Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-npj9w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-06T20:54:53.264Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Afterlife of Soviet Russia's “Refusal to be White”: A Du Boisian Lens on Post-Soviet Russian-US Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

Christy Monet
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this essay I address a gap in the study of contemporary Russia-US relations. I argue that the concepts of race and racialization are active in these relations and available for analysis, but they continue to receive very little attention as compared to concepts of democratization and securitization. My main intervention is the introduction of “race-conscious reading” as a methodological approach relevant not only to the narrow sphere of Russia-US relations, but to the field of Slavic studies more broadly. Presenting the concept of “race-conscious reading” first, I then sketch out a research agenda that extends W.E.B. Du Bois's race-conscious observation of Soviet Russia's “refusal to be white” into the contemporary era. My goal in sketching out this research agenda is to show how a race-conscious approach to reading post-Soviet Russia-US relations can bring fresh perspectives to long-standing questions—Is Russia part of the west?—and generate new questions of urgent relevance: Is there a difference between American and Russian conceptions of “whiteness,” and how and when do they clash?

Information

Type
Critical Discussion Forum on Race and Bias
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 316 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

“We should remember that W.E.B. Du Bois—the key figure in the sociology of race—praised Soviet society for refusing to be white….Today, however, Russia appears determined to become as white as possible.”Footnote 1

—Nikolay Zakharov

Taking a Race-Conscious Approach in Slavic Studies

In this article I argue that the phenomenon of race and racialization is a prominent and continuing feature of the overlapping political histories of Russia and the United States. The field of Slavic studies is uniquely suited to address these related histories of racialization, as its broad interdisciplinary scope naturally invites the innovative theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches needed to address the issue. The field can bring humanistic approaches to bear on the persistent questions at the core of social science inquiry, and vice versa. In this regard, it is not enough to discuss events of racialization in isolation, or, to sporadically highlight the perspectives of scholars of race studies across the disciplines that make up Slavic studies. Rather, part of the work going forward must be active engagement with race and racialization as concepts that inform how we approach the aims and methods of the field itself. In much the same way that work with concepts such as capital and memory have driven the development of groundbreaking approaches to reading post-Soviet transition, or engagement with concepts such as patriarchy and knowledge have led to innovative hermeneutic methodologies of studying contemporary Russia's relationship with the west, so too can race open up new ways of reading and critiquing long-debated and newly emergent issue-areas in Slavic studies.Footnote 2

To this end, I propose a race-conscious approach to reading post-Cold War Russia-US relations and the process by which these two countries are constantly engaged in constructing their selves in relation to the other. Felice Blake describes race-conscious reading as an antidote to “colorblind epistemologies” that divorce the crisis in the humanities as a discipline from crises confronting the planet as a whole.Footnote 3 She argues that race-conscious reading is a way to connect the study of how people document the human experience with social and critical engagement, and to connect the methodology of close reading with critical discussions of discourse and power. As a way of challenging some of the colorblind tendencies that have already been noted in Slavic studies, I employ Blake's approach in my own reading of Russia-US relations.Footnote 4 A few scholars in the field have already begun examining how the concepts of race and racialization can inform our reading of the history of imperial and Soviet population policies, the politics of post-Soviet criminalization of targeted communities, and the embedded cultural logics of east European nationalisms.Footnote 5 I follow this still largely unbeaten path in Slavic studies.

A Du Boisian Perspective: The Modern “Religion of Whiteness”

For a starting place in bringing a race-conscious reading to contemporary Russia-US relations, I went back to the preeminent sociologist who first theorized the role of race in the relations between postwar America and Soviet Russia—W.E.B. Du Bois. Academics of numerous disciplines are familiar with Du Bois as a sociologist and critical race theorist who grappled with the experiences of Blackness in America at the turn of the twentieth century. Perhaps fewer academics are familiar with Du Bois's historical work critiquing the racialization of Black labor in post-Civil War America, as well as his later transnational framing of racialization, including scrutiny of “the souls of white folk” and widespread European systems of domination.Footnote 6 One important factor in Du Bois's transnational turn in studying race would prove to be the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Early on, Du Bois discussed the struggles of Black Americans in terms of discrimination as a barrier to their incorporation into the American nation specifically, and into civilized modernity generally.Footnote 7 Even when speaking of a “black race” or “black races” more broadly, Du Bois couched their struggle in terms of civilizational recognition.Footnote 8 In his early, turn-of-the-century conceptualization of race, Du Bois largely defined racialization on the basis of phenotypical differentiation and implores the “cultured” and “civilized” European nations of the world to recognize the humanity and rights of the “black subjects” of the world. However, this entreaty relied on the assumption that racialized discrimination was something external to the construction of civilized modernity and the ideals and principles of the “spirit of Europe” on which it supposedly depended.

