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The application of the concepts of anti-racism and anti-colonialism as analytical tools in Russian studies is traditionally very restricted. There are no studies of Russia’s engagements with anti-racism after Putin’s government in 2022 took the self-proclaimed role of builder of “a just world order free of neo-colonialism”. European radical right-wing shares the Russian skepticism towards affirmative action, BLM, and so-called political correctness. The logics of engagement with Russian visions of racial justice and with the legacies of Soviet anti-imperialism might be very different in the Global South. This paper argues that Russian engagements with anti-racism (often also labelled as anti-colonialism or as anti-fascism) on the global stage is not merely an instrument aimed at a post factum justification of its foreign policy. Soviet project of antiracism and socialist internationalism made a huge imprint on the global stage, and recent rhetoric of Russian governmental officials is clearly resembling Soviet anti-racist commitments.
The aim of this study is twofold. First, it seeks to analyze how the political regime weaves together the Soviet-era narratives about decolonization with present-day anti-Westernism and concerns about national dignity and recognition with the purpose of presenting Russia as a proponent of a multipolar global order. Second, given the Russian critics of western anti-racism, as well as ambivalences in Russia’s own engagements with race, this paper seeks to chart how Russian political statements employing the concept of anti-racism are presented for the audiences in the Global South.