‘Being Dark-Skinned in Today’s Russia Can Be Dangerous,’ Udmurt Now in Emigration Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 25 – The Horizontal Russia portal features its latest interview with a non-Russian about his experiences in Russia. This time it is with an Udmurt with Mari roots who grew up in his homeland, moved to Moscow and then emigrated and who says that “being dark-skinned in today’s Russia can be dangerous.”

            Artyom, aged 40, grew up in Izhevsk where he says he encouraged xenophobia “only during celebrations of the Day of the Great Fatherland War, but when he moved to Moscow, he came to feel that  being dark-skinned in Moscow could be dangerous because the police singled him out for harassment (semnasem.org/articles/2026/02/25/nerusskij-mir-kak-rossijskim-silovikam-ne-ugodil-cvet-kozhi-udmurta-artema).

Neither his parents nor his grandparents spoke with him in either Udmurt or Mari; but when he was a young child, his parents sent him to live for a time with his grandmother in a Mari El village. There he fell in love with Mari songs and dances and learned some of the language those who engaged in them used.

            But when it was time for him to enter school, his parents brought him back to Izhevask. In the first three classes, he studied Udmurt but then began using only Russian and forgot his native language because “to be from a village and to know his native language was considered ‘not prestigious’ and almost no one would speak with him in it.

            Artyom says he almost never encountered xenophobic attitudes in Izhevsky; but once he was attacked by some other boys who didn’t like him because he was dark-skinned. But the situation deteriorated after he moved to Moscow where both the police and ordinary people singled him out for mistreatment. But that led him to again study Udmurt.

            When he emigrated to the US with his family, he was surprised that no one singled  him out for mistreatment and that many were delighted to find that he was doing all he could to preserve the ethnic identity of himself and his children, teaching them the language he had learned only incompletely earlier.

            Artyom’s story calls attention to a distinction that is not often made by outside observers. Xenophobic attitudes and actions among Russians are not directed at all non-Russians but rather at those who look or speak differently. Those non-Russians who look like Russians and speak Russian generally escape such hostility.

            Thus, in many cases what is described as “merely” xenophobia is in fact openly racist and should be recognized and fought on that basis. For background on this phenomenon and the ways it is manifested in the Russian Federation, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/07/in-rf-members-of-nations-who-physically.html.