That assumption began to unravel for Du Bois in the years following the Russian Revolution. In 1920, Du Bois included in his published Darkwater collection an essay entitled “The Souls of White Folk.” Gone is his praise for the spirit of Europe as a universal template for other races to model, and in its place is a pointed criticism of the modern phenomenon of “whiteness”:

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's people is a very modern thing,—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction….This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts….“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?” Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen! Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionately to believe such an extraordinary dictum as this? That nations are coming to believe it is manifest daily. Wave on wave, each with increasing virulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time.Footnote 9

Importantly, his critique begins to imply hierarchical, phenotypical differentiation as intrinsic to the logic of European civilization, which claimed propertied wealth and moral superiority for the white races.Footnote 10 After his 1926 visit to Soviet Russia and introduction to radical socialist thought, Du Bois would continue developing this implication more explicitly and in dialogue with Marxism.Footnote 11 By 1940, he had a new conceptualization of race: it was scientifically undefinable, historically shaped, and only incidentally tied to skin color.Footnote 12 Most importantly, he posited that the foundations of the concept of race were always changing in order to justify the concentration of power in the hands of a few. In 1950, he began a manuscript on the political systems of Russia and America and their effects on the world. Du Bois detailed how the dominant “European culture of the Nineteenth Century” rested on four institutions, which included “wide freedom of initiative in industry for the white world” and linked “Europe and eventually North America in world domination of the darker peoples of the Earth.”Footnote 13 By his new interpretation, the twentieth-century “European norm” of civilization—a civilization he had once lauded and strove toward—was based on and worked to reproduce the marginalization and exploitation of people of color around the world.Footnote 14

Although his manuscript on Russia and America remained unfinished, Du Bois summarized his thoughts on the matter in a 1953 issue of the radical, recently established independent weekly National Guardian:

In several recent bouts the colored peoples of the world have lined up solidly against white people—if we include among the “colored,” people of the Middle East and South Africa, as well as yellow, brown and black peoples….Indeed, there is but one aspect of this deepening rift long the Color Line which saves it from being complete, and that is the peoples of the Soviet Union and her sister group of states. These are the only white countries which do not usually line up against the colored people of the world and thus increase long-smoldering resentment. For this fact, Britain, France and the US ought to be thankful to Russia and her refusal to be “white.”Footnote 15

Du Bois again makes the distinction between skin color as phenotypical marker and race as historically constructed—that is, there were states with populations of white-skinned people, and then there were states that actively continued the propagation of the aforementioned “new religion of whiteness” by continuing to assume a moral superiority and preeminent selfhood based on continued practices of imperialist exploitation vis-à-vis other populations. Soviet Russia and her sister states fell into the former category for Du Bois. Soviet Russia and its anti-racist, anti-imperialist mandate represented for Du Bois a monumental challenge to the dominant philosophy of history that ascribed historical selfhood and culture to “advanced” white nations and excluded “backwards” others.Footnote 16 As Barnor Hesse puts it, Du Bois's interrogation of race primarily and implicitly asked: “How does it feel to be a problem?”Footnote 17

