The Invisibility of Race in Sociological Research on Contemporary Russia: A Decolonial Intervention

This essay provides a critical decolonial intervention into the prevalent state of racial exceptionalism in mainstream sociological research on contemporary Russia. Following critical race theory's understanding of race as relationally constituted and rooted in discourses of Europeanness, modernity, and civilization, the essay shows that race is highly prevalent but unacknowledged in sociological studies of Russia. It is argued that dismissing race as analytically irrelevant in Russia seriously limits the sociological ability to explain social inequalities, engage with current global challenges and inadvertently gives racism new legitimacy. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial critiques of sociology as a form of knowledge production, the essay points towards some ways of decolonizing sociological research concerning the inequalities associated with race and ethnicity in Russia and overcoming racial exceptionalism.

Invisibility of Race in Sociological Research on Russia "whiteness." 3 Some forms of racial exceptionalism include direct statements of the non-applicability of race to the Russian context.Reporting the results of their research on inter-ethnic relations in higher education, Tatyana Bulatova and Andrey Glukhov explain: In Western studies, hierarchical differences between immigrants and the receiving society have been interpreted primarily in racial terms.The history of Russia has not been burdened by racial confrontation and discrimination; therefore, the Russian mass consciousness is not burdened by racial prejudices that can affect the attitude towards migrants. 4ile rarely articulated in such direct form, mainstream sociological research on Russia implicitly accepts the outlined position as an unquestionable historical fact.Other common forms of exceptionalism include discussing racism and racialization in Russia without any connection to race; studying racism as a form of enthicized xenophobia; using theories of race and racial inequalities coined in western contexts to address "ethnic inequalities" in Russia; and approaching race as just another category of diversity parallel to gender or age.As is the case in other world contexts characterized by racial exceptionalism, race in sociological research on Russia is replaced with other signifiers such as "culture," "ethnicity," or "background." 5t is not always the concept of race itself that is omitted.Some recent sociological studies link racism in Russia to the history of Russian imperialism and build their analysis on postcolonial approaches to race as "a political project rooted in colonialism and imperialism" or "a trait belonging to the host society" rather than an individual characteristic of a migrant experiencing racism and racialization. 6It is the absence of consideration of how the boundedness of race, modernity, and Europeanness are reflected in Russianness.Race in Russia continues to be solely and exclusively about the Other-"migrants," "blacks," "Asians," and "Muslims," but never about Russians. 7ritical race theorists have long argued that race, both an ally and a product of European colonial expansion since the early sixteenth century, attains its meaning through "the interaction of the oppositional, yet mutually dependent, relationship between Europeanness and non-Europeanness," between the notions of modernity and primitiveness. 8According to Barnor Hesse, the modern conceptual history of race shows that race can mean many things and be assigned to corporeal, geographical, cultural, religious, historical (insert a never-ending list of) differences in modernity's construction of the hierarchy between "Europeanness" and "non-Europeanness," which is invariably based on notions of supremacy of "white/European" people over those marked as "non-white/non-European." 9 In other words, it is suggested that we should understand race relationally, rather than proprietarily (as property of individuals).
In a search to understand how racial differences are produced and gain symbolic and material power in the world, "it is whiteness that is more important than blackness," because "what constitutes the other as black (or as corporeally oppositional) is the European Enlightenment obsession with the aesthetics of its own whiteness." 10Now how is "whiteness as a conjunction of Europeanness and modernity" relevant to Russia (commonly positioned as a non-western, (post-)imperial power in an ambiguous, contradictory relationship with Europe and European modernity), which had not historically used the concept of race in managing and understanding its human diversity? 11Is whiteness, as critical race theory understands it, even relevant to Russia?Some recent studies of post-Soviet Russian-speaking migrants in Finland, Italy, and the US show that while these migrants may be racialized as notquite-white in western contexts, they simultaneously firmly insist on their own whiteness. 12It nevertheless remains almost entirely unexamined how Russian whiteness operates at home. 13If, as documented by numerous research and public opinion polls, some "non-ethnically Russian/Slavic" people in Russia are racialized as "black," then who is white?If Russians express superiority towards peoples and world regions racialized as non-European and Invisibility of Race in Sociological Research on Russia non-white, does it mean that they see themselves as white?How did Russians become white?What about so-called Slavic people?Why are Ukrainians and Belarusians generally accepted into whiteness, but Tatars and Georgians are not? 14Until these questions are explored; until whiteness stays silently embedded in Russianness, race will remain invisible.

