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Pogroms Return to Russia
(November 2001)
On the eve of Vladimir Putin's upcoming visit to the United States, there is
a troubling new phenomenon developing in the Russian capital. A series of
mass skinhead attacks against Muslims, attacks the Russian press are openly
calling "pogroms," has disturbed the city in the past two weeks, claiming
three lives and prompting more than 300 arrests. The incidents are among the
most serious threats to social order to hit the capital during Putin's
reign, and also may tarnish the reputation of America's ally in the Afghan
war--particularly as some of the attacks were directed specifically at
Afghans. The worst of the pogroms occurred on October 30, in Moscow's
southern Tsaritsino region, where a crowd of more than 300 shaven-headed
teenagers--apparently fans of the soccer team Lokomotiv--attacked
dark-skinned people outside a street market. When police intervened, part of
the crowd dispersed and traveled by subway to the nearby Kakhovskaya region,
where they descended upon the hotel Sevastopol and attacked some two dozen
Afghan residents, among others, as they came in and out of the building.
There is a small Afghan population in Moscow, mainly ethnic Afghans who were
born and raised in ex-Soviet territories bordering Afghanistan: Kirgyzstan,
Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan. Some are immigrants from the days of the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan. Many are migrant shuttle-traders who live in
hotels, and as such share in the unpopularity experienced by other
non-Russian preyezhiye (arrivals) who inhabit Russia's street markets.
Imposing crowds of teenage soccer fans are nothing new in Moscow. In the
past few years a curious synthesis of the soccer hooligan and skinhead
movements has been observed steadily gaining strength in the city. It's no
longer uncommon in Moscow to see crowds of 300-400 soccer fans--dressed in
the black bomber jackets and black boots popularized by German
skinheads--loitering on the streets in the city's outer regions, and not
always on the same nights as soccer matches. In the most celebrated incident
prior to the recent pogroms, fans of the Spartak and Torpedo soccer teams
rioted outside the US Embassy in the spring of 1999, apparently in protest
against the attack on Kosovo
But these recent incidents are something new. For one thing, the scale and
intensity of the violence is unprecedented, as is the fact that the attacks
were apparently organized and premeditated. In the October 30 incident,
police determined that the 300-plus crowd of teenagers had first gathered in
a wooded area of the Tsaritsino region and held an orderly meeting there
before heading to the market. One police spokesman, Sergei Shevtsov of the
city police press office, even went so far as to say that investigators had
determined that the original targets of the attacks were antiglobalist
protesters in the city center, where the last day of the Davos economic
conference meetings were being held. Only when "advance scouts" determined
that there were no antiglobalist protesters there at that time, Shevtsov
told Izvestia, did the crowd settle on the dark-skinned workers at the
market as a target Many people who followed the news, particularly those in
the Muslim soccer violence. "These were clearly organized and carefully
planned, and not some spontaneous outburst by a group of teenagers," said
Geidar Jamal, leader of the Islamic Committee of Russia. "The behavior was
both more ferocious than usual, and more controlled."
Official estimates of Russia's Muslim population range between 12 million
and 13 million, while Islamic organizations claim that the number is closer
to 20 million. There are several powerful semi-autonomous Islamic regions,
including Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, and the Putin government has taken
pains to assure Russia's Muslims that its support for the US bombings in
Afghanistan is not an anti-Muslim campaign Also startling has been the sheer
quantity of attacks and arrests in the past two weeks--conspicuously high
even for a city as violent and crime-ridden as Moscow. A lengthy series of
attacks followed the October 30 incident, in regions all over the capital.
On October 31 a Dagestani man was shot outside the McDonald's on Bolshaya
Dorogomilovskaya Street, across from the Radisson Slaviyanskaya hotel;
witnesses said the shooters were young men with shaved heads. On November 1,
on Bolshaya Naberezhnaya Street in the northwest region of the city, about
100 skinheads rioted, causing minor injuries to bystanders both Slavic and
Caucasian Two days later, on the evening of November 3, about 150 teenagers,
mostly soccer fans/skinheads, were arrested in five or six different violent
incidents all across the city.
According to Moscow chief of police Vladimir
Pronin, minor riots broke out outside four Metro stations- Timyaryzevskaya,
Petrovsko-Razumovskaya, Altufyevo and Domodedovskaya, as well as in the
southern region of Orekhovo-Borisovo Yuzhnoye. The riots broke out in three
separate geographical areas: north, southwest and south. "There were no
serious 'excesses,' " Pronin told the Ekho Moskvy radio station, adding that
he believed the incidents were organized and "definitely" connected to the
October 30 pogrom. Last but not least, there was a curious incident on
October 29, the day before the Tsaritsino pogrom. According to Sergei
Dorenko, an anchorman for the TV-Tsentr network who is perhaps the country's
best-known and also most hated media personality, eight teenage skinheads
raided his office and attacked his staff while he was taping his show during
the afternoon. Dorenko told Ekho Moskvy that one of his female co-workers
suffered a concussion during the attacks, which inspired the amazing
spectacle of an entire production crew barricading itself inside the studio
while they frantically dialed for help on their cell phones. All eight
attackers managed to escape the studio without being detained, the station
later reported
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