The Birch, Fall 2005

Of Hate Crimes and Watermelons
Skinhead attacks on foreign students underscore extreme nationalism in Russia

Paul Sonne

-Moscow, Russia. On November 4th, Russians observed the Day of People's Unity for the first time. The new holiday, which the Duma created this year, has replaced the old November 7th celebration commemorating the Bolshevik victory of 1917. In conceiving the new Day of People's Unity, which technically pays tribute to the Russian victory over the Polish intervention of 1612, Russian politicians intended to erase the connotations of the November 7th tribute to communism while at the same time maintaining a holiday of national significance and a day off for Russians during the first week of November. What they got was something unexpected.

Throughout the day on November 4th, the streets of Moscow played host to a procession of two thousand ultra-nationalist skinheads, highlighting what some would call a bolnoy vopros, or sore point, of contemporary Russia: the recent surge of racially driven attacks, interethnic tensions, extremist nationalism, and xenophobia. The skinhead march on Moscow, coupled with a slew of recent fatal attacks on foreign students at Russian universities, has underscored a problem of hatred and supremacy that is no longer possible to sweep under the rug in a G-8 country attempting to find its way into the WTO.

Russia remains home to more skinheads than any other country in the world, with groups in 85 cities, totaling roughly 50,000 people. At least 40 murders and hundreds of racially and ethnically motivated assaults occurred in Russia over the course of 2004, Moscow Human Rights Center director Semyon Charny told Interfax News Service in October. On average, Russian skinheads carry out anywhere from 30 to 40 attacks per month, the center reported at the end of 2004. Many believe that the numbers could be even larger. The number of hate crimes perpetrated in Russia grew by 30 percent each year from 2001 to 2004, the Moscow Times reported in May of 2004, and an October Public Opinion Foundation poll reported that 60 percent of Russians believe a hostile attitude toward foreigners is common in Russia.

A Tale of Two Cities

The alarming intensification of hate crimes against foreign students all across the country this year has spotlighted Russia's serious and growing nationalist extremism movement, and two cities in particular-Voronezh and St. Petersburg-have become the focus of much attention. During the school year, the Russian town of Voronezh, located about 300 miles southwest of Moscow, plays host to upwards of 1400 foreign students hailing mainly from the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia and South America. Once seen simply as a vibrant university town, Voronezh lately has seen an increase in the number of violent incidents, which has changed its public image both among its inhabitants and the wider Russian public.

At the beginning of October, a group of young skinheads in Voronezh murdered 18-year old Peruvian student Enrique Angeles Hurtado and attacked two other foreign students. Some of the attackers turned out to be students at Voronezh State University themselves. A Russian court charged one of the young attackers with murder and thirteen other young perpetrators with lower infractions. Skinheads also killed a student from Guinea Bissau in Voronezh in 2004.

Over the course of 2005, foreigners in the city of Voronezh sustained over 100 attacks, Regional Deputy Prosecutor Ivan Zamarayev told Interfax in October. According to Zamarayev, the list of victims includes 95 citizens of countries outside the former Soviet Union. In his statement, however, Zamarayev noted that not all of the attacks stemmed from racial hatred, and many simply came about as a result of "theft or hooliganism."

The death of Hurtado spawned a significant amount of media attention and criticism, perhaps a sign that the acceptance of ethnic hate crimes in Russia is limited to a relatively small but active sector of the population. In response to Hurtado's murder, a student group called the Youth Union Against Racism and Intolerance conducted an "emergency conference" along with members of the international antifascist coalition United. After that, the national Russian youth group Nashi ("ours") held an antifascist march in the city.

"Having conversed with both Russian and foreign students, though there aren't many foreign students in my department, I have not noticed any significant displays of nationalism-neither on the part of foreigners, nor on the part of Russian students. I do not believe it is characteristic among students of the university, although for other parts of the population-in particular on an everyday social level-it unfortunately has a place," said Alexander Tolstobrov, the Vice- Rector for Information Services at Voronezh State University.

Foreign students in Voronezh confirm that it is becoming harder and harder to live in the city, as attacks on foreign students are becoming "systematically characteristic," the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported a week after Hurtado's murder. Just a few days after Hurtado's death and the resulting protests, yet another group of foreign students suffered an attack in Voronezh. Fortunately, no one died.

St. Petersburg has faced a similar problem as has Voronezh, but on a much larger scale. The city, which houses somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand skinheads (the largest skinhead population of any city in Russia), has been a hotbed of violent and racist activity over the past few years.

Nationalist extremists in St. Petersburg attacked and killed 29- year-old Congolese student Epassak Rolan Franz in September, and skinheads attacked an Israeli diplomat at the end of October. A 40-year-old Chinese student at the musical conservatory received a brain concussion and other severe head injuries after skinheads attacked him in March 2005, while an Angolan student received numerous wounds in an attack last winter. Last January skinheads attacked a Libyan medical student on the street. In October of 2004, nationalist sympathizers murdered a foreign student from Vietnam. And the list goes on.

