Social or Cultural Lens? Exploring Regional Facets of Xenophobia in Russia

This article compares expressions of migrantophobia in Moscow and Krasnodar, two Russian cities with strikingly different historical, geographical, and ethnocultural profiles but comparable in the scale of their migrant and ethnic-minority populations. Drawing on semi-structured interviews collected in 2014–2022, we argue that the historical, discursive, and institutional terrain of each city shapes what forms xenophobia takes, at whom it is directed, and through which vocabularies local residents express concern about ethnic “visible others.” Muscovites frame concern about Central Asian labor migrants though a critique of institutional malpractices; Krasnodar residents route hostility toward North Caucasian minorities through cultural hierarchy.