Ethnic Violence Raising Alarms in Russia

Habibe Ozdal, USAK Center for Eurasian Studies

Russia has recently experienced multidimensional ethnic violence in the capital. The turmoil began in southern Moscow on Dec. 6 with the death of Yegor Sviridov, a 28-year-old fan of Spartak Moscows football club who was killed in a brawl with migrants from Russia's North Caucasus region, according to authorities. Five days later, about 5,000 nationalists and football hooligans clashed with Moscow police. The confrontation took place in Manezh Square, outside the Kremlin, and led to the arrests of 65 Spartak fans and more than 1,000 people, including members of both groups. Recent data shows that during 2010 there were more than 350 such violent incidents which resulted in the killing of 36 people. The number of incidents and killings indeed suggest that recent violence in Moscow is not coincidental and has nothing to do with sport. It is rather very much linked to the rising nationalistic and racist trend in the country.


As he often does, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once again lashed out at the liberal intelligentsia and blamed corrupt police officers for the release of a murderous North Caucasian gang for an all-too-obvious bribe, while Medvedev Tweeted that everything was under control.


The Russian government described the recent clashes in a very simplistic way, but the reality says otherwise; this is because recent, racially motivated violence reflects a real social problem in the country that has the potential to seriously disturb the stability of the Russian Federation in the long, if not short run. Russia, with its 140 million people, consists of almost 180 different ethnic communities. The latest violence based on ethnic difference draws attention by its extent. Indeed, similar incidents usually happen on a small scale in the forms of a specific murder and do not usually turns into protests as in this case. There are different explanations for the recent incident. For some, the protests reflect popular revolt at the regimes corruption and ineptitude. According to the head of the Moscow police department, migrants are responsible for 70 percent of the crime in the city. From this standpoint, it is said by Russian analysts that cultural norms and public behavior are quite different between people of Slavic origin and newcomers from the mountains, which leads to the incredible combination of social, legal, ethnic, and cultural conflict.


According to them, on top of this combination comes the horrifying corruption of Russian governmental and law enforcement officials. From this point of view, recent protests were a call for security services to take necessary steps to solve the Caucasian Problem. What all this expresses is that there a fixed view of otherness in Russia toward the people from the Caucasus region, and it seems like the Russian government is having a very difficult time dealing with it.


There is also another argument that these events are social conflicts rooted in the reality of life in Russian cities where money can buy everything while many young people find themselves without clear prospects for the future, due to poverty and anger. This can make sense especially if we consider that the Russian economy is still unable to provide prosperity for the masses among whom unemployment is rampant. From this standpoint, the basic argument usually used to explain racism and xenophobia in Europe could be the case for Russia as well. With a much more diverse, complex and problematic Russia, this can create much heavier burdens if the people of Slavic origin start facing similar attacks in the regions where they are in a minority.


Russia's Security Dilemma


From 1991 onward, the Russian government had two options to maintain unity in the multiethnic Russian Federation:


The first was the main understanding of the Boris Yeltsin era, which initially offered the regions as much sovereignty as they could swallow. But the Chechen War became the main obstacle for such a policy. Since then, the freedom promised by Yeltsin has been gradually replaced by authoritarian policies which strengthen the Kremlin over the regions, especially during Putin term.


The second was the governed democracy understanding that Putin has started to apply. However this policy paved the way for a type of government to the government that controls the country by force. As a result, the Kremlin has not only failed to bring stability to the country, but also raised the question of whether Kremlin has legitimacy in some parts of the federation. Therefore, the lack of public support for the Kremlin in those republics has raised the perception of threats to Russias stability in the eyes of policy makers in Moscow. All these mean that Russia, especially under Putin, has created a dilemma in which the more Moscow has sought stability, the more it has become an instable country.


Whatever the reason or the explanation is, it seems that racial and ethnic hate crimes are a growing problem in Russia and have the potential to create more trouble for the multiethnic federation of Russia. This is a new political challenge that the Russian elite and the Kremlin will have to deal with in the foreseeable future. The most crucial part of the problem is the acknowledgement of its gravity because without this, any solution would be insufficient.


Moreover, it is vitally important to control ethnic tensions in Russia, since it has the potential to threaten the unity of the Russian Federation. Furthermore, previous instances of state-society tension, which has continued since the 1990s between the Kremlin and the North Caucasus, could turn into inter-society tension that would then be very difficult to control. It seems that developing a successful policy for a young and multinational Russia is significantly important in controlling the rising nationalism targeting ethnic citizens.