The most shocking incidence of ethnic-related violence in St. Petersburg occurred last winter, when skinheads knifed and killed two Tajik girls. One was five years old and the other was nine. The trial for the murder of Hursheda Sultonova, the 9-year-old, began in October with eight defendants, Interfax reported on October 24. Four of the defendants are underage, which points to a trend in many of the skinhead attacks-the attackers are usually young Russian boys.

"Racism and xenophobia are intolerable, and the murderers will be found and punished. Skinheads are a disgrace to the nation," said St. Petersburg Mayor Valentina Matvienko after the attacks on the two Tajik girls. She might have added that they aren't very good for her city's image. Foreign students in St. Petersburg are fleeing the country as a result of the rising number of ethnically and racially motivated attacks, reported the Russian Newspaper Novaya Izvestia last March. According to the St. Petersburg Times, approximately 13,500 foreign students are currently studying in St. Petersburg, down from 15,000 in 2003.

Student leaders have not been silent about the issue. Students in St. Petersburg met last March in an attempt to change the situation, and many have held protests on the street to make others aware of the dangers the city poses to foreigners, particularly non-whites. A group of about 500 people participated in a "March Against Hatred" in St. Petersburg in November.

Nevertheless, the repetitive scenario of vicious attack followed by protests or demonstrations doesn't seem to be helping the situation. In fact, the most recent attack in St. Petersburg was the murder of two Russians, known to have been pacifists at St. Petersburg State University, who spoke out against skinheads and ethnic hate crimes. In a very Soviet moment, it is not only dangerous to be a foreign student, but also to express sympathy for their plight.

The attacks on foreigners are by no means limited to Voronezh and St. Petersburg. A student from Cameroon received knife wounds in the neck after an attack in Rostov-on-Don at the end of October. Foreign students in Krasnodar picketed in front of their university last March, urging officials to protect them after skinheads attacked two students from Syria and Lebanon on March 26, according to MosNews.

Though St. Petersburg is home to more skinheads than any other city, many experts contend that Moscow, with a reported 96 injuries reported as a result of hate crimes last year, has seen even more attacks. Skinheads attacked an African-American bodyguard at the US Embassy this year, and on a central Moscow street, skinheads attacked a pregnant Indian woman, who had a miscarriage as a result of the trauma.

Fueling the Fire

Despite protests and media attention related to Russia's surge of hate crimes over the past few years, the UN Human Rights Commission in March said that skinhead groups and movements of extreme nationalism in Russia have been on the rise. A combination of conditionshistorical, political and cultural-has allowed Russia to become one of the world's chief breeding grounds for nationalist extremism, xenophobia, and hate crimes.

Russia's current teenage generation-the first group of young Russians to come of age after the Soviet Union's collapse, during the turmoil of the 1990s-have, according to most specialists, fueled the fire of Russia's extremist nationalism. The economic instability, shaky market reforms and gangland attitude of the 1990s gave rise to a generation of lost-and-then-found street children who have now become the chief warriors in the skinhead movement, according to Russian political commentator Vladimir Simonov in an article published in August.

"[During the 90s] Russian streets were filled with 'children of reforms'-a bewildered, psychologically confused, uneducated young generation, receptive to any primitive call to violence. Gangs appeared everywhere, and teenagers were held together by one primitive idea-dislike for 'foreigners,' even if they were from the next building, particularly if these people were of different color," said Simonov.

The ongoing war in Chechnya, in which the very same generation is fighting against a darkskinned and predominantly Muslim enemy, has only reinforced ethnic hatred amongst the Russian teenage population. The frequent atrocities in this conflict have made the call to extremist nationalism more attractive to psychologically abused warriors. The Chechen terrorist attacks and the surge in Russian nationalism as a result of the war have also helped the extremist nationalism movement gain ground.

Additionally, the closed gates of the Soviet Union have left many Russians with little opportunity to encounter foreign cultures, a disadvantage which has made young Russians more susceptible to extremist anti-foreigner propaganda. In a November poll conducted by the St. Petersburg Agency for Social Information and published in the St. Petersburg Times, 71 percent of Petersburg residents said they do not personally know any foreigners who study or work in the city. Only 14 percent of the 500 St. Petersburg residents polled claimed to have foreign acquaintances, while 3 percent said they do business with foreigners.

