PONARS Eurasia
  • About
    • Contact
    • List of Members
  • Policy Memos
    • List of Policy Memos
  • Podcast
  • Online Academy
  • Events
    • Past Events
  • Recommended
Contacts
Address 1957 E St NW, Washington, DC 20052 adminponars@gwu.edu 202.994.5915
NEWSLETTER
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Podcast
PONARS Eurasia
PONARS Eurasia
  • About
    • Contact
    • List of Members
  • Policy Memos
    • List of Policy Memos
  • Podcast
  • Online Academy
  • Events
    • Past Events
  • Recommended
DIGITAL RESOURCES
digital resources

Bookstore 📚

Knowledge Hub

Course Syllabi

Point & Counterpoint

Policy Perspectives

RECOMMENDED
  • COVID-19 in Eurasia: PONARS Eurasia Policy Perspectives

    View
  • Preparing for the Parliamentary Elections of 2021: Russian Politics and Society (Gel’man, Lankina, Semenov, Smyth, and more)

    View
  • Russians supported Putin’s moves in Crimea in 2014. Here’s what’s different in 2021

    View
  • Putin’s Rules of the Game: The Pitfalls of Russia’s New Constitution

    View
  • In the Caucasus, There Is a Peace Agreement but Not Peace

    View
RSS PONARS Eurasia Podcast
  • Music and Politics in Contemporary Russia [Lipman Series 2021] April 12, 2021
    In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Alexander Gorbachev about the dynamic music scene in contemporary Russia, and how free Russian musicians are to make political statements.
  • How is the Russian Government Coping with Rising Food Prices? [Lipman Series 2021] March 15, 2021
    In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Anton Tabakh about rising food prices in Russia, and what they might mean for Russia's current and future stability.
  • The Communist Party of the Russian Federation: More Than Just Systemic Opposition? [Lipman Series 2021] March 5, 2021
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Felix Light and Nikolay Petrov about the contemporary Communist Party of the Russian Federation, including the divisions between its leadership and membership, its attitude toward Alexei Navalny, and why it might be more than just "systemic" opposition after all.
  • Internet Resources: Civic Communication and State Surveillance [Lipman Series 2021] February 16, 2021
    In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Andrei Soldatov and Tanya Lokot about the role of the internet in contemporary Russian politics, including both as a tool of the Russian opposition and as an instrument of the increasingly repressive Russian regime.
  • The Rise of Alexei Navalny's Political Stature and Mass Protest in Russia [Lipman Series 2021] February 1, 2021
    In the first PONARS Eurasia Podcast of 2021, Maria Lipman chats with Greg Yudin about the current protests taking place in Russia, and what Alexei Navalny's growing popular support means for the Putin regime.
  • Russian Social Policy in the COVID-19 Era [Lipman Series 2020] December 21, 2020
    In 2020’s final episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Sarah Wilson Sokhey and Ella Paneyakh to discuss Russian social policy in the COVID-19 era, and public perception of Russia’s overall pandemic response.
  • Conscious Parenting Practices in Contemporary Russia [Lipman Series 2020] December 10, 2020
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Julia Yuzbasheva and Maria Danilova to learn more about the proliferation of "conscious parenting" practices in contemporary Russian society.
  • The Transformation of Belarussian Society [Lipman Series 2020] November 11, 2020
    In this episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Masha Lipman chats with Grigory Ioffe about the long-term and short-term factors that led up to the current protests in Belarus, and the ongoing transformation of Belarussian society.
  • Russian Lawmakers Adjust National Legislation to the Revised Constitutional Framework [Lipman Series 2020] October 26, 2020
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Ben Noble and Nikolay Petrov about ongoing changes to Russia’s national legislation based on the recently revised constitutional framework, and what these changes portend for the 2021 Duma election.
  • Russia's Regional Elections [Lipman Series 2020] September 25, 2020
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Graeme Robertson and Konstantin Gaaze about Russia’s September 13 regional elections and whether or not the Kremlin should be worried about upcoming Duma elections.
  • Policy Memos | Аналитика

Do Black Lives Matter in Russia?

