Abstract
Post-Soviet Racisms by Nikolay Zakharov and Ian Law is a recent volume within the ‘Mapping Global Racisms’ series, edited by Professor Ian Law of the University of Leeds, which aims to expand the study of race and racisms to non-western forms of racialisation. As racism is not solely a product of the West, deconstructions of racial logics need, according to Law, to go beyond the focus of the operations of western modernity. 1 The idea of plural, diverse and co-evolving modernities is therefore utilised to reconfigure and decentre global race theory and address racialisation in non-Eurocentric contexts by understanding it as an ‘interactive, relational process of polyracism across varieties … of contexts and states’.
This particular volume, therefore, specifically looks at Soviet modernity as distinct, and at its shaping of contemporary racisms in the fourteen successor states (excluding the Russian Federation 2 ). It is indeed unique in its comprehensive addressing of contemporary operations of race and racisms in this region. Based on research conducted between 2013 and 2015, including the collection and analysis of new primary data resulting from qualitative fieldwork and analyses of social and news media, the authors explore the historical context and role of Soviet conceptions of race and racisms in the formation of states, identities and social order, and the evident legacies of this in post-Soviet states today.
It is important to note that Soviet socialist modernity was distinct from, but not separate from, western capitalist modernity. There was interaction and co-evolvement. As Madina Tlostanova summarised it: the USSR ‘appropriated and transmuted (not always consciously) the basic aspects of the western empires of modernity … generating mutant forms of the main vices of modernity – secondary Eurocentrism, secondary orientalism, secondary racism’. 3 Officially, racism in the Soviet Union ‘didn’t exist’ – it was something that was located elsewhere, especially America. Through claims of pseudo-internationalism, as well as the official, intricate organisation of religion and ethnicities, the USSR attempted to mask the racisms operating in the region. Zakharov and Law argue that race, in Marxist-Leninist terms, was presented as socio-historical backwardness rather than biological inferiority – the socio-cultural practices and aspects of non-white, non-Russian groups were constructed as pre-modern and negative, reminiscent of a feudal past, and as obstacles on the way to a modern, socialist society. Through such a configuration the Soviet Empire embarked on a programme of what the authors call ‘state-sponsored evolutionism’, whereby a particular hierarchy was constructed between Slavic and all other peoples in the Soviet Union. The practice of ‘assimilation’ or ‘Sovietisation’ was the Soviet Union’s version of a paternalistic, racialised civilising mission. For example, the Roma populations were pushed towards ‘disappearing into the proletariat’, and Africans were presented as ‘backward’ and helpless victims of capitalism.
The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in a number of heterogeneous, independent states, each of which then refigured these Soviet discourses of race within their own contexts. In Post-Soviet Racisms, Zakharov and Law explore how the previous hierarchies constructed by the USSR, in which the white, Slavic Russian was in a position of power, resulted in a widespread (though uneven) sense across these successor states that they had been victims of colonisation, and that this victim status equated to a non-existence of racism. Thus racial denial became official discourse, despite prevailing and obvious racisms operating throughout the regions. Conversely, in some regions, Soviet discourses were vindictively flipped, and discourses of biological racisms, grounded in skin colour and ‘purity of blood’, came to the fore. Zakharov and Law discuss each region in turn, grouping them in chapters more or less geographically, highlighting differences and drawing parallels.
Chapter 1 focuses on the Baltics – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The authors provide evidence that through this region runs a thread of nation-building discourses grounded in racial differentiation, dialogues of inclusion/exclusion, and the articulations of the connections between race, ethnicity and the nation. Despite such prevalent nationalist discourses, the authors argue that the Baltics utilise their post-Soviet ‘victim’ status to silence oppressed groups, such as Roma, and to rewrite history in such a way as, for example, to deny any role of the nation in the Holocaust. In their analysis, Zakharov and Law present many examples of racial structures profoundly affecting these societies, whilst at the state level, racism is officially denied as a mainstream problem. Instead, it is presented, and condemned, as a series of unrelated, sporadic incidents of racist violence.
Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine are grouped together in the next chapter. The authors discuss how the Soviet experience still defines ethnocultural policy in these countries, though officially denied. Especially in Moldova and Ukraine, anti-Semitic, anti-Roma and anti-Black sentiments are widespread. The official blame for racist discourses and violence is put on far-right parties, although racism is in fact all-encompassing throughout society.
The book then turns to how racisms operate in the southern Caucasus region – Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – in a complex and interwoven way. The southern Caucasus is tied up in the historical legacies of Ottoman, Turkish and Soviet political projects, and constitutes a spatial intersection between Eastern Europe, Russia, and Western Asia. The authors argue that such a historical and spatial position results in the region experiencing a convergence of racial Europeanisation, the resurrection of Russian racialised modernity and local racial nationalisms. For Zakharov and Law, the racial discourses that prevail in these regions are grounded in Soviet traditions of primordial, ethnicity-focused nation-building, which are supported by racialised academic disciplines such as ‘physical anthropology’ that are closely bound up with western racial science. Yet, despite these generalised shared conditions, the specific conditions in each country have created distinct racial processes and outcomes in each of the states, and after delving into the details of how racialisation has operated in each of the three countries, the authors conclude that the southern Caucasus region is a clear example of multiple modernities and polyracism, with no uniform similarity in the ways in which these states have interacted with and operationalised racialisation.
In the final chapter, race and racisms in the Central Asian former Soviet republics – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan – are explored. The operation of racisms in these areas is presented as particularly complex, and at times contradictory. The dominant ethnocentric discourses of nation-building are at odds with the systems of political autocracy, whereby the leaders of the state are officially prioritised over ethno-nationalism, as well as with discourses of Pan-Turkism and the internationalising influence of Islam. However, after an in-depth and fruitful exploration of the operation of racism in each of the states, the authors are able to identify three main patterns of racial exclusion in post-Soviet Central Asia. Firstly, regionalism and clannism are strong divisive forces in Central Asia, and any attempts at nation-building based on common blood or ancestry lead to resistance and the formation of alternative ethno-racial discourses. Secondly, the imposition of racialised identities has occurred through the process of mass labour migration to Russia. In Russia, the natives of Central Asia are not only victims of racism and subsequent racist violence, but they also internalise these racist discourses and convey them back into Central Asia, where they are modified and adapted into local conditions and contexts. Lastly, nominating a national hero or leader has been key in the construction of the titular nation and of its racialisation – the racial discourse is formed to match the image of the leader of the nation.
Through a clear analysis of race and racisms in post-Soviet countries, Zakharov and Law provide a historically and geographically localised example of the benefits of applying an approach which shifts the focus from Modernity to modernities. By decentring western modernity and taking into account multiple modernities, the book allows for a growing understanding of how diverse racisms are constructed and interwoven, and thus contributes to a more complete global view of racial formations and how they operate.