This is where Du Bois's midcentury conceptualization of race and history is especially pertinent to persistent questions at the core of much Slavic studies scholarship, including the ever-present issue of Russia's historic relations with the west. According to Du Bois, when it comes to race and racialization, “the physical bond is least and the badge of color relatively unimportant save as a badge; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult.”Footnote 18 Literary scholars, as well as historians and political scientists in Slavic studies and Pan-African studies, continue to produce innovative work comparing these legacies of discrimination and insult inherited by peoples of Slavic and African descent who have been historically marginalized and problematized by the west.Footnote 19 Consequently, issues of identity and belonging in Russian history can be read in terms of changing affinities toward the constructed constellation known as “the West,” on the one hand, and those excluded groups problematized and racialized as “backwards,” on the other. Alongside considerations of civilization, geography, religion, ideology, and so forth, Russia's “refusal to be white” in the Soviet era brings race into academic discussions of Russia's so-called “East vs. West dilemma.”Footnote 20

Yet, what became of Russia's “refusal to be white” in the wake of Soviet collapse? Here Du Bois's framing of race and history has not continued to inform new approaches to research, especially vis-à-vis post-Cold War Russia-US relations. Does Russia continue to be racialized by America as a threat to transatlantic civilization, as it was in the Soviet period?Footnote 21 If yes, what have contemporary Russia's responses been to these racialized gazes from the west in the post-Soviet period? Does Russia still theoretically refuse whiteness as Du Bois characterized it in the twentieth century, or does it propose a competing, alternative whiteness? How does Russia's stance toward whiteness interact with its racialization of blackness? These questions are examined in the last section of this essay, which is meant not to provide answers but to propose fruitful agendas for future research.

Framing the Issue of Whiteness in Contemporary Russia-U.S. Relations

Anglophone Post-Soviet studies of international relations have treated relations with Russia largely in discursive terms that are Eurocentric, obscuring the discourse's indebtedness to race and racialization. The terms that have come to dominate the discussion—the west, liberalism, capitalism, rule of law—continue a centuries-long discourse, from Immanuel Kant to Max Weber, that is invested in demarcating what is specifiable as European or non-European through tropes and processes of civilizational racialization.Footnote 22 Francis Fukuyama's influential 1989 essay on “the end of history” explicitly works through Georg Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Weber, and reflects the extrapolation of the logic of Weber's argument whereby the most peaceful global society is produced “only once all states and societies conform to the liberal capitalist model” that originated in Europe.Footnote 23 From the point of view of the US and the rest of the west, Russia has remained a civilizational problem, and the questions posed are whether and how well the post-Soviet country is able to embrace liberalism and capitalism in its transition from authoritarian communism.

In the 1990s, American President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin quickly developed a close personal and working relationship.Footnote 24 One thing that was missing from their diplomatic relationship that had been present in those of past American and Russian administrations of the twentieth century was any scrutiny or antagonism on the basis of race relations. Presumably, this absence was partially a reflection of the belief that the US had “solved” its race problems and done away with its herrenvolk democracy with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Footnote 25 It was an attitude that was also noticeably reflected in Russia's 1993 constitution, which broke with previous Soviet constitutions in not making punishable by law restrictions of civil rights based on racial grounds.Footnote 26 Still, despite these constitutional changes and rhetorical silences, racialization of “black” populations as criminal in both countries was present and even began to overlap in surprising ways.

The conceptualization of whiteness as a moral category, or as an ethics based on an assumption of rightness, is instructive in both cases.Footnote 27 In America, the structural loss of the communist “quintessential enemy” meant that constructions of whiteness could return to focusing on their historic “black other” as enemy. Black drug addiction, Black crime, and Black welfare were the primary constructions against which to prove the moral superiority of imagined white American identity in the years after the Cold War.Footnote 28 In Russia, the ontological loss of Soviet identity also meant that a new national identity had to be built, but from the demoralizing position of communist failure. From 1992 through 1997, efforts to construct and legitimize a new Russian nation went hand-in-hand with systematic, state-sanctioned racialization of Central Asians and Caucasians—especially Chechens—as a criminal, “Black” others.Footnote 29 As Meredith Roman puts it, the dehumanizing abuse of these peoples by law enforcement during this period of urban warfare in Moscow suggests that Russia was being “re-imagined officially not only as non-communist but also as white and Slavic.”Footnote 30 Both Clinton and Yeltsin have subsequently been criticized for their silence on these issues of racialized abuse in the name of law and order.Footnote 31 Did their administrations turn a blind eye to the each other's domestic abuses vis-à-vis racialization because they were now partners in bringing Russia into the family of western liberal democracies?Footnote 32

