Rioting for Whiteness: Doing Race on the Squares of Moscow

Abstract

December 11, 2010 was marked by the worst racial riots in Moscow history when the police proved incapable of stopping the 5,000-strong crowd beating up anyone who was ‘non-Slavic’ in appearance who they happened to catch on Manezh Square near the Kremlin. This mass protest expressed the widespread public reverberance (inter alia, affecting the political sphere) caused by the shoddy official investigation into the murder of Yegor Sviridov, a Spartak fan killed by a group of ‘individuals of a Caucasian nationality’, to imply people from the Northern Caucasus and representing ethnic minorities in Russia. On October 13, 2013, the Moscow borough of Biryulevo also saw clashes with the police as a public reaction to the murder of Yegor Shcherbakov, again by a person who was again described as of ‘non-Slavic appearance’. Again, the police were nearly helpless, and the Moscow authorities were at a loss. These events were remarkable in terms of both their significance and their consequences, and, therefore, they should be considered not only as racist violence episodes but, more importantly, as a collective action involving ideological, material, and organizational resources to achieve political goals nationwide.