Xenophobia in the Russian Federation: Geography, Gender, and Generation of Nation

This dissertation is a study of xenophobia in the Russian Federation. Sociologists have had a longstanding interest in prejudice, xenophobia, and racism. Such attitudes imply that the ethnic majority gives tacit if not explicit approval to social and political practices that keep minorities in positions of relative weakness. Russia is a particularly interesting case, as it is the second-highest immigrant receiving nation in the world, has recently issued laws that target minority groups, and yet has a majority party that still appears less xenophobic than some populists in Western Europe or even the US.;In the first empirical chapter, I create and test a measure of two different emotional-types of prejudice: hostility-prejudice and fear-prejudice using both economic and cultural predictors of prejudice among approximately 10,000 non-Muslim, ethnic Russians. Two important findings are first, that this conceptual clarity uncovers previously obscured variation that may have led to incorrect conclusions (for example, that gender did not matter in predicting prejudice) and second, that overall, dominantly situated individuals are more likely to report hostility-prejudice and subordinate groups to report fear-prejudice..;Russian youth reported higher fear- and hostility-prejudice in the first empirical chapter; using a unique dataset of approximately 3,300 Russians aged 16-29, in the second empirical chapter, I test the effects of key life events and social dominance on xenophobia toward Americans, Roma, and Chechens. Young Russian women are more likely to report fear and young men hostility, but there do not seem to be other meaningful gendered interactions. Across young people, on average, marriage lessens hostility and fear-prejudice while having children increases both. There also seems to be a connection between more pro-authoritarian beliefs and greater xenophobia, though the causal direction of this finding is unclear.;The final empirical chapter considers Russian attitudes in comparison to other post-communist states in Eastern Europe that share some cultural and ideological history, yet have taken very different developmental paths in the past decades. Russians' views appear similar to Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, and Hungary on attitudes toward homosexuals, but are meaningfully more negative in terms of abstract attitudes about how immigrants affect the country more broadly.