If that was the case, the working partnership did not last long. A major factor in the dissolution was Moscow's dissatisfaction with Washington's rhetorical support: Russia did not want to join the west if the terms of joining meant playing “junior partner” to America's hegemon.Footnote 33 If the communist Second World no longer existed, then the only other options for Russia were the First World or the Third World. Part of post-Soviet Russia's determination to “become as white as possible” is rooted in its insecurity regarding its belonging and acceptance among First World, “civilized,” western nations, as well as its fear of “degenerating” into a Third World existence of pre-modernization and geopolitical irrelevance.Footnote 34 The role of junior partner did nothing to allay these fears and insecurities. Although there was some hope for revitalizing the Moscow-Washington partnership at the onset of America's “war on terror” in the very early 2000s, state actors, public intellectuals, and young citizens alike quickly became disillusioned with the west—as well as aspirations of joining it—in the wake of America's military unilateralism.Footnote 35 Thus, hopes for partnership were dashed after the US failed to consult Russia before invading Iraq in 2003 and later joined the EU in supporting the color revolutions in Russia's perceived regional sphere of influence.Footnote 36 The final breaking point came with the Russo-Georgian War of 2008.

Between the 2005 color revolution in Kyrgyzstan and 2008 Russo-Georgian War, however, a turn away from the west (conceived of as a US-led transatlantic constellation) was taking place in Russian foreign policy.Footnote 37 In 2006, the foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, and China met in New York on the sidelines of a United Nations general assembly, jointly and publicly identifying with the BRICs moniker for the first time.Footnote 38 Goldman Sachs analysts who created the moniker had initially singled out these countries as emerging economic markets, but Putin's rhetorical positioning of the group in Russia's foreign policy agenda signaled something beyond the economic.

In this case, conceptualizations of whiteness as a particular resistance to or rejection of the loss of expected dominance or influence is instructive.Footnote 39 Putin's Munich speech in 2007 marked an explicit turning point in which the unity of the BRICs was suggested as an alternative to US hypocrisy/hegemony and transatlantic exclusionism, as well as linked to Russia's desire to be a full and influential partner in world affairs while maintaining its distinct and unique civilization. “Russia is a country with a history that spans more than a thousand years and has practically always used the privilege to carry out an independent foreign policy. We are not going to change this tradition today.”Footnote 40 Russia would brook no argument about becoming western at the expense of a loss of its identity, which is rhetorically tied to its inability to suffer any measure of loss of its independent status or sovereign privilege.

Further, beyond mere independence, BRICS—it was eventually joined by South Africa in 2010—presented Russia with a “forum in which Russia could offer ‘big ideas’” and reinstate itself “as the leader of a global counterculture.”Footnote 41 Although Russia's foreign policy emphasis on sovereignty, influence, and leadership track with studies of European whiteness as a dominant norm embedded in the valorization of leadership, Russia's interactions with the US and EU in the last two decades have also resulted in Russia's racialization of itself as “conditionally” European but non-western.Footnote 42 This reinforces construction of Russia's eastern, Slavic whiteness as marginal to western, transatlantic whiteness. Interestingly, it also constructs this marginality as a source of strength and innovation. Russia's “white racial dualism” both challenges the equation of Europe with the west as first demarcated in early modern thought and speaks to the applicability of a Du Boisian double-consciousness to the racialization of whiteness in post-Soviet Russia.Footnote 43 Russia is unable to sit comfortably within the west as it perceives it, but it is also unable to remain content outside of what it perceives to be European civilization.

Finally, although Russia professes respect for the idea of a multitude of unique civilizations within the world order, this call for multipolarity is nevertheless targeted at American unipolarity and, therefore, is often coupled with rhetorical commentary on the impending decline of the United States. This has shown up most recently in Russian responses to the widespread 2020 Movement for Black Lives protests across America. Although sometimes recalling Soviet Russia's historic ties to Black American social movements, the overwhelming thrust of Russian commentary coming from both the Kremlin and civilian social media has highlighted instances of rioting and looting as signs of America's weakness and decline.Footnote 44 Pro-Kremlin forces and oppositional movements alike—including a new Russian Lives Matter movement that focuses on police abuses in Russia—rhetorically distance themselves from Black protestors.Footnote 45 Regardless of whether Russians view American democracy as a model to aspire towards, Black Americans are widely viewed as somehow outside of that democracy—as ungrateful hooligans rather than politically-engaged protestors. This only emphasizes the possible ways in which Russia's post-Soviet construction of part of its identity around “whiteness” as a moral rightness and the rejection of loss necessarily has to reject likening itself to “Black” others at home and abroad.

