Ethnic relations are an important feature of contemporary Russia. This is especially true in the North Caucasus where ongoing insecurity combined with a depressed economy has led to growing Russian nationalism, xenophobia, and fears over immigration. In Stavropol’skii krai, the only ethnic Russian dominated territory in the North Caucasus Federal District, the situation is especially acute. In this thesis I investigate how the geopolitics of ethnic relations in Stavropol’skii krai, as part of the wider North Caucasus situation, impact on the everyday life of citizens in Stavropol’. I do this through employing an eclectic methodology, including both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Through four research papers, I explore how the built urban environment, through the politics of naming place (for example, street names and monuments), has become a space through which ethnic identity can be (re)produced and contested. I show how ethnic relations are (re)presented and performed in Stavropol’ through the Den’ kraya celebration, a performance that is based on a Soviet-era idealised framing of ethnic relations, and one which is open to challenge. I explore how in summer 2007 ethnic relations turned violent as ethnic Russian and non-ethnic Russian citizens rioted, and I attempt to explain the geopolitics surrounding this. Finally, I show how everyday ethnic relations have turned increasingly violent in Stavropol’ since 1991, drawing on reports from non-governmental organisations and independent researchers. I situate this research within the context of the changing ethnic geography of the krai since 1991. Together, this research represents a geopolitics of ethnic relations in Stavropol’skii krai.

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This study concerns the sources of the revolutionary Bolshevik elite's social and ethnic origins in Late Imperial Russia. The key finding is that the Bolshevik leadership of the revolutionary years 1917--1924 was highly ethnically diverse in origin with non-Russians---Jews, Latvians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians---constituting nearly two-thirds of the elite. The 'Russian' Revolution was led primarily by elites of the empire's non-Russian national minorities. This thesis therefore considers the sources of their radicalism in the peripheries of the multinational empire. / Although the 'class' language of socialism has dominated accounts not only of the causes of the Revolution but also of the sources of Bolshevik socialism, in my view the Bolsheviks were more a response to a variety of cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic social identities than they were a response to class conflict. The appeal of a theory about class conflict does not necessarily mean that it was class conflict to which the Bolsheviks were responding; they were much more a product of the tensions of a multi-ethnic imperial state than of the alienating 'class' effects of an industrializing Russian state. / How 'peripherals' of the imperial borderlands came to espouse an ideology of the imperial 'center' is the empirical focus. Five substantive chapters on Jews, Poles and Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Transcaucasians, and Latvians, consider the sources of their radicalism by contextualizing their biographies in regional ethnopolitics and in relationships to the Tsarist state. A great attraction of Russian (Bolshevik) socialism was in what it meant for ethnopolitics in the multi-ethnic borderlands: much of the appeal lay in its secularism, its 'ecumenical' political vision, its universalism, its anti-nationalism, and in its implied commitment to "the good imperial ideal". The 'elective affinities' between individuals of different ethnic strata and Russian socialism varied across ethnic groups, and often within them. One of the key themes, therefore, is how a social and political identity is worked out within the context of a multinational empire, invoking social processes such as nationalism, assimilation, Russification, social mobility, access to provincial and imperial 'civil societies', linguistic and cultural choices, and ethnopolitical relationships.

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