From Comrades to Outcasts: Caucasians in Modern Russia

At the same time that Russia faces a rapid economic development, with a consequent increasing need for cheap labor force that mainly comes from the Caucasus and Central Asia, we notice a parallel increase in violent and non-violent xenophobic activities. How did a once multinational society turn into one of the most dangerous countries for “foreigners”, for those that do not look “Slavs”? The present paper aims to research the brokerage of radical right organizations in the political polarization of a transitional setting. Radical right organizations in Russia form a very varied constellation, but all have in common that they claim to be the “true representatives” of the Russian people. From the year 2000 and on, the target of the racist speech of radical right actors has changed: from the international Jewry and the Americans of the 1990s, the enemy is now “internal”, the “illegal immigrant”. At the same time, radical right actors have accomplished a series of anti-immigrant – anti-Caucasian in their majority – mobilizations that attracted considerable pubic visibility: the 2006 Kondopoga pogrom, the annual nationalist Russian March, the 2010 Manezh riots, the 2011 “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” campaign. The paper will draw on original data from my fieldwork in Russia and will focus on non-parliamentary radical right movements of the 2000s, like the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) and the Russian People's Movement (ROD). It aims to show the extent to which the radical right actors' mobilization, in combination with the opportunities they faced, succeeded in the political polarization of modern Russians against their former comrades. The significance of the present proposal is to bridge social movement studies and nationalism studies through an interdisciplinary approach and to contribute to expand our knowledge on political polarization through its study in a transitional setting.