Grant:
I don't buy the idea that Russia is especially racist either. But we have to work with the semantic tools that we have, even though "racism" -- as a concept -- is a pretty blunt instrument; unfortunately there are no such words as "culturism" or "ethnicism", which may be more accurate in some cases.
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I think my beef is that "racism" implies a belief that groups of people are the way they are because of nature. That belief simply barely exists in Russia. E.g. the opinion is not infrequently held by rossiyanye (NOT "Russians," dammit, Russians, Ukrainians, Avars, Jews, Kazakhs, everybody in the "prisonhouse of nations") that all Chechens over the age of 10 should be killed, at least the ones still in Chechnys. While certainly pretty fucking vicious, the justifications made for it have nothing to do with Chechens qua Chechens; the idea is that growing up in a brutal culture, coupled with 10+ years of war and violence, has created people that are incapable of doing anything but fighting, so you have no choice but to off the lot of them.