Russia ‘a Racist Federation,’ Victims of Racist Attacks Say

Russia ‘a Racist Federation,’ Victims of Racist Attacks There Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 11 – Russians don’t like to admit there is racism in their country, but those who live there and look racially distinct or are married to or have adopted children who do often become victims of discrimination or violence at the hands of rightwing Russians, the SOVA Center says (sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/publications/2020/02/d42015/).

            Statistics capture only part of this, and Natalya Frolova of The Insider seeks to compensate by talking to four people who have encountered Russian racism: a Russian who married an African, a Kazakh woman who left Russia because of how she was treated, an African in Kazan, and a Tatar woman at the Academy of Sciences (theins.ru/obshestvo/225036).

            Yevgeniya, 31, the former wife of an African, said she often encountered racist comments and feared she would be attacked, especially after she became pregnant and people began speculating about what her child would look like.  Her encounters with extreme right groups led her to go to their Internet sites and what she saw there horrified her.

            Ultimately because of pressures from her own family on her and her husband’s family on him, their marriage disintegrated; but no small role in that played the antagonism and verbal attacks against both of them by rightwing Russians who viewed their interracial marriage as an offense against their nationality.

            Mit, an African student in Kazan, says that he faces hostility ever day and that he has to think about how to approach the simplest things like going to a store because there will be so much anger and even physical threats directed against him. People all the time use the N word or worse and make it clear that they would like him to leave.

            For a long time, Mit says, he tried not to respond either face to face or online; but that stance has been hard to maintain, especially after horrific cases like the murder in Kazan of a student from Chad in 2017. His killer was caught and punished, but “it often happens that the police simply don’t do anything when we are the victims.”

            As bad as the offensive racists are, even more upsetting is the fact that those around who see what such people are about show themselves to be indifferent, Mit says. People who see horrific displays of racial animosity do nothing, thus allowing those who engage in such things to do them again and again and again.

            Sardaana, a Kazakh from Kazakhstan who became a Russian citizen before deciding to leave for the United States because of racial hostility toward her and her Kazakh husband and fears about the life ahead for their child. Her husband was beaten, and she was regularly verbally assaulted. 

            “The main cause of our leaving Russia” were such actions directed against us and fears that they would inflict emotional and physical damage on our children. “We did not want to raise children in a country where the overwhelming majority of people are negatively inclined toward people of another nationality.”

            And finally, Maryam L, an ethnic Tatar who grew up and lives in Moscow and works for a research institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says she doesn’t have serious problems because of her ethnicity now but was told that the head of the cadres department of her institute doesn’t like her simply because of her nationality.

            “I have a younger brother” who looks far more Tatar than she does, Maryam says. “Now, he isn’t in Russia and I am glad because I was worried about him here.” Police constantly stopped him to check his docuiments. But now he works at a research institute in Europe and is defending a dissertation.”

            She says she can “only guess how many similar cases there are,” and she says her mother has expressed concern about the deteriorating relations between Russians and other nationalities including the Tatars.  Maryam has an ethnic Russian husband and the two now have children, but one of them has been marked out in his pre-school as “black and dirty” because he’s part Tatar.

            We always had it beaten into our heads, she says, “that our state is multinational, that the peoples are friends with each other, that all are equal and live in peace and harmony. But I, while a child, felt the hypocrisy of those Soviet pictures where for example, an Uzbek, a Kyrgyz and a Georgia sang together.”

            What is tragic, she concludes, is that so many people seem to need to divide up those around them on the basis of those who are “ours” and those who are “alien.”