Silence or Silent Screaming?
Why do we even need race to research diversity and inequalities in contemporary Russia?According to the "proud" history of internationalism and antiracism in the Soviet Union, race is an embarrassment.It is immoral, something that humanity has to leave behind once and for all.We need race because, in the words of David Goldberg, race, as "ways of being, living, thinking, [and]  emoting" "refuses to stay silent." 15Despite the prevalent state of racial exceptionalism in sociological scholarship on the Russian context, this scholarship screams of race.
For instance, we can observe that existing "ethnic hierarchies" that social scientists refer to in the Russian context are based on conceptions of Europeanness and non-Europeanness.Alexey Bessudnov and Andrey Shcherbak found that employers in Moscow and St. Petersburg discriminate against visible ethnic minorities of "non-European origin," but not against groups of "European origin." 16In their field experiment of ethnic discrimination in Russia, researchers combined "all ethnic groups into two categories: of European origin (Germans, Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, ethnic Russians, and Ukrainians) and of non-European origin (Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Chechens, Georgians, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Tatars)." 17 Furthermore, reading sociological scholarship on migration, one discovers that much of this scholarship approaches human diversity in Russia in the binary terms of "ethnic Russians" and "ethnic non-Russians" (often just "non-Russians"), where the latter category includes over a hundred ethnicities living on the territory of the Russian Federation. 18This effectively means that the ontological status of millions of people is defined through "not being" and points to Russianness as the most crucial but overlooked category of analysis.The amount of unaccounted racial slurs and racially charged language deriving from empirical datasets and directed at "ethnically non-Russian" people is equally striking.Much of this language directly relates to bodies, development, and civilization-the main markers of race.For example, Svetlana Bodrunova, Olessia Koltsova, Sergey Koltcov, and Sergey Nikolenko's research reports that North Caucasians are described as "inferior," "barbarians," "uncultivated" and "enfants terribles of Mother Russia." 19Ekaterina Demintseva's and Félicie Kempf's studies of "migrant schools" in Moscow (schools that are attended by a large number of "non-Russian" pupils) reveal that "non-Russian" children are called "black" and described as "aggressive," "unable to assimilate," and "carrying and spreading diseases." 20ismissing race as something that does not originate from Russian history, culture, or politics and therefore does not matter is ubiquitous in the scholarship and limits our ability to see and analyze.As a result, such obviously global processes as the racialization of migration and discrimination against othered populations in Russia are interpreted in narrow nationalist terms (as a consequence of national identity crisis) or reduced to psychological traits. 21Overall these examples demonstrate that mainstream sociological research concerning the inequalities associated with race and ethnicity in Russia is unable to adequately explain these inequalities, "to engage with current global challenges," and, at worst, contributes to the naturalization of social hierarchies, the proliferation of racial violence, and inhibits the development of public debates. 22Following Gurminder Bhambra, I do not view this as "an error of individual scholarship…but something that is made possible by the very disciplinary structure of knowledge production [in]…modern sociology." 23

