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).