Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Interaction, migration and change
Race and social relations 255 13. Race and social relations: Crossing borders in a Moscow food aid program Melissa L. Caldwell In the decade that has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian citizens have struggled to articulate for themselves what it means to be Russian in an increasingly globalized world. Among these efforts has been a surge of nationalist discourses that juxtapose Russianness to an imagined ''Other." Although “the West” has traditionally been Russia’s ideological “Other,” particularly during the Soviet period (Kelly 1998), new post-Soviet discourses about these negotiations include racially oriented themes that contrast Russianness with “blackness.”1 This racialized “Othering” has taken multiple forms: political and economic disenfranchisement of Jews and people from the Caucasus, including military action against Chechens; jokes about the presumed incivility and backwardness of black Africans reprinted in popular newspapers and circulated in public discourse (see also Patico 2001b and Pesmen 2000); and, most virulently, the spread of racist organizations and the rise in violent crimes perpetrated against people of color. It is against this backdrop of racial tensions in Russia that I want to examine how differences can be moderated through the logic of trust and intimacy that characterizes Russian social relations. Themes of friendship, mutual trust, and mutual responsibility are the idioms through which Russians frame their social and economic interactions with each other, a feature that has been described by Alena Ledeneva (1998), Jennifer Patico (2001a), Dale Pesmen (2000), and Michele Rivkin-Fish (2002), among others. Because these studies examine these practices primarily in the context of relations among Russians, my task in this essay is to shift the focus of analysis by looking at the ways in which Russians also
