Paul Goble
Staunton, Jan. 31 – Russian officials and commentators loyal to the Kremlin do everything they can to suggest that clashes between members of different ethnic or religious groups are not ethnic or religious conflicts, preferring to insist that these are driven by other factors that are more immediately important.
That approach until recently has extended to bullying along ethnic or religious lines in Russian schools. But in 2025, the Guild of Interethnic Journalism carried out a project to “STOP EthnoBullying” among young people in the Russian Federation and has now held a conference about the lessons learned (nazaccent.ru/content/45095-stop-etnobulling-itogi-i-perspektivy/).
Among those who carried out this project and then spoke at the conference was Inna Tomilina, a Moscow psychologist and business coach, who said that focus groups in eight federation subjects confirmed that “children out of insecurity, shy away from people who are different from them … and that this misunderstanding often leads to bullying.”
She stressed that “ethno-bullying is different from regular bullying. A situation leading to bullying in children’s groups can be corrected by improving academic performance, building physical skills or if need be changing schools. [But] nationality cannot be changed.” (stress supplied)
Unfortunately, Tomilina said, “no one in Russia is yet talking about ethno-bullying as a phenomenon.” Indeed, she suggested, the very first articles about this phenomenon and practical tools to combat it “appeared precisely during the STOP EthnoBullying project carried out over the last year.
For the Kremlin, Tomilina’s suggestion that “nationality cannot be changed” is close to a provocation; but her insistence that ethnic conflicts among the young are fundamentally different from other kinds of conflicts is a point of view that may inspire more attention to what is clearly a growing problem not only among school-age children but among adults as well.
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