JuliaIoffe

Speak up when you know you're right.

Hmmmm, that's a tough one. I think that, for the most part, you'd be okay -- if you consider people glaring at you and cracking racist jokes okay. (Russians are, er, not the most tolerant bunch.) There's quite a bit of violence against people considered to be black, which includes, in the Russian mind, people from Central Asia and the Caucasus. My advice is go, but stick to the city center and try to go to a bigger city like Moscow. (St. Pete is crawling with skinheads.) Be extra, extra careful and make sure the American Embassy knows you're there. They have a special unit to deal with threats to American citizens, so you should report anything that happens immediately. You should ask, btw, Jelani Cobb, who spent time teaching in Moscow, if he has any advice.

I don't think he is. He is as nationalist as most Russian liberals, who aren't really liberals at all, but are closer to the libertarian end of the spectrum (a natural reaction to a suffocating Russian state). If you ask Navalny, he would tell you that migration is a serious problem (Russia has the second largest number of migrants, after the U.S.) and it's a problem not just for Russia, but for the countries the migrants leave (fatherless families, torn up social fabric, etc.). Moreover, because these migrants live in the shadows in Russia, they don't have access to health care, the courts, etc. His view is that if you don't talk about this, the neo-Nazis will. And I tend to agree with him.

Oh, you bet.

It's a pretty serious threat, and I can't say that the Russians are doing a good job fighting it. For one thing, they've installed a guy named Ramzan Kadyrov to run Chechnya (once torn up by war) and he's running a pretty Islamist ship. (If you want proof, look at his Instagram account.) And Putin, who is in many ways hostage to him, can't do much about it.