Others contend that the use of nationalist ideology in Russian politics has bolstered movements of extreme nationalism across the country. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Russia's best known nationalist and the leader of the LDPR party, and Dimitry Rogozin, the leader of Rodina ("Motherland"), have both predicated large parts of their respective party platforms on the idea that "Russia is for Russians." The Kremlin has been known to use nationalist-based PR schemes on state-owned television channels to sway public opinion about sensitive issues, and United Russia, Putin's party, used advertisements with nationalist undertones to sway voters in the recent Moscow Duma election. In a 2004 article in the Moscow Times, Ekho Moskvy political commentator Yevgenia Albats made a connection between such borderline political nationalism and those who have taken it too far.

Nevertheless, some of the politicians have taken it too far themselves. In January 2005, 20 Duma deputies signed a letter to the prosecutor general requesting that he bar Jewish organizations from operating in Russia, on the grounds that Judaism is "anti-Christian, inhumane and involves ritual killings." A few weeks later, a Duma resolution condemned the letter in a 306- 58 vote.

An advertisement for the December 2005 Duma elections shows Rogozin sitting next to four dark-skinned migrant workers from the Caucuses eating watermelons (a common stereotype rooted in the presence of Caucasian fruit merchants in many Russian cities) and throwing the rinds on the street. The clip shows a young Russian mother rolling over the rinds with a baby carriage. Then, Rogozin implores the workers to pick up their rinds, and when they don't respond, another Rodina party-member asks them if they even speak Russian. In the end, the slogan reads, "Let's clean the trash out of our city." The viewer can safely assume that Rodina is not just referring to the watermelon rinds.

Days later, the party released the ad in French with Russian subtitles, in an attempt to draw a parallel between Russia and the recent race riots in France. The idea was that Russia, unlike France, still has time to "correct mistakes," Rogozin told RIA Novosti. The Rodina campaign ad received heavy criticism from Russian politicians and human rights activists and the Russian Supreme Court banned the Rodina party from the city elections, a sign that outright racism does not always go completely unnoticed in Russia. Yet the ad continued to run for weeks, and it appealed directly to a prejudice toward minorities that Rogozin and his party strategists know exists among a significant portion of the population. Whether or not the nationalist tendencies of politics in Russia have fueled the skinhead movement, the lack of racial sensitivity in everyday life has perhaps passively allowed the movement to take root more firmly than it has in other countries. For example, the decision of a popular St. Petersburg chocolate store to hire only black doormen, or the generally accepted use of the word negr (negro) to describe anyone of African decent, testify to Russia's general racial insensitivity. Such an underlying attitude has helped to create an almost ideal stomping ground for an extreme nationalist movement.

Controlling Hate

The Duma instituted the Law on Combating Extremist Activity in 2002, in an attempt to counteract Russia's growing number of skinhead attacks and hate crimes. "Russia is part of the modern world and, unfortunately, these kinds of manifestations are on the increase in practically every country. This is an illness we all face. There is only one medicine for this illness and that is for the public to reject such manifesta- tions," said Russian President Vladimir Putin, when asked about this year's attacks on foreign students in a September television questionand- answer session. But despite the government's efforts, skinhead attacks and hate crimes remain on the rise.

A number of groups have claimed that the ambiguity of the 2002 Law on Combating Extremist Activity has prevented law enforcement agencies from prosecuting hate crimes under its statutes effectively. In fact, the liberal Yabloko Party complained about the ambiguity of the law back in 2002 at the time of its formulation. Moreover, human rights activists claim that the government is not doing enough to combat the problem. Though law enforcers have closed some radical organizations, the government has yet to prosecute organizations that continue activities after being officially banned, as almost all of them do, reported the Sova Center in Moscow.

"Unfortunately, in 2004, authorities, and law enforcement agencies in particular, offered a rather passive response to the criminal activities of radical nationalists," said the Sova Center's Galina Kozhevnikova and Alexander Verkhovsky in a January report on radical nationalism in Russia.

"The main trend in the government polities toward radical nationalism is unclear at the moment. In fact, two trends coexist in Russia now: efforts to suppress and combat dangerous and destabilizing actions of radical nationalists, and the tendency to ignore the problem as not so urgent," the report concluded.

Others have taken the problem into their own hands. In St. Petersburg, the Russian Ethnography Museum started a program teaching tolerance to Russian middle schoolers. Nadezhda Rogozhina, one of the program's directors, believes a Russian-as-a-second-language program needs to be instituted to further ease relations between foreigners and Russians. The Tolerance Institute at Russia's Library of Foreign Literature uses humanitarian initiatives to foster ethnic understanding in education and law issues.

Despite both public and private efforts, everyone understands that the situation is not changing, and foreigners, particularly students, continue to rethink their stays in Russia. Yet the foreign students and migrants who continue to suffer attacks are for the most part not Russian voters, and the majority of the population remains largely unaffected by the country's rising tide of extremist nationalism, because they do not fall into the target categories. As the attacks continue, so too do the government's vague promises and law enforcement's scattered and inconsistent responses.