In Russia, the country and the people that only half a century ago with their blood and their lives defeated fascism, large parts of the young and desillusioned generation have found new meaning and faith in the concepts of nationalism and racism.

During the past few years, several cases of assaults on persons with a foreign look have occurred every month in Moscow, with many of them ending with the death of the assaulted. 

31st of March, a group of skinheads spotted a student from Ghana at the metro station Petrovsko-Razumovskaya. Broken ribs and teeth were the price he had to pay for the colour of his skin.
On April 15th, the 35 years old Afghan Abdul Akrim Hakrid, working as a translator for the MVD (the police), was assaulted by skinheads at the metro station Polyanka, nearby the Kremlin, and died in the hospital as a result of his injuries. 
April 17th, two skinheads, who had attacked a store on Gvardeyskaya street, were arrested. The cause for the attack was found to be the fact that the owner of the store was Armenian.
On March 6th, three attacks on foreigners were reported only in Moscow.

This violence tends to culminate around the 20th of April, the birthday of Adolf Hitler, when skinheads celebrate his memory by attempting to clean up the capital from unwanted elements. Groups of neo-nazis are said to travel "from all over Europe" to participate in the meetings that are arranged. And the usual approach of the police has been to pretend they don't exist. 

This year, the majority of the foreign embassies in Moscow received written threats from a Nazi organisation, where the the embassies were recommended to send home all of their citizens, since it could not be guaranteed that they were not going to be killed. Beginning with the 20th of April, the organisation vowed to extinguish each and every foreigner in Moscow.

This should, of course, not be taken too literally, as that would mean that the Nazis would have to act out a veritable genocide. It is hard to say how many people of foreign background there are in Moscow exactly, but according to the statistics in "Москва в цифрах с начала века до наших дней", the percentage of foreigners to the 9 million inhabitants of Moscow is estimated to have been 9% in 1995 (a number that should have increased since then), and there are about 140 different nationalities represented.

The threat before Hitler's birthday is nothing too special for most embassies in Moscow. The Vietnamese embassy, for example, has been informing its citizens about how to avoid threats and assaults in their own Vietnamese-language papers. And the employees at the embassy of South Africa have been receiving threats like this constantly. Particularly actively this has been occurring during the last four years.

Statistics from the Medical Academy of Volgograd tell of a growing number, as well. In 1998, six of their foreign students were assaulted, in 1999 - thirteen, in 2000 - twenty.

The greatest problem has been the indifference of the police, the judiciary and the government towards the problem. 
It happened once, that an educational institution arrested some rampaging young skinheads with its own security force, and handed them over to the police. Not one hour had gone past, and the skinheads had returned, unpunished and full of self-esteem. 
During a football game of "Sokol" (Saratov) versus TsSKA (Moscow), a small group of skinheads flew a Nazi flag with a swastika on the spectators' tribune, while chanting "Sieg Heil!". The police present did their best not to notice the incident.
23rd of August 2001, Ivan Konovalov and Dmitry Ivanov, both seventeen years old, assaulted a number of young African men. While trying to run away, one of them, Paul Massa Mayoni, citizen of Angola, fell. One of the skinheads ran up to him and beat him in the head with a stick. Mayoni died in hospital. According to the expert Poldyaev, who made the first examination, the cause of death was the blow with the stick. But later on, a second examination was made, and now, the cause of death was suddenly stated to be the fall on the asphalt. Thus, the two skinheads cannot be accused of manslaughter, as Mayoni's death is classified as "accident", while Konovalov and Ivanov were, in the intermunicipal court of Izmailov in May 2002, only accused of "hooliganism". 
The chief of the capital's GUVD, Vladimir Pronin, made a statement in the beginning of this year, saying: "There does not exist any organised movement of skinheads in Moscow." Furthermore, he claimed that the grave assaults reported were just the makings of football fanatics, and that shaved heads and heavy boots were just a fashion trend among the yougsters nowadays.

Whereas, in reality, there are more than five strong skinhead organisations. "Русская цель" ("The Russian Sake"), "Скин-легион" ("Skin-legion"), "Хаммерскинхеды" ("Hammerskinheads"), "Кровь и Честь" ("Blood and Honour") and "Русская атака" ("Russian Attack") are the largest groups, whereas the smaller ones are virtually uncountable.
They all work actively for the cleansing of the streets from unwanted elements. Most commonly individuals of Caucasian, African and Asian origin, and young fans of rap and hip hop music fall into this category.

