I won’t be the first person to say this, Russians themselves have been saying it, other people have been saying it. So this is mores a compilation of everything that has been said and expressed by the victims themselves.
It is genuinely exhausting how russophobia is treated like it’s either a joke, a conspiracy, or something too trivial to take seriously, or worse, watered down to just simple xenophobia. As if it just magically appeared in 2016 with the “Russian bot” hysteria and then disappeared once people got bored of it. It is genuinely exhausting to watch the "progressive" West perform olympic-level mental gymnastics to avoid admitting that Russophobia is a foundational, structural, and violently persistent form of Orientalism. We have to stop pretending this started in 2022, or 2016, or even 1945. This is a centuries-old project of dehumanization that has been so thoroughly normalized that even the most "intersectional" spaces on this site and elsewhere have a massive, glaring blind spot where 140 million people should be.
Because let’s be honest about what that era actually did. It normalized the idea that Russians, as a people, are inherently deceptive, manipulative, dishonest, subversive. Regular civilians became fair game for suspicion and ridicule, and liberals, who are supposedly so attuned to prejudice, just… ran with it. Fully. And they’re still running with it. There’s no reflection, no pause, no “hey, maybe we crossed a line.” Just this ongoing refusal to recognize that what they participated in, and continue to participate in, is racism.
The 2016 russian bot hysteria and the way liberals clung to that like a security blanket to avoid self-reflection was truly peak absurdity. The "russian bot" craze turned an entire nationality into a digital bogeyman, and even when the fallout happened on places like tumblr, the actual victims of that bigotry—russians—were completely erased from the narrative. people would scream about black bloggers being banned or terminated, which is a valid and vital discussion, but they conveniently left out that an entire demographic was being systematically silenced and dehumanized under the guise of "national security." it’s the same old story: russians are never centered in the discussion of their own marginalization. The conversation somehow managed to sidestep Russians entirely. The focus became “which bloggers got banned,” “which communities were disrupted,” and yes, that matters, but it’s telling that Russians themselves were not framed as victims of a mass moral panic that explicitly targeted them. Their marginalization wasn’t even legible within the discourse. They were props in someone else’s narrative.
And if you think this is new, it really isn’t. You can trace this back through intellectual history, through political writing, even through Marxist texts that is rarely acknowledged. There is a strain of Eurocentrism in these texts that views the "Slavic East" as a backward, stagnant mass that needs to be "civilized" or dragged into history by Western enlightenment.
Marx and engels wrote about slavic peoples in ways that reflected the western european prejudices of their time and context. Engels wrote about "peoples without history", a category that included various slavic nationalities. Meaning peoples who had not developed the historical consciousness or revolutionary potential that the european proletariat had. This framework, which positioned certain peoples as outside the forward motion of history, has a specific genealogy in western european assumptions about civilization and backwardness that reproduces orientalist logic inside a materialist framework.
It is the definition of Orientalism. It’s the framing of Russia as "not quite European," a bridge between the "civilized" West and the "barbaric" East, which allows the West to project all of its own sins, imperialism, colonialism, cruelty, onto a Russian face so it doesn’t have to look in the mirror. There’s a long-standing current of framing Eastern Europe, and Russia in particular, as backward, uncivilized, reactionary. That didn’t start with modern geopolitics. That’s part of a much older pattern of orientalism, where “the East” is constructed as inherently lesser, inherently suspect, inherently in need of domination or correction. And yes, that framework absolutely extends to Russians, whether people want to admit it or not.
Look at how normalized it is now, especially with the Russia–Ukraine war. The language people are comfortable using is wild. Calling Russians “orcs,” saying they have no culture, depicting them as inherently predatory or subhuman, and this isn’t fringe rhetoric, it’s mainstream, it’s casual, it’s everywhere. And what gets me is how people who would immediately recognize dehumanization in other contexts just… switch that part of their brain off here. Completely. There is no introspection. No “wait, what am I endorsing?” Just blind acceptance because they’ve already decided who is allowed to be seen as human. Because i know what happens when palestinians express equivalent rage about israelis. i know what happens when the language is heated, when the dehumanization runs in the direction of an occupied people toward their occupier. The response is immediate and forceful: this language is dangerous, this language produces violence, this language must be policed, the political position of the people using it must be questioned. I have watched this happen repeatedly and in detail. If Palestinians spoke about Israelis with even a fraction of that vitriol, the Western liberal establishment would be screeching about "incitement" and using it to justify every single horror committed against them. But when it’s Russians? It’s "resistance." It’s "understandable bitterness."
