After Korkino Pogrom, Hostility toward and Repression of Roma Communities Spreading across Russia

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 29 – Following the violence in Korkino earlier this fall, hostility among Russians toward Roma communities across Russia has intensified and repression of these communities has increased as well, threatening both new outbreaks of clashes between Roma and Russians and worsening relations between Russians and other minorities as well.
    The Korkino events attracted enormous coverage at the time, but since then, the Roma issue has largely disappeared from the Russian media, despite warnings that it was a harbinger of worsening relations between Roma and Russians and even other ethnic groups (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/10/roma-pogroms-in-chelyabinsk-make.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/11/verkhovsky-on-sources-of-anti-migrant.html).
    Now that media neglect has been in part compensated by a detailed story by the Horizontal Russia portal about Roma in Leningrad Oblast which shows that Russian hostility to and official mistreatment of members of that nationality intensified after Korkino and shows no sign of dissipating anytime soon (semnasem.org/articles/2024/11/29/vse-dorogi-vedut-k-roma).
    The Roma, the name now commonly given to the gypsies, number between 200,000, the figure given by the last more or less reliable Russian census in 2010 but a clear undercount, and one million, the figure members of the community believe but that likely is at least slightly exaggerated.
    Consequently, if this trend continues and spreads, and in the Russia of Vladimir Putin, that is entirely likely, more clashes between Roma and Russians are likely; and there is a great danger that such violence will spread to conflicts between Russians and other ethnic minorities as well.