Making Caucasians Black: Moscow Since the Fall of Communism and the Racialization of Non-Russians

Under communism, Moscow was imagined as the capital of a multinational brotherhood of peoples and was used as the stage from which to project the image of the Soviet Union as the country which had discovered the cure for racism. Since the collapse of this multi-ethnic friendship, administrative and law enforcement officials have systematically used public discourse and the registration system to exclude and racialize dark-skinned non-Russians in Moscow and re-imagine the community as white and Slavic. The Soviet era's positive discrimination or affirmative action policies have been replaced by a system of racial profiling. The seeds of this official racism, which has exploded in the post-communist period, were embedded in the Soviet system's ostensibly raceless ideology which, although suppressing overt racist policies like the ones being committed on a daily basis in Moscow, simultaneously claimed that non-Russians (particularly those of the Caucasus and Central Asia) were the Union's chief beneficiaries and were indebted to their Russian elder brother for their civilized existence. Secession then could only mean non-Russians' degeneration to their pre-Soviet, criminal if not barbarian and 'dark' existence.