katsakioris, Constantin, “Burden or Allies?: Third World Students and Internationalist Duty through Soviet Eyes.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 18, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 539–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Matusevich, Maxim, “Soviet Antiracism and Its Discontents: The Cold War Years,” in Mark, James, Kalinovsky, Artemy, and Marung, Steffi, eds., Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World (Bloomington, IN, 2020): 229–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Karl Proffer, Bez kupiur, trans. V. Babkov and V. Golyshev (Moscow, 2017), 66. Sadly, Brodsky’s views on non-white peoples were not isolated to private conversation. For a study of the orientalism of his prose and poetry, see Sanna Turoma, Brodsky Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia (Madison, WI, 2010).

10. Proffer, Bez Kupiur, 74.

11. Ibid., 66.

12. Ibid., 85.

13. Ibid., 74, 14.

14. There are, of course, exceptions. As a card-carrying CP member feted by the Soviet Union, Angela Davis became a frequent target in dissident writing. See Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, A Warning to the West (New York, 1976), 60–61; Dina Kaminskaya, Final Judgment: My Life as a Soviet Defense Lawyer, trans. Michael Glenny (New York, 1982), 173–74; Leonid Plyushch, History’s Carnival: A Dissident’s Autobiography (New York, 1979), 238. I owe these references to Meredith Roman.

15. Aleksandra Guzeva, “Amerikanskaia izdatel΄nitsa Brodskogo raskryvaet ego tayny: Ellendeia Proffer-Tisli predstavit knigu Bez kupiur,” Godliteratury at https://godliteratury.ru/articles/2017/04/18/amerikanskaya-izdatelnica-brodskogo (April 17, 2017).

16. Correspondence with Alexander Shubin, a historian and a contemporary of the perestroika era. September 7, 2020.

17. There have been two major accounts of the post-Stalin-era popular obsession with the west: Eleonory Gilburd, To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2018) and Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: the Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), 158–206. In both cases, the popular fascination with American rock music or Erich Maria Remarque’s novels, jeans or Italian comedy films, the minor cult around Hemingway and other such western figures are presented as something innocent, at worst, amusing, and the darker side to this late-Soviet preoccupation with the west is largely absent.

18. Rossen Djagalov, “The Zone of Freedom? Differential Censorship in the Post-Stalin-Era People’s Republic of Letters,” Slavic and East European Review 98, no. 4 (October 2020): 601–31.

19. Maxim Matusevich, “Journeys of Hope: African Diaspora and the Soviet Society,” African Diaspora 1, no. 1–2 (January 2008): 53–85; Raquel Greene, “In to Africa.” YouTube video, 40:45, posted by Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University, October 31, 2016, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TklHTuC611k&t=2445s (accessed June 8, 2021).

20. Such views, of course, cannot be ascribed to all pro-western liberal dissidents. Some, such as Lyudmila Alexeyeva, took the notion of human rights seriously and extended it to people regardless of their skin color. Others, such as Andrei Amal΄rik, demonstrated genuine and positive interest in the lives of certain non-white peoples (in his case, the Igbo people, who were in the late 1960s the target of a murderous campaign by the Nigerian military, supported by Great Britain, the US, Egypt, and the USSR). Moreover, this antipathy towards non-white peoples extended to other sections of the Soviet dissident community, such as Russian nationalists, as evidenced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s hostile statements against Angela Davis, or the nationalist samizdat journal Veche’s interest in the coming wars between the white and the non-white races.

21. Charles Quist Adade, “From Paternalism to Ethnocentrism: Images of Africa in Gorbachev’s Russia,” Race and Class 46, no. 4 (April 2005): 79–89.

22. Space limitations do not allow me to consider the numerous kindred phenomena such as post-Soviet intelligentsia’s racialization of the working-class, including its white and Slavic majority, through biological concepts such as Homo Sovieticus, with his “civilizational incompetence.” For a fuller treatment of this process, see Rossen Djagalov, “Anti-Populizm postsocialisticheskoi intelligentsii,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 1, no. 75 (Winter 2011), at https://magazines.gorky.media/nz/2011/1/antipopulizm-postsoczialisticheskoj-intelligenczii.html (accessed June 9, 2021).

23. Valeriia Novodvorskaya, “Ne otdadim nashe pravo nalevo,” Novyi Vzgliad, August 28, 1993, 46.

24. Vladimir Bukovsky, “Politkorrektnost΄ huzhe leninizma,” Delfi, at ru.delfi.lt/blog/neformat/politkorrektnost-huzhe-leninizma.d?id=24625353 (October 12, 2009).

25. Vladimir Bukovsky, “Angliia i Evropeiskoe sodruzhestvo,” Russkii Globus at http://www.russian-globe.com/N34/Bukovsky.EnglandEuropeanUnion.htm (December 2004).

26. Vladimir Bukovsky, “EU = USSR.” YouTube video, 5:23, posted by “ItChupsCabra,” December 20, 2011, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m41Td15mvdg&ab_channel=ltChupaCabra. These are not solely the opinions of tragic and traumatized personalities. The struggle against political correctness is a cause célèbre among members of the liberal Russian intelligentsia, as is resistance to non-white labor migrants, whether in west European or Russian cities. In one of its last gestures in early 2013, for example, as some of its members were being arrested and the rest put under enormous pressure by the Putin regime, the Coordinating Council of the Opposition voted on a resolution demanding an end to the visa-free regime that ex-Soviet Central Asian countries still enjoy with Russia and that serves as the main vehicle for labor migration to Russia. Reserving this resolution for the non-European former Soviet republics (one cannot find Belarus, Ukraine, or Moldova among the list of countries), its authors justify their demands with the growth of radical Islamism and the way this “uncontrollable migration” from Central Asia and the Caucasus “damages Russia’s efforts to integrate into Europe”(?!). Though expectedly proposed by the “nationalist democrats,” Nikolai Bondarik, Konstantin Krylov, and Vladimir Tor, this resolution also garnered the signatures of the Council’s liberal members, such as Aleksei Naval΄nyi, the late Boris Nemtsov, Gary Kasparov, Ilya Yashin, Evgenia Chirikova, Dmitry Gudkov, Andrei Illarionov, Andrei Piontovsky, and Vladimir Kara-Murza. Significantly, the one fraction of the Council that voted unanimously against the proposal was the left.

27. Mikhail Epstein, “Pevtsy Pandemonii,” Novaya Gazeta 59, at https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2020/06/04/85687-stanet-li-voyna-s-bogatymi-mirovoy (June 8, 2020).

28. Mikhail Epstein, “Amerikanskie ‘Vekhi,’” Novaya Gazeta 76, at https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2020/07/14/86267-amerikanskie-vehi (July 20, 2020).

29. Arkadii Nedel΄, “Strategiia revoliutsii v Amerike,” Liberal.ru, at http://liberal.ru/trends/7582 (June 18, 2020).

30. Gennadii Katsov, “Glavnaya problema SShA segodnia—eto Demokraticheskaia partiia,” YouTube video, 39:36, posted by TV Klub “Kontinent” July 17, 2020, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwuKMv18UxM (accessed June 9, 2021).