Roma Children Not Provided with Adequate Schooling in Russia and So Leave Before Middle Grades, Extending Isolation of Their Nation, Memorial Expert Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 10 = In many places around the Russian Federation, the children of Roma families are put in inadequate schools where they do not mix with children of other nationalities but are instructed in Russian, a language they seldom know well enough to succeed in their studies, Steafniya Kulayeva says. She describes this approach as a form of apartheid.
    As a result, most fail and drop out before entering the middle grades, a pattern that means few of them acquire the skills to enter the normal workforce and thus keep the Roma isolated for another generation, the Memorial human rights expert who has been studying that community for 30 years says (cherta.media/interview/roma-v-rossii/).
    And such Roma when they grow up sometimes fall into a life of crime to make ends meet, a pattern that helps to explain why there is so much hostility toward that nation among Russians and one that the Kremlin does little or nothing to counter. Instead, it feeds such views by its talk of the isolation of the Roma, an isolation it has itself promoted.
    Kulayeva does not draw the conclusion that many others will: that Moscow’s policies under Putin regarding the schooling of other non-Russian nations may have similar if not quite as radical consequences and thus produce the kind of isolation and hostility between them and the ethnic Russians the Kremlin wants to prevent.