  • July 13, 2020
  • Peter Rutland

(PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo) This memorandum reviews Russian state media and civil society responses to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The varying reactions cast an interesting light on how Russians view their place in the world and the trajectory of Russia’s democratic development. Russians seem to have a poor understanding of the dynamics of American history and society, but the BLM movement struck a nerve, triggering a heated debate in both state and social media. Studying the reactions to BLM in Russia can teach us a lot about Russian society—just as Russians and others have learned a great deal about American society as the movement has unfolded.

The killing of George Floyd triggered thousands of protests around the world, from the toppling of former slave owner statues in Bristol, England to demonstrations by Aboriginal rights activists in Alice Springs, Australia. However, no such empathetic protests could be seen in Russian cities. This is not because Russian civil society is absent—despite ever-tighter restrictions on public meetings, brave people are willing to take to the streets to challenge things such as the siting of waste dumps or the arrests of investigative journalists. Rather, the BLM movement has exposed a surprisingly troubling attitude towards the politics of race amongst Russia’s embattled democratic activists.

The Impact on Russian Debates

Let us first analyze the responses from official channels. Russian government figures were relatively restrained in their comments—they did not have to say much, preferring instead just to watch America tearing itself apart. In a June 21 interview on Rossiya-1, President Vladimir Putin said, “We always in the USSR and in modern Russia had a lot of sympathy for the struggle of Afro-Americans for their natural rights.” He further added, however, that “If this fight for natural rights, legal rights, turns into mayhem and rioting, I see nothing good for the country.” Federation Council foreign relations committee chair Konstantin Kosachev ridiculed former National Security Advisor Susan Rice for suggesting that the protests were a result of Russian interference (“right out of the Russian playbook”).

Russian TV gleefully relayed images of police violence and burning cities in order to demonstrate the collapse of American society (as did the state media in China). Some of the criticism, of course, is totally justified. Police attacks on protestors, for example, sometimes impacted foreign journalists, including Russians. But much of the media coverage went well beyond objective reporting. Take, for example, the June 7 edition of Vladimir Soloviev’s talk show. Soloviev chuckled at “apocalyptic” clips of a loose police horse in London: “that’s what you get with democracy when it loses its way.” He went on to add, “aren’t white lives important, yellow lives? Are black lives the only ones that count?”

Soloviev’s guests on this show included Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who claimed that “sowing chaos abroad, [the Americans] are reaping chaos at home. Those very ideas of destabilization that they were spreading around the world” had blown back on them. At the same time, she hinted darkly that “nothing is accidental,” and it “is useful for someone.” She argued that the U.S. strategy of “exporting democracy” was designed to cover up problems with democracy back home. Soloviev agreed, stating, “the umbrellas of Hong Kong are showing up in Portland.” Maria Butina, the Russian formerly jailed in the United States for working as an unregistered foreign agent, was also on the show. She stated, “these protests are useful for the establishment—racism to order,” used as a part of “speculation for the black vote.” The next day, June 8, Channel 1 screened the iconic Russian gangster film Brat 2 (Brother 2) (2000), set in Chicago—and over the closing credits showed video footage of the current rioting in the United States. The film ends with the song “Goodbye America.”

Russia’s radical nationalist fringe predictably seized on the American protests, which began, of course, amidst the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the world as well as the worst economic recession in living memory. Conspiracy theorists—never in short supply in Russia—have had a field day with this. One even argued that the Democrats are deploying the technology of “color revolution” on American streets in order to dislodge the Trump administration.

It is interesting to note Russian media reporting on how Russian emigres in the United States have responded to the BLM protests. In “Little Odessa” in Brighton Beach, New York City, Russian bikers gathered to guard local Russian-owned businesses. Similarly, in San Diego, an Armenian restaurant owner recruited Russian-speaking friends to guard his Pushkin restaurant. RT complained that the American press called them “Russian mafia,” and reported that the sign “’Russian mafia in full force’ could be seen in front of the building, defending it from looters.” In fact, that was just a tag on an Instagram photo: no such sign existed. We could not find a single U.S. press source that referred to the “Russian mafia” in reporting on the incident—only Russian sources. This can be seen as an example of self-orientalization, or creating “Russophobia” where it does not exist.

Other Spectrums

Most interesting is the mixed reaction among pro-Western liberals, which shows that the structure of Russian political discourse on race today is very different from that in the West. The leading opposition figure, Aleksei Navalny, has aggressively challenged official media coverage through his YouTube broadcasts, supporting the BLM protests and criticizing police violence inside Russia. Navalny argued that the Kremlin is using the unrest in the United States to distract attention from its own problems, first and foremost, its bungled response to COVID-19.

