Africans, Asians and Chechen refugees fear for their lives in Moscow and other cities.

Racism Rears Up in Russia
14 June 2001

MOSCOW--An immigrant from Madagascar went out late at night to buy milk for his infant daughter. As he passed a girl playing guitar in an underground walkway, he was jumped from behind and beaten and kicked for five or 10 minutes. Throughout the attack, the girl kept playing.

A refugee from the Chechen war had planned to meet his Russian girlfriend at a popular meeting point near Red Square. But instead of going for a stroll with her, he was accosted and slapped by a Russian nationalist, who then stabbed him through the heart within sight of police.

Call them fascists or skinheads, there is a virulent breed of bully prowling the streets of this and other Russian cities. Nationalists roving in gangs, they pounce on people whose skin is black, or brown or caramel, or whose features mark them as Chechen, Armenian or Azerbaijani.

These ruffians don't see themselves as villains. In their minds, they are pure and virtuous, defending the national identity from foreign invasion. In a society that has undergone a decade of severe social and economic trauma, they believe that Russia is occupied by foreigners and needs to be cleansed.

Generally they are young men from working-class backgrounds, dropouts and rebels who steep themselves in right-wing tracts and obtain a sense of belonging from their gangs. At night they go on "hunts" for victims, usually in small groups. Police say they keep no separate statistics on skinhead attacks.

However, anecdotal testimony from African and Asian residents of Moscow suggests that the violence has been on the rise, culminating in a spate of attacks in April, when a horde of more than 100 skinheads raged through a market, beating merchants from Asia and the Caucasus.

President Vladimir V. Putin spoke out in April against the wave of racist and ethnic violence. But judging by police attitudes and actions, very little is being done to curb the attacks. Many victims say they no longer bother going to authorities because of the indifference they know they'll encounter.

Several embassies have complained to the Foreign Ministry. According to one document obtained by The Times, Kenya has supplied a list of 24 of its citizens recently attacked, 23 of them this year. They include the ambassador's son and two diplomats.

But in interviews, police and Foreign Ministry officials play down the issue of skinhead violence. "They are not really dangerous. There are so few of them," said Tatyana Kostyunina, a Moscow police officer assigned to deal with youth groups.

The Foreign Ministry refused to comment for the record, but one official, speaking anonymously, was also sanguine. "We know that this problem exists, but it is not of a systematic character," he said.

Systematic or not, the problem is widespread, members of the targeted groups contend. They say it threatens their safety on a daily basis and encroaches on their freedom of movement in Russia.

Foreign students with dark complexions feel as if they are afloat in a sea of racism. If they are not assaulted on the streets or on public transportation, they are frequently subjected to hostile looks or racist insults. Almost all described taking precautions and staying vigilant--ready to bolt--when confronted by a group of skinheads.

"Whenever I come in contact with a guy, I either get hit on or spit on," said University of Nebraska student Leonna Griffin, an African American from Bellevue, Neb., who spent her junior year at the Moscow Linguistic University and Moscow International University.

Hannington Ssenynonjo, 24, is a Ugandan pharmacology student at the University of Friendship of Nations in southwestern Moscow, an institution founded as the Soviet Union's gesture of solidarity with the Third World. He was set upon in a subway car by a group of 20 to 30 youths. He had to be hospitalized for 12 days.

He recalls that as he fell to his knees in the car, trying to protect his head with his hands while the blows and the kicks rained down, he thought, "God, am I dying today?" The attackers kept up the assault between two far-flung stops, about eight minutes. Near the end, they broke a beer bottle on his head.

"Until you leave the country, you can't do anything about it," said Dan Ochieng, a Kenyan law student who was attacked in a park in January by seven or eight young men wearing black leather jackets and boots.

There have always been strong nationalist currents running beneath the surface of Russian society, and xenophobia and anti-Semitism have traditionally increased during times of turmoil.

Yet there are many racial and ethnic minorities living in the far-flung Russian Federation, and thousands of African students have been coming for years to be educated at low cost, in a holdover from the Soviet Union's policy of wooing Third World countries to socialism.

Jeannot-Michel Abessolo is one of those students. A 31-year-old doctoral candidate in mathematics from the West African country of Cameroon, he recalls delivering a guest lesson to a class of 150 at his university (which he asked not be identified). Standing in the well of a lecture hall, he heard noises behind him, which were followed by titters from the audience. When he turned around, he saw a large red, hand-painted swastika held aloft by a group of students.

Abessolo says that was only one of countless humiliations he has endured since he arrived in Russia to study four years ago. By his account, he has been spat on, beaten, scorned and otherwise insulted nearly every day, and often several times a day. Going to the subway station is a test of courage. He murmurs a prayer before he walks through a park on his way to school. And, he said, after he defends his dissertation in November, he intends to leave this country and never come back.

"We know that outside, it is very dangerous, so we try to go where there are no skinheads," he said. "But in all places--in universities, hospitals and even [academic] conferences, there are racists."