But as the skinheads know that no one is ever going to punish them for their deeds, they freely continue their activities, while the government closes its eyes. They don't even consider it necessary to hide their faces and identities, but continue their menace in broad daylight. 

For a Russia that is hoping on investments from abroad, there could be no worse anti-advertisement to potential investors. Many large Western corporations have a policy by which employees of Asian and African origin are not to be offered positions in Russia, because of safety reasons.

It is utterly necessary that the Foreign Ministry and the judicial organs finally take action against the neo-Nazi organisations and their adherents, and that even one - exemplatory - verdict would be given the Nazis in court. 
As yet, this has not happened even once. And if it is to continue like this, all attempts of president Putin to get closer to the West, and make Europe and the USA treat Russia like a "civilised country", are quite futile, according to Maxim Yusin in Izvestiya, May 18th. "In civilised countries", he writes, "a hunt on 'blacks' and 'yellows' is not being carried out under the toleration of the watchmen of law and order and the embarrassed silence of legislatial clerks."

But what is it, then, that led to this situation in Russia?

There is a certain amount of hidden "everyday racism" in Russian society (just as in most parts of the world), which manifests itself in common people criticising the skinheads, while themselves expressing (in their own opinion) "harmless" racist points of view, which are perhaps based on lack of knowledge and general ignorance. This includes, when discussing a Pakistani student at the university, asking if he is "like, dark in the face"; giving hostile glares or mutterings to people who speak in any language other than Russian in public places; and thinking you should keep away from Africans on the metro, because they can have all kinds of strange, tropical diseases that your organism couldn't resist ... Or, in more serious cases, like my aged Russian teacher, wondering what good it is for Sweden to have all those Muslim immigrants - as they all are fanatics and terrorists; as well as worrying about the large amount of Chinese immigrants in Russia (particularly in the Far East, where it is said that about 2 million Chinese have settled), who seem to be stealing Siberia from them - and they are coming here, to Moscow, with their mafia! 

As Russia has seen relatively little peaceful times in the 20th century, and the adversaries, at least in the past few decades with Afghanistan and Chechnya, have frequently happened to be of Islamic creed, it is an element of the governmental propaganda to depict individuals from the Muslim world as 'evil terrorists'. (Consider the apartment bombings of the late 1990's, quite likely staged by the FSB (secret service), and used as propaganda for the war against Chechnya.) 
Surely, the Western world's similar propaganda in later days, with its crooked ideas of a "clash of civilisations", have only worked to strengthen this image.

The "everyday racism", that has actually been around for a very long time in Russia, is nothing very different from what can be seen in other countries of the world. But with the combination of deep economical misery and political meaninglessness, it has in many cases turned into an agressive form of right wing radical racism. The young people who are attracted to this ideology are usually from the lowest social groups; poorly educated, and unemployed or working for very low pay. 

"Racism is the snobism of the poor", as the French sociologist Raymond Aron said once. 

And as the police ignore them, the organisations can easily grow stronger. The police themselves, with their force widely weakened by corruption and overstrain, as well as down cut governmental funds, often have enough problems as it is, and are not always prepared to take on such a task all by themselves.

The embassies in Moscow related very seriously to the threatening letters in the wake of April 20th 2002. They immediately started to write instructions for citizens, who were going to spend April in Moscow, advising them to be careful, not to walk on the streets late at night, and not to visit nightclubs.

Already some time ago large groups of foreign citizens living in Moscow, having lost patience with the government's lame attitude, had started acting publicly for opening the nation's eyes to this problem. Now, a great number of the embassies sent notes to the Foreign Ministry, requesting a strenghthening of measures regarding the safety of foreigners in Moscow.

In the weekend of the 20th, a great number of policemen and soldiers were called out by the government, patrolling the streets and metro stations. The result was striking: the whole weekend and following days proceeded peacefully. Most skinheads had left the city or just didn't do anything, as they realised that they would not be allowed to do much harm in the capital.

This, hopefully, will be taken as a sign by the government that security measures against skinhead organisations actually work, and should be continued, along with legislation against certain elements of their activity.