Navalny, Race & Russia
Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny at a protest.
On this episode of Black Diplomats, host Terrell Starr convenes a panel of experts to talk about the recent decision by Amnesty International to revoke the “prisoner of conscious” status from Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Starr wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about the decision this week, criticizing the simplified discourse in the West.
In order to bring some nuance to the conversation Starr hosts Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, Dr. Rano Turaeva-Hoehne, and Irina Kuznetsova, three women who follow Russian politics with a keen eye to the racial dynamics of the region. They break down Navalny’s racist statements, how they fit into the context of Russian imperialism, and what they think opposition parties need to do to move forward.
And don’t miss the hilarious sidebar on babushka culture. There has to be a bench.
Thank you for listening!
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work examines Black experience in the USSR and how the presence of Black people shaped ideas and understandings of race, ethnicity, and nationality policy in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet space.
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Dr. Rano Turaeva
Dr. Rano Turaeva is a habilitating candidate at the Ludwig Maximillian University and an associated researcher at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle Saale in Germany. She is currently working on the second book on Migration and Islam in Russia. She has been writing on the topics of migration, entrepreneurship, informal economies, gender, border studies, identity and inter-ethnic relations among many other topics which she published in such journals as Central Asian Affairs, Central Asian Survey, Inner Asia, Communist and post-Communist studies, Anthropology of Middle East among other journals. Her book based on her PhD thesis is out with Routledge in 2016 under the title `Migration and Identity: the Uzbek Experience`.
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Dr. Irina Kuznetsova
Dr. Irina Kuznetsova is a Birmingham Fellow and a Lecturer at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is also an associated member of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham and a Fellow of the Intercontinental Academia. Kuznetsova’s research expertise includes migration, health, and critical urbanism and covers Russia, Central Asia, Ukraine, and Nigeria. Examining the social aftermath of population displacement from Ukraine’s war-torn territories, she led several research projects which were presented internationally at Chatham House, European Asylum Office, and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, among others.
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