What it’s really like being Black in Russia
Russian President Vladimir Putin (C) poses with foreign students studying in Russia in Sochi, Russia, on March 6, 2024, in this pool photograph distributed by a Russian state-owned agency. (Mikhail Metzel / Pool / AFP via Getty Images)
Culture
After facing police discrimination as a Black woman in the U.S., Francine Villa decided to return to her birth country, Russia, in 2019, searching for the safety America had denied her.
A year later, she appeared in a Russian propaganda documentary “Black in the USSR,” saying that she “felt free” in Russia and could “walk outside and be safe.”
But that illusion shattered in July, when she and her child were brutally attacked by neighbors who shouted racial slurs at them.
“How much more of this can one take?” a bloodied Villa cried in an Instagram video filmed from what appeared to be the back of an ambulance. As she described the attack, Villa said the police failed to intervene.
“Russia is not a comfortable country to live in for anyone who doesn’t fit the image of the ‘ideal Russian’ promoted by the media and authorities.”
Since then, she has not spoken publicly about the incident and didn’t respond to the Kyiv Independent’s request for comment.
Kremlin state propaganda has long tried to promote the idea that people from Africa and the global Black diaspora can live free of discrimination in Russia, where they will be judged by their achievements and not their skin color — unlike in the West, which it portrays as plagued by racism. Villa’s own great-grandfather moved from the U.S. to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and much of her family reportedly still resides there.
But for many Black Russians and immigrants, this narrative has always clashed with their reality.
Villa’s experience reveals a deeper, long-standing problem: Russia’s decades-long efforts to attract racial minorities to live and work in the country for economic and propaganda gains have often been met by Russians with outright hostility.
“Russia is not a comfortable country to live in for anyone who doesn’t fit the image of the ‘ideal Russian’ promoted by the media and authorities,” Mariia Magdalena Tunkara, an exiled Black Russian activist, told the Kyiv Independent.
“I don’t believe it’s possible to live in Russia as a black person and not notice it — people who claim otherwise are simply lying.”
Prejudice and isolation
Driven by the promise of greater opportunities than those in their own home countries, people from African countries and the Black diaspora have come to live, work, and study in Russia. However, many of them face racism in everyday life and, at times, even violent attacks.
In 2020, Roy Ibonga, a 21-year-old Congolese student in Bryansk, filmed a taxi driver boasting of his racism when he refused to give Ibonga a ride. The video went viral, and the company ultimately dismissed the driver — but the incident also prompted a wave of support for him on Russian social media.
When locals attacked Gabonese student François Ndjelassili outside a Burger King in Yekaterinaburg in 2023, Russian police declared “not our problem.” Ndjelassili later died from stab wounds.
The Sova Research Center, a Russian nonprofit that monitors hate crimes, recorded 33 individuals injured in hate-motivated attacks in July alone, bringing the total for 2025 to 183 incidents, including five murders.
In their database tracking racially-motivated violent crimes, Sova recorded that in 2025, three violent acts specifically targeted Black individuals, 10 people from Central Asia, and 12 from the Caucasus, among other cases.
By comparison, Sova recorded 244 hate-motivated attacks for the entirety of 2024.
In the late 2000s, amid the global turmoil of the financial crisis, Russia experienced a sharp increase in racially-motivated violence. In 2008 alone, Sova documented “no less than” 525 people who were specifically the victims of racially-motivated and xenophobic attacks, 97 of whom were killed. These numbers had dropped significantly by 2015, with fatalities dropping to nine and injuries to 68.
At the same time, Sova has repeatedly stressed throughout the years that the true scale of racially motivated violence and other hate crimes in Russia is likely undercounted, citing victims’ reluctance to report such incidents and the authorities’ frequent failure to pursue prosecution.
“I think that, at least in part, these sentiments have intensified recently because, for the past four years (of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine), Russian state propaganda has been trying to replace the concept of a person from Russia with the concept of an ethnic Russian,” Tunkara said.
The Russian government has long promoted the idea of the “Russian world,” where ethnic Russians and Russian speakers — regardless of their nationality — are part of one large civilization. This idea has not only enticed foreigners to live and work in Russia, but has also been used by the Russian state to “justify” territorial aggression, such as its war against Ukraine.
However, during times of unrest, it is often non-ethnic Russians who become scapegoats targeted by the Russian authorities. Like migrants from African countries and the global Black diaspora, Central Asians often find themselves the targets of Russian racism. Following the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall in late March 2024, the wave of anti-migrant sentiment that spread across Russia particularly targeted people from Central Asia, as that’s where the accused attackers were from.
In early April 2024, Human Rights Watch reported a rise in cases of migrants being denied services and losing their jobs. There were also growing reports of physical intimidation, often accompanied by anti-migrant slurs and nationalist slogans.
Later that August, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law allowing migrants to be expelled without a court order. That fall, the criminal code was updated to introduce tougher penalties for actions considered to obstruct efforts against illegal migration. By then, around 60,000 migrants had been deported — twice as many as in the same period in 2023.
