Abstract
For scholars seeking to understand hate crimes and racist violence, Russia is clearly worth studying, and this book, in particular, provides critical theoretical and methodological insight into those phenomena. In the early 2000s, Russia witnessed an explosion of racist violence that caught the attention of international scholars because of both its scale and the puzzling rise of the Skinhead organizations behind much of this violence. Such organizations, which would never have been tolerated in the Soviet Union (1917–1991), have proliferated in the post-Soviet period, in part, as Arnold (2013) has shown elsewhere, thanks to the support and encouragement of their western counterparts.
A major strength of the book is Arnold’s attention to the varied questions of causation that arise in relation to racist violence, and the modes of inquiry and evidence proper to each question. Arnold astutely distinguishes between “ultimate” and “proximate” causation of such violence (p. 44). As he has addressed elsewhere (Arnold, 2015), the ultimate causes of “systematic racist violence” in Russia include the country’s post-imperial malaise and economic problems, as well as the ambivalent attitude of high-ranking officials and police towards racism and racist organizations. In this book, Arnold devotes more attention to “proximate” questions, such as what accounts for variation in the form, targets and geographic distribution of racist attacks, and what events trigger large-scale racist pogroms of the kind that occurred regularly in Russia in the early 21st century. Arnold draws on multiple sources of data, including a multi-year database of hate crimes in Russia, content analysis of the Russian national and regional press, and interviews with Russian Skinheads—some conducted online, and others conducted in person at some risk to the author.
Arnold starts his analysis by outlining and testing his “theory of ethnic vigilantism”. As he argues, racist groups see themselves as vigilantes, defending (white, Slavic) Russian society against despised ethnic outsiders and their supposed crimes (p. 49). Arnold categorizes acts of racist violence based on several criteria: whether persons or property were targeted; which ethnic groups were victimized; and the scale of the attack. Each category of crime conveys a particular “message”, and Arnold identifies patterns in the messages aimed at each given ethnic group. Thus, people from the Caucasus region (e.g. Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Chechens) were typically victimized through “pogroms”, large-scale attacks on their businesses (usually small shops) conveying the message that their economic involvement and indeed presence in Russia were unwelcome. In contrast, Roma, the most stigmatized group that Arnold examines, were most likely to be targeted by “massacres”, signaling that the Skinheads see them as deserving extermination. The theory is tested through quantitative analysis of a database of acts of racist violence, as well as through interviews with Skinheads, and holds up well to this empirical scrutiny.
Arnold then turns to contextual factors that influence racist violence in contemporary Russia. Chapter 4 is a comparative analysis of violence against a small ethnic minority, the Meskhetian Turks, in two neighboring regions of southern Russia: Krasnodar and Rostov. Although the Meskhetian Turks in Krasnodar were attacked in pogroms, confirming the theory of ethnic vigilantism, there was much less violence against them in Rostov, a contrast Arnold attributes to the highly inflammatory coverage of the Turkish community by the Krasnodar press, and the more restrained coverage by the Rostov press.
The exploration of factors that can convert ambient racism into racist violence continues in Chapter 5, where Arnold examines several large-scale racist pogroms that took place in the mid-2000s. These incidents differ from the other racist attacks analyzed in the book in that, although Skinheads may have helped organize them, they also drew in other Russian citizens with no affiliation to racist organizations. In other words, they were more akin to western-style race riots. Arnold argues that although the pogroms overtly targeted (and objectively victimized) ethnic minorities, their perpetrators also meant them as protests against the national authoritarian political regime and its corrupt officials, suggesting that in such a setting, racist outbursts can have a veiled political function (p. 124). (Granted, one could also ask whether they have such a function, albeit to a lesser extent, in democratic political systems.) He also notes that the negative images of ethnic minorities propagated in the mainstream Russian press do not differ dramatically from those articulated by Skinheads (p. 131), and argues that widespread acceptance of such negative stereotypes in Russian society constitutes a threshold condition making such mass racist violence possible (p. 135).
Yet he also notes that there have been no such pogroms since the onset of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, including its occupation of Crimea and collaboration with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Arnold speculates that state-directed violence against a foreign enemy may represent a deliberate strategy of diverting violence away from such racist, but also anti-regime, actions. Arnold does not specifically consider whether the Russian media’s negative coverage of minorities is genuinely independent of the state, or rather is at least in part directed by it. In my own work (Light, 2016), I found that regional authorities in Russia exercise substantial control over the coverage of ethnic issues in the local press. Assuming that such control is duplicated at the national level, one can infer that the Kremlin is attempting to harness and manage ethnic chauvinism, and is not simply responding to racism that emerges spontaneously within society (although the two processes are not mutually exclusive). On this point, in future research, Arnold could also analyze the apparently substantial decline in Skinhead violence in Russia since 2009, which may reflect both the planned or accidental consequences of the Ukraine campaign (as he suggests), as well as more targeted law enforcement efforts against violent racist organizations.
As a contribution to theories of hate crime, this book helps conceptualize the causal chain that links theories of ultimate and proximate causation (p. 144). As Arnold demonstrates, while underlying causes can explain macro-variation in racist violence, only more tailored analysis, such as the theory of ethnic vigilantism, can answer important micro-level questions about it. In addition, the study also raises intriguing questions about feedback and interaction between ambient societal racism; the more concentrated, extreme racism of Skinheads or similar groups; and actual racist violence. Until recently, one could argue, as Arnold (2015) has done, that Skinhead violence in Russia differs substantially from its manifestations in western industrialized democracies by virtue of the far greater extent to which Skinhead racism is accepted or tolerated by the Russian press, officials, and society as a whole. However, with the successful campaigns for Brexit in the United Kingdom and for the election of Donald Trump as president in the United States, there are signs that such political firewalls against the growth of extreme racism are breaking down in major industrialized democracies. Arnold’s study suggests that when national leaders and their media supporters articulate overt or veiled racist positions, they are both potentiating mass racism, and wittingly or unwittingly signaling the state’s tolerance for racist violence. Such violence can then cease to be a marginal, stigmatized phenomenon, and become a mass, partially licit one.