This one-day conference aims to critically explore and theoretically engage with constructions of racial identity in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Race demands attention in the field of Slavic Studies (and related disciplines), both as an analytical tool and as a subject of study unto itself. Scholarly constructions of the Russian and Soviet empires present them as apparently “racially homogenous spaces,” or as territories characterized by other categories of identification, such as nationality or ethnicity. Yet race has been present here, both in the form of racialized identities produced in Russian imperial conquest and as the response of Russian and Soviet imperial culture to racial categories produced in the history of empire across the globe. To date, very little scholarly work has been devoted to the uneasy processes of translation connecting categories of identity in Eurasia with those prevalent in other histories of empire. This conference will bring together a group of scholars from across disciplines to do just this, contributing theoretically engaged analyses of race as it has been articulated, deployed and translated between the cultures of Eurasia and those of the larger global context.