This indifference to the struggles of racial minorities in Russia partly stems from Russian society’s failure to understand and embrace the country’s diversity, according to Tunkara.
Tunkara’s social media posts on topics such as race generally receive positive and even curious engagement from a segment of her Russian-speaking audience — mostly Russians — but they also attract individuals who respond with outright hostility and harassment.
“Under almost every single post — literally every one — I get ‘jokes’ about me eating bananas, about not having water at home, about being wild and living in a tree,” Tunkara said.
Growing up in Russia, Tunkara felt that her dark skin drew "excessive and frankly unnecessary attention" from ethnic Russians — attention that frequently led to uncomfortable or even hostile situations. These experiences sometimes left her feeling as though there was something “inherently wrong” with her.
With no connection to her father’s family in Mali and eventually losing contact with him altogether, she grew up without Black role models in Russia, deprived of the opportunity to embrace and celebrate her own diversity.
“As a child, I had to deal with bad jokes from classmates, teachers questioning my mother’s choice — as if there were no ‘normal’ Russian men for her to start a family with — and at dance class, they’d place me in the back row because I didn’t visually ‘fit’ with the rest of the group,” Tunkara said.
“It's not the same as beatings or murder, but these kinds of things can slowly ruin a person’s life.”
History of racism disguised as liberation
Russia’s relationship with African nations and the global Black diaspora dates back to Soviet times. As European colonial powers receded and the U.S. asserted global dominance, the Soviet Union sought strategic alliances with newly independent nations, hoping to expand its influence across the postcolonial world.
Portraying racism and exploitation as inherent features of a capitalist society, the USSR was perceived by many as being “on the right side of history,” Maxim Matusevich, a professor at Seton Hall University specializing in the history of African-Soviet relations, told the Kyiv Independent.
However, this propaganda proved to be “a thin veneer disguising ethnic and racial tensions.”
Soviet society was structured around class and ideology — not race. This meant that when dealing with African nations and the global Black diaspora, Soviet policy struggled with its messaging of “liberation” from Western colonialism and oppression.
Much of what the Soviet intelligentsia thought about Africa also came from reading translations of Western literature, which often depicted racial minorities as exotic or inferior. As a result, Soviet antiracist rhetoric mirrored paternalistic attitudes of the West.
This created a contrast between the Soviet Union’s image as a "friendship of nations” and the attitudes held by Soviet citizens in everyday life.
“African students (who came in the thousands to study in the USSR between the 1960s-1980s) often reported being subjected to racist prejudice,” Matusevich said, including poor living conditions or unwarranted attention from police.
“Many of them noted a disconnect between the official party line on antiracism and the reality of living and studying amid a population that had apparently internalized some of the most paternalistic and racist stereotypes about racial minorities.”
Pawns in Russia’s war
Modern day Russia distorts the historical legacy of the Soviets to maintain and expand its influence across the so-called Global South. This includes a calculated effort to recruit men from African nations to aid in Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine.
In an investigation published in late April, the independent Russian media outlet iStories identified more than 1,500 mercenaries had been recruited just in Moscow over the past year, including 72 foreign nationals from African countries, among them Ghana, Cameroon, and Senegal.
“Russia uses this propaganda to support its friendly image while it also provides support to dictators and authoritarians across the African continent who regularly violate the human and civil rights of their people.”
Some of the recruits from African nations had reportedly signed contracts after traveling to Russia to attend a so-called “pro-peace” forum aimed at strengthening ties between Moscow and the African continent.
Russia has enticed many of these military recruits from African countries — often driven by economic hardship at home — with promises of generous salaries, health insurance, and the prospect of Russian citizenship for themselves and their families, provided they survive.
However, foreigners serving in the Russian military are often dispatched to the most dangerous front-line missions. Some said they were enticed to come to Russia by promises of legitimate employment, only to be thrust into military combat with little training.
Some African nationals — primarily women — are also being recruited to work in Russian weapons factories, part of a broader effort to bolster the country’s war economy. The Alabuga Start program, promoted by the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan, promises enriching cultural exchanges and “life-changing” career opportunities.
These women, who come from more impoverished countries like Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Gambia, face exposure to harmful chemicals working at these factories and can suffer life-threatening health issues as a result.
The Single Interdepartmental Information and Statistical System (SIISS), an official Russian government database, shows a record number of Africans moving to Russia in search of better work — suggesting that the country’s propaganda is effective, even as its actions fail to serve the interests of immigrants from African countries.
“Russia uses this propaganda to support its friendly image while it also provides support to dictators and authoritarians across the African continent who regularly violate the human and civil rights of their people,” Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Kyiv Independent.
“As the U.S. further reduces its financial investment in the region, Russia and China will only continue to pick up the slack.”
Note from the author:
Hi, this is Kate Tsurkan, thanks for reading this article. As an American citizen, it was tragic for me to learn about how Russia tries to exploit the history of racism in my country to its benefit, only to lure vulnerable people to their country for even more hardship. I hope reading this article make you reflect on how those in power weaponize history to their benefit. If you like reading about this sort of thing, please consider supporting The Kyiv Independent.
