Between “Western” racism and (Soviet) national binarism: Migrants’ and nonmigrants’ ways of ordering Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad

Abstract

In Kaliningrad (and elsewhere in Russia), migrants and nonmigrants are often connected to places far beyond the state’s borders. In this article, I argue that two divergent transnational phenomena are at stake when investigating racism in Kaliningrad: firstly, ongoing conflicts between Russia and the “West” and, secondly, the almost globally perceived threat of Islam. The first aspect accounts for strengthening Russian nationalism and even more the old Soviet empire, which implies including one’s own (Muslim) migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus. The second aspect, however, encompasses a broader perception of “whiteness” by seeing Muslims generally as a threat of “white” civilization. Nonetheless, this article demonstrates that binary concepts of “black” and “white” are not as fixed and hardened as they might appear at first because those people investigated here generally conceptualize themselves and the city they live in as being tolerant, which is also explained by the Soviet legacy of seeing racism only outside of one’s own cosmos.

Keywords:

• Russia
• racism
• “Islamophobia”
• migration
• Kaliningrad

Notes

1. The number of labor migrants from sub-Saharan countries is generally quite low in Russia and negligible in Kaliningrad (cf. Bondarenko, Googueva, Serov, & Shakhbazyan, 2009).

2. Among those interviewees are people from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirgizstan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine as well as from different parts of Russia, in particular from Siberia and the Far East, who are sometimes also labeled as migrants or resettlers. Roughly, my sample reflects the migratory background of Kaliningrad’s residents. However, it is not a random sample but compiled by means of the snowball principle.

3. All life-story interviews were conducted in Russian, taped, transcribed by an assistant, and translated by me (as to the passages cited here). I followed mainly the “realist approach” advocated by Miller (2000, pp. 92–95), and I only asked more focused questions after the interviewees had concluded their life stories.

4. I asked 12 interviewees to note down each “group” that lives in Kaliningrad on a separate sheet of paper (whereby I stressed that it is their decision what kind of groups they build). Secondly, I asked them to sort those groups and to explain the criteria they used to do so. It was up to them how many piles they built. I noted down the visual result and taped the interviews (see also Sanders, 2016, p. 97f).

5. Furthermore, I conducted more than 20 semistructured interviews, especially with experts. For the analysis of the narrative data, I used in particular grounded theory approaches (cf. Charmaz & Mitchell, 2001).

6. Most often, people used nationality categories (like Uzbek, Russian, etc.) to build groups and religion and/or territory in order to sort those groups and build piles (like people from Central Asia comprising Uzbeks, Tajiks etc.).

7. Moreover, there is a small mosque that was built in a suburb of Kaliningrad in 2006. The two Muslim communities belong together.

8. This is the “Movement against Illegal Migration” (DPNI) (Karpenko, 2014, p. 137).

9. There was actually a fourth building, which was newly constructed as storage for the museum.

10. However, several authors (amongst others Chari & Verdery, 2009; Randeria & Römhild, 2013; Salein, 2005) seek to bridge “Eastern” and “Western studies” and to disclose historic entanglements.