Decolonizing Sociology
In the remaining part of this essay, I build on the postcolonial and decolonial critiques of sociology and their failure to address the inextricable connection that exists between the notions of race, the rhetoric of modernity, Invisibility of Race in Sociological Research on Russia and the histories of European colonial violence against those marked as "non-Europeans." 24The starting point for these critiques lies in approaching sociology as a form of knowledge that emerged in the nineteenth century "as a debate among intellectuals of the imperial center about the world that global imperialism had encountered or created." 25 Raewyn Connell writes that one of the key organizing concepts of Comtean sociology (ca.1850-1920) was interpreting "the difference between the metropole and the colony…as 'progress.'" 26Ali Meghji explains that from its inception, sociology "internalized the logic of a colonial episteme," that is, it accepted "the dominant ways of thinking and knowing that produced and reproduced colonial difference: the idea that the colonized were inherently different from (and inferior to) the Western colonizers." 27s shown by historical research on intellectual currents in late imperial Russia, Russian social sciences, including sociology, "were thoroughly integrated into the European and, later, transatlantic intellectual context"; their approaches to human diversity and discourses on racial and ethnic difference were in line with the dominant episteme of European modernity. 28Some scholars present Russian sociology as a long-lasting intellectual tradition reaching back to the nineteenth century and "unified by a set of underlying common features." 29Others consider it as a new field of study that emerged in the post-Soviet period and was shaped by numerous (and mostly) western social theories. 30In either case, as demonstrated above, mainstream sociology concerning the inequalities associated with race and ethnicity in Russia shares disciplinary structure of knowledge production with European and American sociologies in that it fails to address the relationship between sociology and empire.
Bhambra suggests that sociology-a discipline approaching race and ethnicity as issues of stratification and identity-can be criticized on three grounds: substantive, conceptual/methodological, and epistemological. 31I follow the structure of her critique to explain what can be done to overcome racial exceptionalism in sociological research about Russia.

Slavic Review Substantive Issues
Postcolonial and decolonial theorists have argued that the way in which sociological research understands the past and how this understanding influences its conceptualization and analysis of the present is problematic. 32In Bhambra's words "the historical record…found within standard sociological understanding" lacks "a systematic consideration of the world-historical processes of dispossession, appropriation, genocide, and enslavement as central to the emergence and development of modernity and its institutional forms." 33his critique is applicable to the sociology of race and ethnicity in Russia, since the historical account found in existing studies is generally based on an implicit acceptance of the official Soviet state narrative on the equality of all Soviet ethnicities/nationalities and/or privileging Eurocentric (or to be precise Russian-centric) account of the emergence of modernity in the region.Ignoring Russia's history as a country that over multiple stages of colonization slaughtered, displaced, and enslaved multiple peoples hinders the sociological ability to explain present-day inequalities.To understand why Russians today continue to draw their sense of civilizational superiority over Chechens, Armenians, Kazakhs, Buryats, Uzbeks, and others, routinely called various racist terms, the histories of Russian and Soviet colonialism has to be taken into account.
Considering imperial Russia's, the Soviet Union's, and the Russian Federation's positionality within global imperial formations is another crucial issue that can help make sociological research in and about Russia a more critical endeavor.It is commonly known that from the early eighteenth century onwards Russia engaged in selective borrowing of elements of western modernity.While the history of Russia's cultural and intellectual dependency on Europe has various, often contradicting, interpretations-from stressing Russia's uniqueness to claims of mental colonization by western philosophy, knowledge, and cultures-a lack of attention to the power of the western accounts of modernity/coloniality in Russia reinforces the legitimacies of these accounts. 34

Conceptual/Methodological Issues
As noted above, sociological research has been criticized for approaching ethnicity and race as primarily issues of stratification and/or identity.While focus on stratification and identity has crucial importance for understanding human societies, it has a limited capacity to unveil "the underlying processes by which race and ethnic differences are produced." 35This criticism is Invisibility of Race in Sociological Research on Russia further exacerbated by a widespread lack of conceptual clarity in sociological research on Russia-the central concepts of "race," "ethnicity," "racism," and "xenophobia" often remain undefined and/or conflated with each other.When defined, racism for the most part is seen as prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a different skin color or phenotypical traits; infantilization of non-Slavic or non-European people on the basis of their perceived lack of "civilization," "progress," or "culture" is rarely recognized as racism at all. 36Developing clear definitions for the central research terms and recognizing race and racism as world-systemic phenomena linking global geographies through connected notions of white supremacy, modernity, and Europeanness might be a useful way forward. 37ecognizing connections between global geographies and politics of race is imperative for another important reason-overcoming methodological nationalism: the intellectual orientation to research and analyze exclusively within the framework of the nation-state. 38Racialized hierarchies and oppression cut across national boundaries because an empire that invented such hierarchies and oppression was "a transnational and global process." 39orrespondingly, in Ulrich Beck's terms, some social processes "are indifferent to national boundaries." 40This is not to say that there is a lack of cross-country comparisons between everyday racism and anti-immigration attitudes in Russia and elsewhere.Within sociological scholarship these comparisons and parallels are plentiful.As argued by Julian Go, what is often missing is the attention to transnational connections between technologies of power and the domination generated by processes of colonialism and deployed against the racialized others at home and abroad. 41Investigating these connections will be instrumental in overcoming racial exceptionalism without diminishing the specificities of the Russian context.

