everyday nationalism: perceptions of migrantswhich – from a constructivist position – the authors analyse and
criticise discursive practices widespread in Russian society (see,
for example, Karpenko 2002; Malakhov 2007, 2011; Shnirel’man
2008; Regame [Regamey] 2010; Demintseva 2013). These dis-
courses have an alarmist character – employing concepts of ‘ter-
ritorial ethnic balance’, ‘ethno- cultural safety’, ‘critical share of
immigrant population’, ‘ethnic criminality’ and the like – thereby
furthering the ethnification of social relations and the growing
migrantophobia among the populace.
Russian academics have taken the same approach to foreign
experience as well. Instead of approaching Western works as
concrete sociological studies, they have tended to focus on the
specificities of the production of ethnically ‘charged’ discourses,
and on how the authorities and various sectors of civil society in
Western countries oppose the discursive and actual practices of
discrimination against ethnic minority migrants (see Malakhov
2004; Mukomel’ and Pain 2005; Osipov 2013).
For all the significance of the above- mentioned Russian research,
we feel there is a gap between the still- prevalent ‘view from above’
(conceptual- discursive) and the ‘view from below’ (concretely
sociological). To our knowledge, there has been hardly any lit-
erature in Russia in which the attitudes of local residents towards
migrants have been studied on the micro- level by qualitative
sociological methods (various types of interviewing, participant/
non- participant observation).^3 Here we mean the attitudes of
ordinary citizens, specifically, and not a particular section of
society – football fans, young extremist gangs, various representa-
tives of (un)organised nationalist opposition groups, and so forth.
In essence, what we know may be reduced to a simple conclu-
sion that is repeated, in various formulations, in publication
after publication: ‘Xenophobic attitudes have spread through
all levels of Russian society... xenophobia is primarily pro-
jected at representatives of migrant minorities non- traditional
to a given location’ (Mukomel’ 2013: 199, 200). Many aspects
of our theme remain unclear: what selection and hierarchy of
factors engender negative attitudes towards migrants? How do
these negative attitudes manifest themselves, also within specific
socio- demographic groups? Are there regional specifics? And,