In Moscow, Immigrants Live in Fear of Deadly Racist Attacks

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The New York Sun

MOSCOW, Russia — In a gloomy Moscow underpass thousands of miles from her native Kyrgyzstan, a young mother shivers as she tries to hawk pegs, bath sponges, and Rubik’s cubes. A few blocks away, a schoolteacher from Moldova sells tomatoes out of a cardboard box and tries to dodge the police, who take half her income in “fines.”

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, whose communist ideology promised a classless society and brotherhood of all races, the ethnic minorities of the former Soviet republics have become Moscow’s new underclass: working like slaves, hounded by the police, and unloved by the newly wealthy Muscovites whose needs they serve.

Now, after last week’s deadly blast at the city’s Cherkizovsky market, used mostly by traders from Asia and the Causasus, the immigrants and guest workers are also grappling with a new problem: the Russian nationalist extremists who want to kill them.

According to prosecutors, the two youths caught and charged with “racially motivated homicide” after Monday’s explosion, which killed 10 people and injured at least 49, were net-surfing nationalists who downloaded a bomb recipe and made their device at home.

“I feel pain,” Chulpun said. Chulpun, who came from the impoverished central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan in the hope of earning money for her children’s education, and who, like most other migrants, will not give her full name for fear of creating trouble with the authorities. “I feel shock and pain that these young Russians can hate us so much.”

But Vera, the schoolteacher from Moldova, shrugged her shoulders in resignation. “I am not really surprised,” she said. “You should see how the police rob us. At the bus station where the bus leaves for Chisinau, the Moldovan capital, the police rob all the poor Moldovans who have been sweating here to save money for their families through the summer. These young Russian nationalists take their lead from the behavior of the authorities.”

During the past two years, Russia has seen a marked increase in the number of racist attacks, with a series of murders and beatings of people with dark skin, often from central Asia or the Caucasus. Markets where immigrants work, selling food, clothes, and other goods, have become focal points of tension.

“We are seeing a 30% increase in xenophobic attacks every three months,” Galina Kozhevnikova of the racist violence monitoring group Sova said. “This demonstrates the quick growth of ultraright tendencies.”

Worsening the situation is the increased suspicion among Russians of darker-skinned people after attacks by Chechen Islamic separatists that have killed hundreds of civilians. Now, anyone who looks like they may be of Chechen origin is a potential target.

The head of Moscow city council’s ethnic relations committee, Igor Yeleferenko, said, as in the Soviet era, Russians still tended to pretend that racism did not exist.

“We should not be shy about this problem,” he said. “There needs to be a campaign of street advertisements and a media project which talk about different ethnic groups. It so happens that in our eyes, if somebody is a Chechen, he is a terrorist who virtually eats children.”


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