Russian media's response to George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, and the subsequent upsurge of protests in many North American cities in the hot summer of 2020 ranged from denunciations of anti-racism to outright racism. That the state-controlled TV channels should have reveled in lurid images of violence rather than attempt some socially informed analysis of the United States was perfectly predictable: over the past decade, and especially since 2014, they had rarely missed a chance to portray the US as a society in the grips of chaos. More curious were the explicitly racist utterances coming from Russian liberal media such as the Ekho Moskvy radio station, the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, Radio Free Europe or the Liberal.ru platform.Footnote ¹ Hardened Russia-watchers might have expected such statements from the journalist Yuliya Latynina, who could for many years always be counted on to inform her readers and listeners about the inferiority or danger of non-white peoples, or the socialite-cum-politician Ksenia Sobchak, who had recently started competing with her in this capacity through social media, but this time these two were joined by a veritable chorus of liberal figures such as the historian Mark Solonin, the philosopher Arkady Nedel΄, the economist Andrei Illarionov, the political scientist Vladislav Inozemtsev, and the leader of the Libertarian Party Mikhail Svetlov, for most of whom this foray into race matters represented a coming-out of sorts.Footnote ²

There is, of course, a paradox in identifying the contemporary Russian intelligentsia, or more specifically, its liberal mainstream, as a major source of racism: this role is not what one would expect of its western peers, who have been, in the recent past at least, seen as carriers of anti-discriminatory discourses.Footnote ³ Moreover, granted the sheer heterogeneity and discontinuity of the Russian intelligentsia tradition and the peculiar beliefs some of its members held at various times, its mainstream had usually resisted such racialist thinking until the late-Soviet period. So, what has happened to it since then? To answer this question, we need to turn to the most immediate ideological predecessor of the contemporary Russian liberal intelligentsia—the anti-Soviet dissidents—and their discursive struggle against Soviet hegemony. The adoption of those most radically opposed to communism of racist ideological positions and language occurred at the intersection of two distinct logics: in the first place, a tendency emerged among the most radically anti-communist section of the dissident movement to mechanically negate Soviet values such as socialist internationalism and anti-racism as well as Soviet geopolitical support for various African and Asian states. In the second place, within such a milieu, an older civilizational hierarchy with “the West” as its pinnacle and the east or south at its bottom grew increasingly dominant. Today's liberal intelligentsia's racism carries the imprints of these trends.

Of course, the racial attitudes of the intelligentsia constitute only one specific type among the varied landscape of racisms in contemporary Russia, certainly not the most prevalent or violent one. Classifying those by their subject, we can identify at least four types. The first originates in the workings of the contemporary Russian state (institutional racism), with its civilizational discourse, migration policies, the discriminatory practices of its institutions, especially the police, and its multiple mechanisms of dividing society into (racializing) categories.Footnote ⁴ The second type of racism expresses itself in the grim work of the far-right groups, which gets recorded by the Sova Center statistics for racially motivated violence and murder. Although there has been a marked decline in the murder rate and xenophobic attacks since their peak in the late 2000s—most likely, a result of the state's crackdown on such groups after many years of tolerating them—their level remains alarmingly high.Footnote ⁵ Thirdly, there is everyday racism, which encompasses language and practices (employment discrimination, “for Slavs-only” housing ads) that racialized people living in Russia encounter most frequently.Footnote ⁶ While interconnected, these racisms have different media and institutional infrastructures, ideological backgrounds, and histories. And while these three types have been subject to a growing—if still insufficient—body of scholarship, the fourth type, the racism of the contemporary liberal intelligentsia, remains so far the least examined.Footnote ⁷

The rest of this essay will be devoted to its history. For lack of space, we will omit the glories of early Soviet anti-racism, at home and abroad, or the horrors of Stalin-era racialization and proceed directly to the racism of the late-Soviet intelligentsia, the immediate ideological predecessors of today's liberal intelligentsia.Footnote ⁸

