Russia’s ‘Non-Slavic’ Communities: Constituent Part of Russia’s Pluri-Ethnic Population, Seasonal Workers or Threat?

The paper analyses the implications of ‘othering’ Russia’s non-Slavic minorities that originate from the Caucasus and Central Asia. These groups have a high degree of internal heterogeneity, encompassing both persons born in Russia and recent immigrants. While a unifying factor is their formal recognition as national minorities with a traditional presence in Russia, legacies of Soviet nationalities policy result in a tendency to essentialise, and thereby reify, ethnic groups. In the case of the minorities under consideration, this is accompanied by their ‘orientalising’. Surveys reveal low levels of trust in the ethnic Russian majority towards persons that are of ‘non-Slavic appearance’ and ‘darker-skinned’, who are often regarded as culturally incompatible to Russians and as having extremist inclinations.

The resulting scenario is one of exclusion rather than inclusion and integration, despite official pronouncements on Russia’s multi-ethnic character. Narratives of non-Slavic minorities as a menace to Russian society are located in a securitised context, implying the state’s management of inter-ethnic diversity to preserve a delicate societal balance. The paper will argue that this approach leads to two complexities: first, the effective repression of open dialogue on the marginalisation of particular groups, causing this phenomenon to remain unresolved. Second, the ‘othering’ of groups originating from the Caucasus and Central Asia results in group fragmentation, with some persons belonging to these communities distancing themselves from immigrants. This, inter alia, raises issues of possible differential treatment (by state organs and Russian society more broadly) between individual immigrants and their settled co-ethnics.