In a recent probably mutually unbeneficial exchange with James Heartfield, I mention briefly the inappropriateness of using the term "race" with reference to Russia. I thought people might be interested in a couple of additional comments (if not, sorry).
1. Russia, due to its history, is a huge multinational country, and the peoples within it are divided on the basis of "natsionalnost'," not race. Natsionalnost' is not a biological concept, and has to do with culture and self-identification, though looks do factor into it. Russia also does not have a history of making natsionalnost' into a measure of Russian-ness, except for occasional bouts of Slavophilia. Doing so would be suicidal for Russia.
2. The words "rasa" and "rasizm" were introduced into Russia from English during the Soviet era to refer to black-white conflicts in the United States and South Africa. When a rossiyanin (that is, a member of the Russian-speaking linguistic community within Russia) hears the word, he or she thinks of apartheid, slavery or Jim Crow, not ethnic conflicts between e.g. Russians and Caucasians or Ajerbaijanis and Armenians. HOWEVER, Russians who know English (not a whole lot) who have strong ethno-nationalistic leanings will describe themselves as "racists" when speaking in English.
3. HOWEVER, this is changing, for two reaons.
First, there is the influence of Western, esp. Hollywood, movies and the Internet, which discuss race and use racial motifs. This gets grafted onto traditional Russian xenophobia. Let me give a couple of examples of this: the Russian word for Negro, "negr," traditionally has had no negative connotation. However, it does possess such a connotation today, because it sounds like the word "n-word," which people hear in overdubbed English-language movies in which it obviously has a negative meaning. Also, White Power graffiti has begun appearing occasionally in Moscow -- invariably in (non-grammatical) English!
Second, the imported "race" conceptual vocabularly gets superimposed upon ethnic tensions within Russia, so that what was previously an issue of natsionalnosti mutates into one of race. This is because ethnic Russians often feel that they spent so much time during the Soviet era giving money to the non-Russian Soviet Republics, with the result that they themselves had a lower standard of living, only for those republics to then turn around and secede from the USSR! (That secession was unpopular among a lot of people in those republics, esp. the Stans, which were dragged kicking and screaming from the Union, does not enter into their thinking.) Then there is the added pressure of immigration into Russia, when people from the same republics that left the Union move to Russia to take advantage of the higher standard of living there, which is perceived by many members of the ethnic Russian population as bringing in crime, competition for jobs and lowering of wages, and generally clogging "our" cities with undesirables. There is also a certain amount of envy in some cases, because of the disproportionate success of some ethnic groups (Ajeris, Chechens, Georgians) in the market economy as compared to ethnic Russians.