A few anecdotes from Carl Proffer's memoirs of the time he spent in the USSR in the late 1960s illustrate the workings of this dissident racism. Proffer—the famous publisher of Ardis and hardly a Soviet sympathizer—found the virulent anti-communism of pro-western dissident circles hard to swallow. Joseph Brodsky, in particular, stood out in the radicalism of his proposals: “I feel bad saying this, I like people, but we [the civilized world] have to go in there [Vietnam] and drop the hydrogen bomb.” Seeing the reaction on his friend's face, Brodsky qualified himself, “It's very sad, but they [the Vietnamese] aren't human [oni zhe ne liudi].”Footnote ⁹

Another non-white group supported by Soviet propaganda and thus targeted by Brodsky during those arguments were African Americans. Jocularly backtracking on a statement he had made earlier, Brodsky reassured Proffer that “if a black person were to enter the room, he [Brodsky] wouldn't kill him.”Footnote ¹⁰ Both he and his friend, the famous translator of English poetry Andrei Sergeev, insisted that American blacks “have nothing to complain about” (the conversation was taking place at the time of the Civil Rights movement, which in their eyes represented Soviet propagandistic noise) and as proof of this assertion, told the story “of a Russian GULAG inmate who asked to be sent to a black ghetto,” which Proffer would hear a number of times among such circles.Footnote ¹¹ Brodsky's unease with African Americans was not purely abstract and theoretical. Proffer also tells the story of Bordsky's encounter with a US embassy official in Vienna in charge of his visa application, noting the Russian poet's visible discomfort with meeting a black person in such a position.Footnote ¹²

Brodsky of course was not alone in making such statements about the inferiority of non-white peoples. On several other occasions in his memoir, Proffer explicitly states that they were part and parcel of anti-Soviet discourse. He also makes clear the existence of an opposition to such attitudes among this dissident milieu, as when the literary historian Leonid Chertkov calls out Brodsky's unhealthy preoccupation with Vietnam and the Black Power movement or when the Kiev-born Lev Kopelev challenges Sergeev's denigrating words about Ukrainian culture (“provincial”) and language (“not a real language”).Footnote ¹³

Only a small number of such statements are recorded in dissident texts, contemporary or memoirist.Footnote ¹⁴ For the most part, however, they were not publishable—certainly in the Soviet Union, with its more formal institutions of censorship, but even in the west—and their authors were reluctant to go on record as making them and pay the consequent reputational costs with western publics. Thus, for example, upon learning that Proffer was preparing his memoir, Brodsky threatened to sue his friend and publisher, the person most responsible for helping his departure from the USSR and reception in the US.Footnote ¹⁵ As a result, most such statements about “stinking Arabs,” “backward Africans,” and “impudent African-Americans” remained in the oral culture of kitchen conversations.Footnote ¹⁶

There are two overlapping logics behind these anti-Soviet statements: the first, already suggested earlier, represents an automatic rejection of not only official Soviet anti-racist internationalism propaganda but also of concrete Soviet alliances with non-white countries or groups. Crudely speaking, “if the Soviet Union is for Vietnam/Angola/Palestine/Arab states/Civil Rights movement, then I am against it.” This hostility originates in political bloc thinking, which is only subsequently projected onto the skin color of the antagonists. It is doubtful that the authors of such statements knew or cared much about the peoples involved. What was important was these non-white groups’ or peoples’ real or perceived alliance with the Soviet state or their function in Soviet rhetoric. The grievances of these peoples—the racism, colonialism, or other form of oppression they were experiencing—were, therefore, to be dismissed as Soviet propaganda claims. And in their discursive struggle against the regime that oppressed them, anti-Soviet dissidents sometimes ended up questioning the humanity of the peoples perceived to be allied with that regime.

The second logic is based on a civilizational hierarchy at the top of which is “the imaginary West,” an ideal and distinct space characterized by an abundance of Culture, Democracy, and Prosperity.Footnote ¹⁷ While there has been a long Russian tradition of thinking about the west, predating even the Slavophile-Westernizer debates of the 1840s, in the post-Stalin era, this intellectual tradition acquired a more negative corollary in the form of an east or a south characterized by the absence of those qualities. In this logic, therefore, Russia is no longer the heartland of an evil Cold-War empire but rather an in-between space, facing a civilizational choice of reaching up to join the west or descending to the level of Africa.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, in this cosmology, Africa may have been a certain limiting case; cultural geographies such as Soviet Central Asia, the Middle East, and Vietnam represented steps towards it. And while a milder version of this developmentalist logic and orientalizing representations was shared by Soviet officialdom and official culture, accounting for the often-noted patronizing quality of the representations of the (post-)colonial world, in anti-Soviet discourse, the official paternalism gave way to a more virulent rejection.Footnote ¹⁹