But Navalny is something of a lone voice. Why have Russian liberals been slow to support and emulate BLM? It is widely recognized that Russian society was traumatized by the experiences of the 1990s, including a wave of violent crime and political battles in the streets that culminated in the shelling of parliament in 1993.

Against that background, it is not surprising that Russians view scenes of looting with alarm, as academic Sergei Medvedev explained in a June 6 Facebook post. What was surprising was that half of the responses to his post—presumably from his liberal friends —were highly critical of the BLM protests. Likewise, many leading ‘liberal’ figures publicly expressed contempt for the peaceful protestors, blaming them for the looting and violence.

Russian liberals remain committed to the language of universal human rights and are disdainful of identity politics (the struggle for rights of marginalized minority groups). For some, the attacks on property were reminiscent of Soviet anti-capitalist propaganda. But racial prejudice is also regrettably a factor. The celebrity and one-time presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak wrote in a June 4 Instagram post, “Those who realized you need to work your fucking ass off [to be successful] long ago became your Naomi Campbells, your Obamas, and your [Oprah] Winfreys. The rest will always find excuses for their own laziness and stupidity.” (The German carmaker Audi subsequently fired her as their representative.) Investigative journalist and nationalist Oleg Kashin tweeted an image labelled “Martin Looter King.”

Leading libertarian blogger Mikhail Svetov started a Russian Lives Matter movement after a police killing in Ekaterinburg on May 31. The movement focuses on police violence and is not racist, but in an interview with Meduza’s Kevin Rothrock, Svetov was highly disparaging of BLM. Karina Orlova, an émigré journalist writing for the liberal Ekho Moskvy, commented that “Many in Russia and even those who moved from Russia to the US think that dark-skinned people are thieves from birth” and related a recent incident where some African-American kids in Washington, D.C., tried to steal her electric scooter. Even the leading liberal economist Andrei Illarionov, a former Putin advisor who is now a fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., devoted a long blog post to analyzing crime statistics to allegedly show that African Americans were not disproportionately targeted by the police.

The whole question of the extent of racism in Russian society is complex, and its historical trajectory is quite different from the rest of Europe or the United States. As Marlene Laruelle points out, Russia has more of a tradition of ethnic/racial mixing than segregation, and the main division in social interactions is between Russians and people from Central Asia and the Caucasus. (It is noteworthy that we have not seen a “Central Asian Lives Matter” movement in Russia.) Some black residents and visitors report no major incidents going about their daily lives, while others experience overt racism, and on occasion, physical violence. In this respect, Russia is probably not particularly different from other European societies—though Russia has a far smaller black community than most West European countries. Racists are, unfortunately, very active in Russian social media. Maria Tunkara, a biracial blogger who complained about racist taunts, is being investigated herself by prosecutors for “spreading extremist materials.” 

Yevgenia Albats, one of the few liberals to speak out in support of BLM, said that many Russians are simply unaware of the history of racism in the United States. (The older generation of liberals were exposed to plenty of coverage of racial tensions in the United States by Soviet media, but they discount that as propaganda.) Likewise, veteran journalist (and Putin supporter) Vladimir Posner regretted the racist tone of much of the Russian coverage. New York University professor Eliot Borenstein suggests that Russians are trapped in the narrative that they are victims of history—from the Nazi invasion to the Soviet collapse—and that they don’t want to be told that others (in this case, African Americans) are suffering more than they. Russian activist Ilya Budraitskis argues that this perverse response of the embattled Russian intelligentsia shows that they are trapped in a vision of an “imaginary West.”  

For both liberals and conservatives in Russia, both identity and world view are powerfully shaped by attitude toward the United States. This helps explain why BLM has had such a strong impact on political debates in Russia. For pro-Kremlin figures, it was quite easy to incorporate BLM into their narrative, using it to criticize structural racism in America while at the same time echoing racist attitudes. For the reasons outlined above, this was much more challenging for Russian liberals. In recent decades, liberalism in the West has evolved to become a more open and contested discourse, very different from the monolithic grand liberal narrative of the Cold War. Russian liberals remain somewhat trapped in binary categories (the corrupt elite versus their righteous critics) and feel uncomfortable with the self-criticism of contemporary liberalism.

