'Russia belongs to ethnic Russians' is a slogan that many people have identified (and continue to identify) with in the post-Soviet era. Racism in Modern Russia is an open access book which takes a historical lens to reveal why this is the case, laying bare how race has worked in contemporary Russia in the process.

Between 1992 and the turn of the 21st century, when Vladimir Putin became the Acting President, Russia experienced a catastrophic loss of population, with the decline of ethnic Russians outpacing all other nationalities. In Putin's Russia, as in 19th-century Europe and North America, observers saw trends in mortality, immigration, and race as interconnected. As the birth rate of ethnic Russians ticked up in the first decade of the 21st century, opposition to immigrants, especially from the independent states of Central Asia and the Caucasus, became more pronounced. In this concise and provocative book, Eugene M. Avrutin explores the complex historical links between depopulation, labor migration, and race that have built up in Russia over the last 150 years to expose the truth behind the disturbing state of race relations in the country today.

This revised edition includes significant new material on race and racism in the Caucasus and Central Asia and reflects the wealth of recent scholarship which has appeared in recent years on key topics, including race and racism in everyday life and the biopolitics of race.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Illinois, USA.