Abessolo has stopped wearing his glasses despite his poor vision simply because he continues to be assaulted. "If they break, then I might get an injury to my eyes," he said. "And besides, they are very expensive."

Once, some skinheads beat him and even chased him into a police station, where he fled for sanctuary. Realizing where they were, they simply shrugged and walked away. None of the police stopped them, he said. He was asked only if he wanted to file a complaint.

"I think it is terribly unfair. I cannot understand why they are picking on us," said Jules Rakotondravoavy, the man from Madagascar attacked last month after purchasing milk. "I've gotten accustomed to the skinheads. Why can't they get accustomed to me?" Although Rakotondravoavy was bleeding from a cut above his eye, no passersby offered assistance as he walked the half a mile to his home, he said. Weeks later, "the police don't even want to take my complaint," he said.

"If this evil is not punished, it will grow and get worse," said his Russian wife, Yelena, as they sat in their 15th-story walk-up apartment in a typical Soviet-era slum tower. "But the police seem not to care about it. "I am ashamed of my own people," she said.

Russian Teen a 'Hardened' Nationalist

He is 21, sullen-faced, his lips set in a perpetual pout, his dark hair shaved to the scalp, a 1-inch swastika tattooed to the cleft between his thumb and forefinger.

Vasily Skvortsov is proud to be a skinhead, he said in an interview in his cramped bedroom in the apartment where he lives with his divorced artist mother and grandparents. He explained that he has been a "hardened" nationalist since 15. He asserts that the swastika is a national, religious symbol predating the Nazis, and has one on his wall, next to a stereo system with enormous speakers.

His 75-year-old grandmother, Galina, mentions that she has many Jewish friends and regards her grandson's nationalism as a phase. "Please understand that we in the family don't share Vasya's ideas," she said. "He is a smart and nice boy. He is just confused like any boy of his age. . . .But he will eventually grow out of it. He must."

As Skvortsov sees the world, he is surrounded by enemies: He imagines that Jews control Russia's government and are deliberately running his country into the ground. He thinks that blacks from Africa are spreading drugs and disease. And people from the Caucasus, he said, "come here and behave in a very dirty way toward our Russian girls." In the meantime, most Russian families he knows are poor and struggling. "I just became very seriously irritated," he said.

The young man, who dreams of getting an education and becoming a chemist or a pharmacist even as he practices martial arts on weekends with his loosely organized fellow skinheads, denies having taken part in any beatings of Africans. He and his comrades have ties to a small right-wing party called Russian Master, whose fortysomething "fuehrer," Alexander A. Chervykov, says for the record that street fighting will only hurt their cause.

But in the next breath, Skvortsov says he understands the motives of the more than 100 skinheads--some of whom he knew-- who rampaged through a market near his house this spring, overturning stalls belonging to mainly Azerbaijani merchants.

The people who suffer skinhead attacks have only themselves to blame, he says. "Who made them come here? They knew our situation. They know what we are like. Why put themselves in a situation where they could be beaten up on? . . . Any normal person loves his own motherland and should settle there," he said.

Chechen Youth Sent to Moscow for Safety

But of course, not all people have the luxury of choosing where they live.

Meyerbek Yelesayev, for instance, was sent by his parents from Chechnya to Moscow to stay with his aunt and uncle to avoid the deadly perils in that war- torn corner of the Caucasus.

One night in April, around the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, he and some friends planned to spend the evening at Okhotny Ryad, a popular shopping mall and meeting place just opposite the Kremlin. The 18-year-old Meyerbek had gone there frequently with a Russian girlfriend and always told his doting aunt, Amnat Pagalov, not to worry about him--there were always a lot of people about.

According to Meyerbek's friend Movladi Dzeitov, the leather-jacketed skinhead who stabbed Meyerbek to death around dusk began the encounter by glowering for several minutes at the Chechen youth, inches from his face.

"I am in my own land, and I can look at whatever I want," he said when Meyerbek asked him to go away.

He struck Meyerbek, and Meyerbek hit him back, said Dzeitov, and then the Chechen tried to make up and say that their fight was over. That's when he was stabbed, swiftly, almost anticlimactically. His friends did not even see the knife. All they saw was Meyerbek sagging to the pavement.

"I went to him and said, 'Don't die.' He just smiled at me and closed his eyes. It was the last thing he ever did," said Salambek Tansuyev, another companion.

Police posted nearby did not react until the attacker had already dashed away.

Now the family fears that authorities are not even trying to find him. Pagalov, her eyes still red from crying inside their basement apartment weeks after the killing, finds it hard to understand the racist anger that caused a stranger to end her nephew's life so abruptly.

"He was as gentle as a girl," she moaned as she waved a snapshot of the slight teenager. "He never ever had any fights."

Sergei L. Loiko and Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times' Moscow Bureau and news intern Rachel Nielsen contributed to this report.

By JOHN DANISZEWSKI, Times Staff Writer
Copyright © 2001 Los Angeles Times