This book explores new forms of racist discourse which have emerged in Russia since the 1950s. It argues that Russia's interventions in Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s, which included the aim of civilizing Africans along Soviet lines, but where the interventions failed to establish Soviet Empire, had an important effect on how Russians see themselves in geopolitical, cultural and ideological terms, from which disappointed self view the new racism emerged. Considering a wide range of literature and film, including television, the book shows how Russians' views of "blackness" changed over the period, and how such views are closely connected to Russians' myths about their own "whiteness", racial purity and ethnic superiority.