(Not a historian, so fully expect half of this to be wrong in one way or another.)

> Either way, people here aren't discriminated based on their race. Never were.

That is untrue.

You could argue the “pale of settlement” (instituted shortly after the annexation of parts of Poland made Jews more than a rounding error) was discrimination based on religion, not ancestry (and indeed it seems to have had some resemblance to the suppression of Old Rite communities, which did not have any particular ethnic composition as far as I know). But the distance between the two is easily bridged (one only needs to look at Ireland to see that), and by the 20th century it was, thoroughly, as evidenced by things ranging from Stalin’s Jewish resettlement attempts in the 30s and 40s (whence the “Jewish autonomous region”) to the ethnic quotas and heavily biased exams at the Mekhmat and elsewhere in the 70s and 80s (supported not only by a mass of mostly-forgotten university functionaries, but also by some of the genuine greats such as Pontrjagin, cf You Failed Your Math Test, Comrade Einstein).

(That last part is why any intentional bias or quota in admissions gives me the chills. Nothing will go wrong, surely.)

It’s not only the Jews, of course. The common euphemistic appellation for the situation on the Caucasus, “tensions”, hides a morass of mutual hatreds that is centuries deep, though again the results of Stalin’s disastrous resettlement efforts are best characterized as “fallout”, and the two Chechen wars intended as election publicity for Putin did not help. But a close look at the 19th-century colonization of the region as described indirectly by authors like Lermontov gives the impression that the whole thing was pretty fucked up even then.

(If you want to dismiss these places as “not really Russia”, you are proving my point, even if there are senses in which that statement is true.)

Shall we talk about the undocumented and (thus) vastly underpaid Middle Eastern migrant workers who have sustained most of Moscow’s municipal infrastructure for the last two decades? (Though perhaps not for much longer, given the recent monetary restrictions.) Who have reversed much of its despair- and alcohol-fueled collapse of the late Soviet times? That the low-wage jobs should go to them may not be not explicitly xenophobic (except inasmuch as any system of employment controls for foreigners is), just the result of the how the USSR was organized and how it fell apart; but I have an acquaintance who has adopted a child from there, and their experiences both with officials and with strangers off-handedly insulting the child or the family sound pretty straightforwardly racist to me.

And, well, let us be honest and acknowledge the mutual feeling of otherness between people from Central or Northern Russia and those from West Ukraine, Belarus, or even the south of the country as it currently is. It can range from having a stereotypical funny-talking character in jokes to toppling monuments, rewriting history, and going to war, but it’s been there for a long time, and the distance between these two extremes isn’t nearly as large as I’d like.

(Navalnyj has distant relatives in Ukraine? Everybody has distant relatives in Ukraine. If you want commentary on the Golodomor and whether it fits here, though, you’ll need to find someone qualified enough to talk specifics about it.)

This is not at all an exhaustive list. (What about the Tatars? The Russian Germans? The postwar expulsions, tacitly accepted by the West, that turned Königsberg into Kaliningrad and Danzig into Gdańsk? I’m sure there are things I’ve never heard of as well.) It might be that there is no “racism” in the precise North American mold in Russia or around it, but that is only because that mold is uninteresting (and to the extent that the opposition to it is built around its incidental features, that opposition is missing the point, although I would not claim to be the one to make it the Right Way). Xenophobia towards people inside or just outside the country, now that we have plenty of, and so does everybody else living on the ruins of an empire.

That is if the economic structures originating from serfdom in the Empire or from internal migration restrictions in the USSR are not enough for you. They might not always have an ethnic bent, but is that really that much of a consolation?..