And no, this isn’t something unique to Ukrainians either. There is a very specific, very ugly trend of using "bitterness toward the soviet union" as a convenient shield to rehabilitate nazi collaborators and defend a fascist past. By framing everything through the lens of russophobia, they get to bypass their own history of complicity in the holocaust and ethnic cleansing, use it to excuse the fact that many of these nations had active, enthusiastic Nazi collaborator movements. It’s a historical shell game where the russian becomes the eternal villain so everyone else can be the perpetual victim. By making Russia the eternal, primordial villain, they get to frame their Nazi past as a mere "reaction" to Soviet "barbarism," effectively laundering fascism through the lens of Russophobia.
Meanwhile, people collectively forget, or outright erase the scale of Soviet suffering during World War II. Twenty-seven million dead. That is not a footnote. That is not a background detail. That is one of the largest human losses in recorded history, and yet the dominant narrative still centers the U.S. and its allies as the primary forces that defeated Nazism. The number is almost incomprehensible. to put it in context: total american deaths in world war two were approximately 400,000. Total british deaths were approximately 450,000. The soviet union lost 27 million. The majority of those deaths were on the eastern front, which was the largest and most destructive military theatre in human history, where the nazi germany prosecuted a war of annihilation against slavic peoples and jewish people simultaneously. The narrative of world war two as it circulates in western culture, the d-day landing, the liberation of paris, churchill and roosevelt, the american GI as the face of allied victory, almost entirely erases this. The soviet union's role in defeating nazi germany is not proportionally represented in western cultural memory. When we talk about victims of fascism, Soviet and Slavic deaths are barely mentioned, if at all. When we talk about the victims of the Holocaust and Nazism, Slavic deaths, the Generalplan Ost, the deliberate starvation, the systematic erasure of "untermenschen" in the East, are treated as a footnote, if they are mentioned at all. It’s like they don’t fit into the story people want to tell, so they’re quietly pushed aside. Because the one the west fed us was the Soviet Union as a monster fighting another monster. So the 27 million dead are not proportionally mourned in western commemorations of the war's victims.
This erasure is exactly why russians are never viewed as victims of u.s. imperialism. Because the soviet union actually had the power to resist it for decades, people think russians are somehow "immune" to imperialist violence. They ignore the absolute devastation and the mass deaths that followed the dissolution of the ussr—a literal humanitarian catastrophe that the west cheered for. and you see it today in the casual cruelty of sanctions. nobody takes the suffering of russian citizens seriously. Westerners were foaming at the mouth with rage when sanctions were recently lifted, obsessing over "what russia would do" or what weapons they’d have, completely ignoring the fact that lifting those sanctions meant actual human beings might finally be able to breathe and afford to live. The lives of russian people are never the priority; they are just collateral damage in a western power fantasy.
And the mental gymnastics people use to deny russians their status as victims of u.s. bombing campaigns is truly next level. There is always some impossible standard they have to meet. People will unironically argue that russians aren’t victims of u.s. aggression because "the bombers are ukrainians." meanwhile, the u.s. is the supplier, the manufacturer, and the material backbone of that entire campaign. if u.s. bombs are falling on russian soil, provided by the u.s. and supported by the u.s., then those people are victims of u.s. imperialism. period. But because the west has decided russians aren't "allowed" to be victims, they play these semantic games to wash their hands of the blood.
