I noticed that Pushkin's grandfather, an African from roughly modern-day Chad, was freed, treated very well, and received a formal education in Metz; this is quite the contrast with his time with the Ottomans, where he was effectively a royal slave. This got me thinking: were there issues with racism in Russia back then? Even today, you'll see supporters of Zenit St. Petersburg heckling their own players for being darker skinned - how would they have reacted to the Tsar taking in an African child as his own godson? Abram Gannibal was apparently quite the regular in the Royal court as well.
I can’t speak specifically about Africans but during the USSR as several neighbouring Central Asian countries were integrated, Russians were exposed to alot of ‘Asian-looking’ Kazakhs etc. Despite suffering discrimination and mass deportations under successive Russo-centric governments it is nowhere close to the amount of racism Central Asians face in Russia today.
So during the USSR whilst it essentially adopted an all inclusive non racist policy it was actually a significantly racist regime that stemmed as far as borderline genocide, going back even further Tsarist Russia was likely the same, especially in terms of Anti-semitism, with pogroms advocated by the Tsar. So racism is definitely not a recent issue, but the fact that Russia has been only recently exposed to large amounts of say Africans has only accentuated the issue - I mean just look at the amount of racist incidents in Russian football.