Racism in Modern Russia - Revised Edition: From the Romanovs to Putin

Since its first publication in 2022, Racism in Modern Russia has become a key text for understanding the role that race has played in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history and politics. Analyzing a wide range of printed and visual sources, this timely accessible open access volumemarks the first serious attempt to understand the history of racialization over a span of 150 years. A brilliant examination of the complexities of racism, Eugene M. Avrutin’s panoramic book asks powerful questions about inequality and privilege, denigration and belonging, power and policy, the creation of exclusionary boundaries in everyday life, and the complex historical links between race, whiteness, and geography.

The revised edition includes significant new research on race and racism in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the history of color consciousness and biopolitics, and the aesthetics of anti-racism campaigns, as well as a thoroughly updated selected bibliography for further reading.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Illinois, USA.

Eugene M. Avrutin is the Tobor Family Endowed Professor of Modern European Jewish History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is the author and co-editor of several award-winning books, including Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (2010) and The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian Town (2018). Most recently, he edited, with Elissa Bemporad, Pogroms: A Documentary History (2021).