Conclusion

While in the United States and elsewhere there has been a mass movement to dismantle statues of slave-owners and imperialists, the Russian state has, in contrast, been actively involved in building new monuments to tsars and generals in recent years—with some local communities even erecting statues of Stalin. This comes, of course, after the removal of many Communist-era monuments in the 1990s.

BLM  has exposed the cancer of structural racism and police violence in American society. But the emergence of such a broad-based movement, which also draws support from the majority white community, shows that civil society in the United States is still strong and raises the prospect of change for the better. That is the main conclusion drawn by Yelena Khanga, a prominent black Russian journalist whose African-American and Jewish grandparents moved to the USSR in 1928. In the words of Sudanese activist Muzan Alneel, “This is not an ugly story of the American dream falling apart. It’s a beautiful story of the propaganda machine falling apart and the true stories of the people’s struggles coming out.”

Peter Rutland is Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought at Wesleyan University.

Andrei Kazantsev is Professor at the Higher School of Economics, Russia.

[PDF]

Homepage image credit.

Memo #:
662
Series:
2
PDF:
Pepm662_Rutland-Kazantsev_July2020.pdf
Author [Non-member]:
Andrei Kazantsev
Peter Rutland
Peter Rutland
Website | + posts
Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor in Global Issues and Democratic Thought, Government Department
Affiliation

Wesleyan University
Links

Wesleyan University (Bio), Personal Website
Expertise

Contemporary Russian Politics and Political Economy, Nationalism
  • Peter Rutland
    https://www.ponarseurasia.org/members/peter-rutland/
    Dueling for the Soul of Russia
  • Peter Rutland
    https://www.ponarseurasia.org/members/peter-rutland/
    Belarus on a Knife’s Edge
  • Peter Rutland
    https://www.ponarseurasia.org/members/peter-rutland/
    History Matters
  • Peter Rutland
    https://www.ponarseurasia.org/members/peter-rutland/
    Russia’s policy in the “frozen conflicts” of the post-soviet space: from ethno-politics to geopolitics
Related Topics
  • 2020
  • BLM
  • Kazantsev
  • Racism
  • Russia
  • Rutland
Previous Article
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем

Petrov: “They are telling local elites that… they can arrest anyone”

  • July 13, 2020
  • PONARS Eurasia
View
Next Article
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем

Wave of Post-Plebiscite Repressions Makes Russia More Dangerous

  • July 14, 2020
  • Pavel Baev
View
You May Also Like
View
  • Policy Memos | Аналитика

China’s Expanding Military Education Diplomacy in Central Asia

  • Erica Marat
  • April 19, 2021
View
  • Policy Memos | Аналитика

This Time is Different (Again): The Political Consequences of the Economic Crisis in Russia

  • Andrei Semenov
  • April 1, 2021
View
  • Policy Memos | Аналитика

The Dzerzhinsky Discord: Who Will Fill the Vacancy in Lubyanka Square?

  • Maria Lipman
  • March 19, 2021
View
  • Policy Memos | Аналитика

The Political Consequences of Public Relations Miscalculations: Will Ukraine’s Anti-corruption Bureau be Terminated?

  • Ivan Gomza
  • March 12, 2021
View
  • Policy Memos | Аналитика

The Belarus Protests and Russia: Lessons for “Big Brother”

  • Natalya Chernyshova
  • March 1, 2021
View
  • Policy Memos | Аналитика

Central Asian Responses to COVID-19: Regime Legitimacy and [De]Securitization of the Health Crisis

  • Mariya Omelicheva and Lawrence P. Markowitz
  • March 1, 2021
View
  • Policy Memos | Аналитика

COVID-19 in Russia: What Russians Expected, What They Got, and What They Think About It

  • Sarah Wilson Sokhey
  • February 22, 2021
View
  • Policy Memos | Аналитика

The Russian Parliament and the Pandemic: A State of Emergency, Post-constitutional Changes, Retaliatory Laws

  • Ekaterina Schulmann
  • February 16, 2021
PONARS Eurasia
  • About
  • Membership
  • Policy Memos
  • Recommended
  • Events

Permissions & Citation Guidelines

Input your search keywords and press Enter.