An Unbeaten Path

This has not been an in-depth exploration of post-Soviet racialization as it pertains to either the US or Russia, or their relations with one another. Rather, this paper has outlined the parameters of one of many possible research agendas that I believe demands attention as a move toward deeper engagement with issues of race in the field of Slavic studies. Primarily, I have endeavored in this short space to illustrate the value of race-conscious reading as a methodological approach that is relevant to Slavic studies. To that end, I have offered my own brief sketch of the questions that such a reading could reveal and address in the narrow sphere of post-Soviet Russia-US relations alone. I believe engagement with the concepts of race and racialization not only at the level of content but, more importantly, at the level of method can inspire fresh, innovative approaches to long-standing questions in Slavic studies, as well as give the field yet another measure of relevance to urgent questions facing our contemporary world.

References

1. Zakharov, Nikolay, Attaining Whiteness: A Sociological Study of Race and Racialization in Russia (Uppsala, Sweden, 2013), 49Google Scholar.

2. For feminist and constructivist monographs on U.S. foreign policy perspectives on Russia and Soviet/Russian foreign policy perspectives on the West, respectively, see: Williams, Kimberly A., Imagining Russia: Making Feminist Sense of American Nationalism in U.S.—Russian Relations (New York, 2012)Google Scholar; Hopf, Ted, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar.

3. Blake, Felice, “Why Black Lives Matter in the Humanities,” in Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams, Harris, Luke Charles, HoSang, Daniel Martinez, and Lipsitz, George eds., Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines (Oakland, 2019), 308–16Google Scholar.

4. On page 308, Blake suggests that race and racialization are not essentially about skin color, but rather about othering populations and creating hierarchical relationships of human difference. In this sense, being colorblind is not only about refusing to acknowledge the role skin color has been constructed to play in racisms and racializations, but also refusing to interrogate other constructed concepts such as nationalism, whiteness, and empire for their roles in processes of racialization. For debates in these areas as they pertain to regions of interest to scholars of Slavic and post-Soviet studies, see: Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1–29; Alaina Lemon, “Without a ‘Concept’? Race as Discursive Practice,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 54–61; Aniko Imre, “Whiteness in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe: The Time of the Gypsies, the End of Race,” in Alfred J. Lopez ed., Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire (Albany, NY, 2005), 79–102; Alfred J. Lopez, “Introduction: Whiteness after Empire,” in Alfred J. Lopez, ed., Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire (Albany, NY, 2005), 1–30. Of particular interest is Lopez’s observation that whiteness as a concept has dealt virtually with the US alone. Nikolay Zakharov’s monograph on whiteness in contemporary Russia, which I cite below, is a very recent but excellent exception.

5. A recent, edited volume touches on these and other issues. David Rainbow, ed., Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context (Montreal, 2019).

6. Reflective of the colorblindness problem in the humanities that Felice Blake points out, Du Bois’s expressive and at times allegorical writing in Souls of Black Folk (1903) is often held up across many disciplines as the author’s magnum opus, even though he lived for sixty more years after the publication of this work and would produce in that time larger and more critical volumes on race, including: his militant 1920 collection of essays and poems Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, his 1935 historical study Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, and his 1940 autobiography Dusk of Dawn. Ostensibly, Souls of Black Folk, though a masterpiece, lends itself more easily to colorblind readings of the experiences of othered populations that produce in the reader aesthetic pleasure and empathy—as opposed to writings like Darkwater, Black Reconstruction, and Dusk of Dawn, which are harder to aestheticize and to divorce from critical engagement and civic activism.

7. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Spirit of Modern Europe,” in Nahum Dimitri Chandler, ed., The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays (New York, 2015), 139–66; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Negro Race in the United States of America,” Gustav Spiller, ed., Papers on Inter-racial Problems: Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress (London, 1911), 348–64. In his 1900 speech on the spirit of modern Europe, Du Bois, addressing Black American teachers, suggests that Black races take the “spirit of Europe” as a model and be responsible for its own striving toward the civilizational ideals Europe had seemingly perfected. Speaking in 1911 to representatives of European nations, he describes the cultural development and civilization of the “Negro” in terms of obtaining education and capital. He argues that for “many generations the American Negro will lack the breeding and culture which the most satisfactory human intercourse requires,” but this does not prove the “essential inferiority” of the Black race; on the contrary, it suggests that racial discrimination will only serve to bar Blacks from continuing to develop toward some ideal of full or “satisfactory” civilization. These two speeches are reflective of his early thinking on discrimination as a barrier to eventual civilization.

8. W.E.B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World (Pan-African Congress)” (Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, 1900), MS 312, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b004-i321 (accessed June 10, 2021).

9. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Writings (New York, 1986), 923–24. Emphasis added.

10. Ibid., 925, 927. Du Bois several times points out the hypocrisy of the barbarous acts committed against darker peoples in the name of civilization and commerce by modern white peoples who take their own “perfectness with such disconcerting seriousness.”

11. Whereas in 1921 Du Bois had been unwilling to hitch black liberation to the wagon of a communist revolution that he felt was still not yet fully understood, by 1935 he was using concepts such as “surplus value” and “dark proletariat” in his historiography of American slavery as a subsystem of world capitalism. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Negro and Radical Thought,” in Writings, 1184–88; Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 200.

12. W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (Millwood, NY, 1975), 70–71; Eric Porter, The Problem of the Future World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury (Durham, NC, 2010), 44.

13. See chapter V, pages 3–4, in W.E.B. Du Bois, “Russia and America: An Interpretation” (Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, 1950), MS 312, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b222-i001 (accessed June 10, 2021).

14. Du Bois, “Spirit of Modern Europe,” 141.

15. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Color Lines,” National Guardian, February 12, 1953. Kate Baldwin has already produced a brilliant reading of the meaning of Du Bois’s insistence on the industrialized capitalist world owing its thanks to Soviet Russia’s “refusal to be white.” See Kate A. Baldwin, “Du Bois, Russia, and the ‘Refusal to Be White,’” in Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922—1963 (Durham, NC, 2002), 177–78.

16. Despite Du Bois’s provocative characterization of Soviet Russia as refusing to “be white,” it is important to note that many Black sojourners to the Soviet Union were not insensitive to the contradictions and ambiguities of Soviet Russia’s anti-racism campaign against the United States—including Soviet prejudices and stereotypes vis-à-vis Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Critical perspectives on this issue include Audre Lorde, “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York, 1984); and Robert Robinson, Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union (New York, 1988). For a recent edited volume featuring essays on ideologies of race as they functioned in Imperial and Soviet Russia vis-à-vis Roma and Jews, as well as peoples of Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus region, see David Rainbow, ed., Ideologies of Race.

17. Hesse, Barnor, “Of Race: The Exorbitant Du Bois,” Small Axe 50, no. 2 (July 2016): 18Google Scholar.

18. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 59.

19. For studies exploring how the process of constructing identities like “the West” and “Europe” historically has involved othering Russians, Slavs, and people of African descent as outsiders, see: Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, 1992)Google Scholar; Neumann, Iver B., Uses of the Other: “The East” in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis, MN, 1999)Google Scholar; Adamovsky, Ezequiel, Euro-Orientalism (Bern, Switzerland, 2006)Google Scholar; For studies featuring direct comparison, see Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick, NJ, 2010); Maxim Matusevich, ed., Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Trenton, NJ, 2007); Dale E. Peterson, Up From Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham, NC, 2000).

20. Ana Siljak, “Between East and West: Hegel and the Origins of the Russian Dilemma,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 2 (April 2001): 335–58.

21. Julie M. Powell, “Making ‘The Case against the ‘Reds’: Racializing Communism, 1919–1920,” in Travis D. Boyce and Winsome M. Chunnu, eds., Historicizing Fear: Ignorance, Vilification, and Othering (Louisville, 2019), 102–21; James Zeigler, Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism (Jackson, MS, 2015); Richard Iton, “Remembering the Family,” in In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, 2004), 30–80.

