ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to analyze how Russian intellectuals, particularly scientists and scholars, engaged with race-related theories during the imperial period. The chapter questions the long-standing assumption in Russian studies about the marginality of racial theories to the Russian intellectual tradition and considers the ways in which the Russian imperial context set its own agenda for the exploration of the concept of race, shaping the specificity of Russian thinker's contribution to the pan-European racial discourse. Democratizing political reforms and modernization in Western Europe, leading to the gradual integration of representatives of lower social orders into the public sphere, from which they hitherto had been excluded, did not always facilitate the bridging of the gap between the elites and the masses. The opposite trend of reifying social divisions, representing them as being rooted in biology, was also evident in Europe in the post-Darwinian age.