Epistemological Issues
Postcolonial and decolonial critiques urge sociology of race and ethnicity to break away from the imperial episteme and decolonize the discipline. 42ecolonizing means "making visible the invisible and…analyzing the mechanisms that produce such invisibility." 43As many have argued, whiteness gains currency by being invisible, by being "the absent centre against which others appear only as deviants, or points of deviation." 44To decolonize also means to recognize that racial exceptionalism in Russia, historically the third largest empire in the world, is an effect of global coloniality-the system of power relations and classificatory order privileging European/white people and the Eurocentric way of life while marginalizing those marked as non-European/non-western/non-white peoples worldwide. 45p to date mainstream sociological research concerning race and ethnicity in Russia has mainly focused either on the Russian "majority's" attitudes towards "ethnic minorities" or the experiences of oppression and exploitation among "ethnic" labor migrants.These research orientations not only reinforce the perception that Russia is the country of ethnic Russians but also produce significant omissions in knowledge production-namely, they obliterate the role of the margins in constituting the core. 46For instance, the racializing discourses that the Russian state has projected on migrants from ex-Soviet countries have been discussed at length, but what does this projection do for the Russian state itself?Could it be the case that whiteness that ethnic Russians ascribes to themselves only exists in the presence of racialized migrants?A shift from approaching migrants and racialized populations as "minorities" among the Russian "majority" to examining the constitutive role they play in the formation of Russianness and the Russian state will help to decolonize Russian sociology.In contrast to seeing Russianness as an indigenous category, formed independently of the history of Russian/Soviet imperialism, and migrants from the ex-Soviet states to Russia as newcomers, these processes should be located "within the broader systems of nation-state formation in the context of imperial states and colonial regimes and therefore to be understood as integral to such processes as opposed to being regarded as subsequent additions to them." 47e decolonial project has shown that analytical categories of social sciences are not neutral, may contribute to sustaining the hegemonic structures of power, and reinforce social inequalities.From the viewpoint of this essay, mainstream sociological research concerning race and ethnicity in the Russian context not only fails to recognize the link between existing inequalities and modernity/ coloniality but also lacks the analytical tools to think critically about these inequalities.The scope of this essay does not allow for a detailed overview of the sociological approaches to race and ethnicity that successfully engage with postcolonial and decolonial tools of critique. 48Following critical race theory's understanding of race as relationally constituted and adopting the structure of Bhambra's critique, this essay elaborates on a number of substantive, conceptual/methodological, and epistemological issues that sociologists of Russia may find useful to consider while devising their research projects.Invisibility of Race in Sociological Research on Russia Last but not least, decolonizing Russian sociology of race and ethnicity presents a valuable opportunity to further develop the theorization of continuities and discontinuities of inequalities first forged by colonialism into the present.As argued by Sergey Abashin, the Russian case pointedly demonstrates that postcolonialism can emerge from "a combination of contemporary conditions, and not necessarily stems exclusively and directly from the… past." 49On the one hand, as discussed above, modern-day inequalities in Russia reflect those first produced by Russian and Soviet colonial expansion.On the other hand, it has been argued that the dramatic and sudden fall of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union disrupted put an end to multiple colonial processes that took place within these imperial formations. 50After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and discrediting the socialist project of modernity, Russia and other countries of the former Soviet bloc had no other choice but to "join" neoliberal capitalist modernity. 51This has opened the doors to discourses and practices of race, migration, and nationalism that might have been previously absent from the region or have appeared here in new forms.Sociological research attentive to these historical developments, striving for epistemic justice, and willing to consider the role of the synchronous global contexts in structuring the meanings and practices of race can thus significantly contribute to the development of the decolonial project.