22. Barnor Hesse, “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 4 (July 2007): 644; John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760—2010 (Cambridge, Eng., 2012), 160.

23. Hobson, Eurocentric Conception, 164.

24. Svetlana Savranskaya, “Yeltsin and Clinton,” Diplomatic History 42, no. 4 (September 2018): 564–67.

25. Howard Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons, 3rd ed., (Minneapolis, 2002), 39. Winant does not specify when after WWII the United States ceased to be what he calls a herrenvolk democracy, but, in the context of this paper’s concerns, Soviet criticisms of US race relations presumably lost much of their power after 1964 rather than immediately after 1945.

26. “Constitution of the Russian Federation” (Government of the Russian Federation), at http://archive.government.ru/eng/gov/base/54.html (accessed September 21, 2020). Chapter 1, Article 2 of the 1993 constitution still prohibits racial discrimination, but does away with the wording found in the 1936 and 1977 Soviet constitutions that makes it punishable by law. See Chapter 10, Article 123 of the 1936 constitution (https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/36cons04.html#chap10), and Chapter 6, Article 36 of the 1977 constitution (https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02.html#chap06). It is perhaps not coincidental that this wording of the constitution was ratified in December 1993, just weeks after the October 1993 state of emergency in Moscow that aimed to cleanse the city of unregistered people, especially dark-skinned immigrants from the Caucasus who were routinely referred to as “blacks.” See Meredith L. Roman, “Making Caucasians Black: Moscow Since the Fall of Communism and the Racialization of Non-Russians,” The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 18, no. 2 (June 2002): 13.

27. Imre, “Whiteness in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe,” 79; Ronald A. Kuykendall, “Whiteness as Antidialogical,” in Tammie M. Kennedy, Joyce Irene Middleton, and Krista Ratcliffe, eds., Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education (Carbondale, IL, 2017), 300.

28. While enslaved Black peoples had long been othered as a threat to white America—at least since the time of slave revolts and certainly since the Jim Crow era—communists and Civil Rights activists came to share demonization by white America during the Cold War. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the “Black other” remained among the most prominent targets of American racialization, especially via criminalization. Kate A. Baldwin and Julie M. Powell provide evidence that the racialized category of “reds”/communists as threat momentarily allowed for white America to offer Blacks solidarity and assimilation as a solution to race relations. Yet, it seems, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the “red” threat neutralized, there was nothing stopping white America from constructing Blacks as a threat again. See Angela Y. Davis, “Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and the Punishment Industry,” in Wahneema H. Lubiano, ed., The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today (New York, 1998), 271; Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain; Julie M. Powell, “Making the Case against the ‘Reds.’”

29. While Jeff Sahadeo does point to the late-Soviet everyday phenomenon of racializing migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia as “Black,” Roman’s study specifically highlights the ways in which this racialization was not embraced by the state and not linked to criminalization until the immediate post-Soviet period. See Jeff Sahadeo, “Black Snouts Go Home! Migration and Race in Late Soviet Leningrad and Moscow,” The Journal of Modern History 88, no. 4 (December 2016): 797–826.

30. Roman, “Making Caucasians Black,” 3.

31. Howard Winant, “The Speech President Clinton Should Have Made,” Poverty & Race 6, no. 4 (July/August 1997): 3–4; Roman, “Making Caucasians Black,” 18.

32. Liberating and/or liberalizing Russia is a centuries-old American crusade, beginning at least in the late nineteenth-century with American criticism of imperial Russia’s antisemitic pogroms. See Ann E. Healy, “Tsarist Anti-Semitism and Russian-American Relations,” Slavic Review 42, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 408–425; David S. Foglesong, The American Mission and the ‘Evil Empire’: The Crusade for a ‘Free Russia’ since 1881 (Cambridge, Eng., 2007); Victoria Zhuravleva, “Anti-Jewish violence in Russia and the American ‘Mission for Freedom’ at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” East European Jewish Affairs 40, no. 1 (2010): 43–60.