In anti-Soviet discourse, these two logics merged to produce a figure of a racially different and culturally inferior Soviet proxy in the Global South that one needed to distance oneself from. Indeed, the dissidents practicing this discourse saw—not entirely without reason—Soviet support of African and Asian countries and forces, and especially those at war with western ones or their allies, as not only draining the USSR economically but also precluding the possibility of the much sought-for convergence with the west. In this zero-sum cosmology, Soviet support for some African countries amounted to increased tension with the west and reduced prospects of convergence; a Russian translation of a Central Asian writer led to the absence of Ernest Hemingway from bookstore shelves in the USSR.Footnote ²⁰

When glasnost opened up the Soviet public sphere, the appearance of such statements in official Soviet media troubled a Ghanaian student living in the USSR at the time, Charles Quist Adade. Returning to this moment many years later, as a professional sociologist, he examined how the official paternalistic discourse about decolonizing societies gave way to previously tabooed objections to Soviet anti-racism that were now coming from pro-perestroika (and at a later stage, pro-democratic, and subsequently, liberal) journalists.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, sections of this pro-democratic intelligentsia of the late 1980s and early 90s, which had adopted much of the western-centrism of earlier dissidence, took Mikhail Gorbachev's ambiguous call “to join the civilized nations” as a signal to claim the privileges of whiteness.Footnote ²² In making such claims, it was hard to outdo the former principled anti-Soviet dissident and prisoner of conscience Valeria Novodvorskaya, who managed within a single article to articulate as extreme a version of this western-centric cosmology as few others would dare express, but many did share:

Another former dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, with twelve-years’ experience of Soviet prisons and carceral psychiatry, also continued to wage his epic struggle with Soviet communism long after it was gone. In addition to feminism and gay rights, he continually denounced support for minority rights as “the latest and most virulent form of Marxism.”Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, after the Russian courts very questionably blocked his candidacy for the Russian Presidency in 2008 on behalf of Russia's liberal forces, his last decade of political activism was largely spent in the United Kingdom, where he became a public face of the anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP). While other prominent figures of this party tried hard to avoid singling out non-white immigrants and making explicitly racist statements, Bukovsky showed few such inhibitions:

Bukovsky saw his fight to defend western civilization—a popular cause among today's liberal Russian intelligentsia—as a continuation of his mortal struggle with communism. In a video clip shot for the UKIP, looking directly at the camera, with all the solemnity and authority of an east European dissident, he intoned:

Man erkennt nur, was man kennt. This comparison between today's social/racial/gender/immigrant struggles with the Soviet project—not entirely unfounded, but seen entirely negatively—became the main refrain of the liberal intelligentsia commentary in reaction to the 2020 BLM protests. In the process, the Russian anti-communist tries on the tragic role of Casandra, who has seen the destruction of human lives and property brought about by the communist project and whose tragic warnings to American society, always forgetful of history, remain unheeded. He has already seen this attempt to bring about justice and equality not only unleash the dark, elemental forces of “the masses” but also end up with Stalin, Beria, and GULAG. Today, he is witnessing the beginnings of the same cycle and stands firm in his determination to save western civilization from itself, from its destructive tolerance and miscegenation, from its occasional eclipses of reason, such as the BLM protests:

It is impossible to argue with trauma, usually very real, but sometimes imagined, as in the cases of Latynina and Nedel΄, who entered adulthood too late and from too privileged a position to have been traumatized by the Soviet experience. Rather than attempting to reflect on this continued struggle against communism, let me conclude with the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Lieutenant of the Imperial Japanese Army, who was posted in December 1944 to a Philippine island with strict instructions not to surrender. He and his men refused to believe all the leaflets they had been receiving about Japan's capitulation and the war's end and continued to fight a guerilla war for twenty-nine more years until his former commanding officer was flown to the island to officially relieve him from his duty. This story might have been an amusing anecdote, but for the terror his ambushes instilled in local peasantry, not to mention his occasional shoot-outs with police, during which a number of innocent people were killed.