Racism in the Soviet Union by Adele Tadevosyan

Researching the Soviet Union, racism was a topic which came up quite frequently. Naturally I was unsurprised because of what my grandparents and parents would tell me about their childhoods in the Soviet Union. It’s not racism to specific people, but to almost every other country besides Russia. Some examples of what they would do are:

From 18th November 1932 peasants from Ukraine were required to return extra grain they had previously earned for meeting their targets. State police and party brigades were sent into these regions to root out any food they could find.

The forcible deportation of the Crimean Tatars from Crimea was ordered by Stalin as a form of “ethnic cleansing” of the region and collective punishment for alleged collaboration with the Nazi occupation regime in Taurida Subdistrict during 1942–1943. A total of more than 230,000 people were deported. This included the entire ethnic Crimean Tatar population, at the time about a fifth of the total population of the Crimean Peninsula, as well as ethnic Greeks and Bulgarians.

The prosecution of Greeks in the USSR was gradual: at first the authorities shut down the Greek schools, cultural centres, and publishing houses. Then, the NKVD indiscriminately arrested all Greek men 16 years old or older. All Greeks who were wealthy or self-employed professionals were sought for prosecution first.

According to J. Otto Pohl, 65,599 Germans perished in the special settlements and that an additional 176,352 unaccounted for persons "probably died in the labour army". During the Stalin era, the Soviet Germans continued to be confined to the special settlements under strict supervision, in 1955 they were rehabilitated but were not allowed to return to the European USSR until 1972.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/06/10/yandex-fired-a-taxi-driver-for-refusing-an-african-passenger-then-a-campaign-defending-the-driver-appeared-on-twitter





With Russia having quite old-fashioned citizens, you can imagine the hurt and pain people feel when a babushka (grandmother) moves to a different seat so they don’t have to sit next to you, or being stared at and whispered about. In the video you see how he openly says ‘Of Course!’ after being asked if he was racist, which just goes to show you how openly careless people can be. "The basketball clubs are already used to having black girls on their teams, so there's less racism around. But when you play for a Russian team there are always comments on social media pages: Is she really Russian? Has there been a mix-up? People think it's funny when a black girl plays for Russia."





"It upset me so much when I was a kid, I took it so much to heart. But now I shrug it off. Why do they call me names? The answer is simple: it's not me that's wrong, it's the people around me." - Kamilla Ogun, basketball player, 21.