33. Savranskaya, “Yeltsin and Clinton,” 565; Michael Mastanduno, “Partner Politics: Russia, China, and the Challenge of Extending US Hegemony after the Cold War,” Security Studies 28, no. 3 (June 2019): 494–95.

34. Zakharov, Attaining Whiteness, 55, 153–54. Russia’s Slavic whiteness is often constructed as a striving against “degeneration,” a term which has been used by various Russian actors to refer to post-Soviet Caucasian and Central Asian peoples (Roman, “Making Caucasians Black,” 8) or to the continent of Africa (Zakharov, Attaining Whiteness, 194).

35. President Bush’s “War on Terror” seems to have greatly affected anti-American sentiment in Russia in this period, especially amongst the college-educated youth. See the poll results in Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, “Us and Them: Anti-American Views of the Putin Generation,” The Washington Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 139–44. Further, Russian academics came to define modern global terrorism as the obratnaya storona (flip side) of globalization policies of the US and other western countries seeking to impose their culture and views on the whole world. See Seifi Gudrat and A.V. Lebedev, “Sotsial΄nye bolezni sovremennosti,” Vestnik Rossiiskogo Filosofskogo Obshchestva, no. 3 (2004): 35.

36. Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko, “Russia Says No: Power, Status, and Emotions in Foreign Policy,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, no. 47, no. 3–4 (October 2014): 273.

37. President Putin’s 2007 Munich Speech is commonly taken as the official marker of this turn. Interestingly, in this speech, Putin brings up the concept of tak nazyvaemykh problemnykh stran (so-called problem countries) in western discourses on international security threats to Europe. For the Russian transcript of Putin’s 2007 Munich Speech, see Vladimir Putin, “Vystupleniye i diskussiya na Myunkhenskoy konferentsii po voprosam politiki bezopasnosti,” at http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034 (accessed June 10, 2021).

38. Jim O’Neill, “Building Better Global Economic BRICs,” Global Economics Paper No. 66 (Goldman Sachs, November 30, 2001) at http://www.elcorreo.eu.org/IMG/pdf/Building_Better_Global_Economic_Brics.pdf (accessed June 10, 2021)

39. Zakharov, Attaining Whiteness, 152–54; Juliet Hooker, “Black Protest/White Grievance: On the Problem of White Political Imaginations Not Shaped by Loss,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 3 (July 2017): 488.

40. For an English transcript of Putin’s 2007 Munich Speech, Vladimir Putin, “Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy,” February 10, 2007, at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034 (accessed June10, 2021).

41. Alexander Gabuev, “Russia Cements Lead Role with BRICS Presidency,” RBTH, online edition, May 25, 2015, at https://www.rbth.com/opinion/2015/05/25/russia_cements_lead_role_with_brics_presidency_46287.html (accessed June 10, 2021); Rachel S. Salzman, “Laying the Rhetorical Foundation for BRICS: The Evolution of the Concepts of Sovereignty and National Identity, 2000–2007,” in Rachel S. Salzman, Russia, BRICS, and the Disruption of Global Order (Washington, DC, 2019), 48.

42. For Russia’s carving out of its own European identity, see Zlobin, Nikolai, “Together but Separate,” Harvard International Review 26, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 48–52Google Scholar; Gvosdev, Nikolas K., “Russia: ‘European but Not Western?,’” Orbis 51, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 129–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; For a discussion of the norm of whiteness in valorizations of leadership, see Helena Liu, “Redoing and Abolishing Whiteness in Leadership,” in Brigid Carroll, Josh Firth, and Suze Wilson, eds., After Leadership (New York, 2019).

43. Winant, Howard, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis, 2004), 50; Hesse, “Racialized Modernity,” 644; Hesse, “Of Race,” 19.

44. Peter Rutland and Andrei Kazantsev, “Do Black Lives Matter in Russia?,” Policy Memo (Washington DC: PONARS Eurasia, July 2020), https://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/do-black-lives-matter-russia (accessed June 10, 2021).

45. Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, “The Curious Case of ‘Russian Lives Matter,’” Foreign Policy, July 11, 2020, Online edition, at https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/11/the-curious-case-of-russian-lives-matter/ (accessed June 10, 2021).