And this erasure feeds directly into the cultural imagery we’re constantly exposed to. Hollywood has spent decades coding Russians as villains, spies, mobsters, corrupt officials, brutal men, hypersexualized women who need to be “rescued". The Russian man is either a vodka-soaked mobster or a cold, unfeeling spy; the Russian woman is a hyper-sexualized "honey pot" or a victim who needs a Western savior to rescue her from her own "barbaric" culture. It’s the same tired script over and over again. And the framing is not subtle. Russian men are barbaric, Russian women are exotic and oppressed, and the West is positioned as the civilizing force. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the exact same orientalist logic applied to Arabs, to Asians, to anyone positioned as “Eastern.”
So how do people look at all of this, the history, the rhetoric, the media portrayals, and still refuse to call it what it is? Racism. Orientalism. A structured way of dehumanizing a group of people. I know why. It’s because so much of “progressive” discourse has flattened everything into this rigid black vs. white framework that simply does not map onto global reality. It treats whiteness as this fixed, universal category instead of what it actually is: a historically constructed, unstable, constantly shifting social classification. And when you force everything into that binary, you lose the ability to see forms of discrimination that don’t fit neatly into it.
That’s how you end up with people insisting that Russians, because they are perceived as “white”—cannot experience racism. As if proximity to whiteness erases all other axes of marginalization. As if history, culture, geopolitics, and longstanding patterns of othering just… stop mattering. It’s reductive, and honestly, it starts veering into the same kind of essentialist thinking that underpins race science. You’re denying people the language to describe their own oppression because it doesn’t align with your framework.
And what’s interesting is that people do recognize, at least partially, that whiteness isn’t stable when it comes to certain groups. Jewish people, for example, have been incorporated into whiteness in some contexts while still facing antisemitism that clearly operates outside of that framework. There’s at least some acknowledgment of complexity there. But that same nuance is rarely extended to Russians, because the dominant narratives about them are so entrenched, so normalized, that people don’t even question them.
Europe itself is proof of how unstable these categories are. Before colonial expansion, before the rigid codification of race based on skin color, there were already systems of hierarchy and othering within Europe—West vs. East, “civilized” vs. “barbaric.” These divisions didn’t disappear; they evolved. Whiteness as a category was formalized later, but the underlying need to define an “other” was already there, and Eastern Europe often filled that role.
The categories of "civilization" vs. "barbarism" were honed on the bodies of the Irish and the Slavs long before skin color became the primary tool of separation. The West used "culture" and "civility" to demean the East until they found a more visible difference to exploit. Western europe had ways of marking eastern europe as inferior, as barbaric, as culturally deficient, before skin colour became the primary organizing category of hierarchy. The categories were civilizational, cultural, religious. The east was orthodox christian rather than catholic or protestant. It was slavic rather than germanic or latin. It was the steppe rather than the city.
The development of race as a biological category in the 17th and 18th centuries gave western european hierarchy a new and supposedly scientific vocabulary. But the hierarchy it organized had existed before the vocabulary arrived and its eastern european dimensions did not disappear when blackness and whiteness became the primary categories. They continued operating alongside the black-white framework, in the cultural and civilizational registers that had always carried them.
Applying the american black-white binary to this situation and concluding that russians cannot experience ethnically targeted bigotry because they are white is not a sophisticated analysis. It is the export of a specific american racial framework to a global context it was not designed to describe, producing the erasure of forms of discrimination that do not fit neatly into its categories.
And that’s the problem. If your analysis can’t account for this, if it can’t hold complexity, contradiction, and historical nuance—then it’s not as progressive as you think it is. It’s just another way of deciding who gets to be human and who doesn’t. By refusing to see Russophobia as a form of racism, you aren't being "anti-racist"—you are upholding the very Eurocentric, colonial structures that decided who gets to be "human" in the first place.
You are using the same logic as the colonizers to deny the victims of that logic the vocabulary to even describe their own oppression. It is disgusting, it is hypocritical, and it is a complete intellectual failure.
So no, this isn’t just “xenophobia” in the casual sense people like to downplay. It’s part of a longer tradition of oriental racism, adapted and repackaged for modern contexts. And the refusal to see it for what it is doesn’t come from ignorance alone. It comes from a framework that actively discourages people from recognizing certain groups as capable of being oppressed.
