beekjuffer's Journal

New Public Body Faced With a Stubborn Problem

The Public Chamber, a 126-member consultative body set up to foster cooperation between the state and civil society in Russia, didn’t have to wait long before it was confronted with its first high-profile issue. A Jan. 11 attack on a Moscow synagogue by 20-year-old Alexander Koptsev, left eight worshippers suffering from stab wounds and the media raising alarms that anti-Semitism – and xenophobia in general – was on the rise.

President Vladimir Putin highlighted the issue on Jan. 22, when he told the chamber “Any calls for ethnic intolerance have to be condemned.” A paper released by a working group from the new chamber drew particular attention to the need to ensure that statements of intolerance from public officials – such as last year’s “Letter of 500,” an appeal for a ban on Jewish organizations in Russia that was signed by 19 members of the present State Duma – are dealt with seriously.

"Any manifestations of ethnic or religious discord, any calls for hatred and intolerance, must mean the end of their authors' public and political career in Russia," said the statement of the working group.

These should have been welcome words for human rights advocates, who have warned of an increase in xenophobic rhetoric from politicians in recent years. One of the members of the Public Chamber cited the “Letter of 500” as part of a broader atmosphere that led to the synagogue attack. Despite the outcry the letter caused, none of the 19 Duma members who signed faced the danger of losing their seats, much less a more severe punishment.

“[Koptsev] is a product of our common passivity,” said Leonid Roshal, chairman of the International Charity Fund for Aid to Children in Disasters and Wars and a member of the Public Chamber, at a January press conference. “If the authors of that letter had been stripped of their parliamentary immunity and brought before justice one year ago, this attack would not have happened.”

The use of racist political rhetoric has come under increased scrutiny in recent months, after the nationalist political party Rodina was disqualified from the Moscow City Duma elections for running a television ad that likened migrants from the Caucasus to “garbage” that should be cleaned from the city’s streets.

Sinagogue in Moscow “Russians are not born xenophobes,” said Alexander Brod, the chairman of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights. “These attitudes in society are instigated by some politicians who discredit Russia before the world community.”

Human rights advocates have, however, expressed doubts with regard to the state’s seriousness in dealing with the problem. Many speculated that the decision to ban Rodina from the Moscow vote was less a result of their racist ad and more related to concerns that Rodina’s popularity would undercut that of the pro-government United Russia party.

The racist rhetoric from some political corners is matched by disturbing figures related to racially-motivated violence in the country. According to a report released at the beginning of February by Sova, a Moscow-based research center studying issues related to extremism in the country, 28 people were murdered and another 366 injured in 179 racially motivated attacks in Russia in 2005. In contrast, the Interior Ministry made public a smaller figure for last year, reporting 22 people killed and 280 injured. Law enforcement officials attribute the discrepancy to the fact that incidents of hooliganism or simple robbery are sometimes categorized improperly as racially motivated attacks, while human rights organizations charge that in fact the opposite is true, with many racially motivated attacks being charged as simple hooliganism, which carries a significantly less severe punishment.

“The police are just not interested in investigating some of the racist attacks properly,” said Yevgeny Proshechkin, the head of the Moscow Antifascist Center. “If you investigate a racially motivated murder, you have to find evidence that the suspect made racist statements, that he was a member of some racist group. If you uncover this group, you have at least one more case to investigate. It is just much easier to say that the murder was a result of a drunken brawl or that it was committed by a gang of hooligans.”

Regardless of what the actual numbers are, opinion polls conducted in Russia are virtually unanimous, revealing that, despite the intensive coverage generated by the synagogue attack, prejudice against Jews, while present, is not as strong as hatred aimed at other ethnic groups. The polls show that racism is most prevalent against ethnicities from the North Caucuses, particularly Chechens, and those of other nationalities from the region such as Azerbaijanis, Armenians and Georgians.

Migrant workers from the former Soviet Central Asian republics have also been targeted by nationalist groups, and the focus on the problem of illegal immigrants during the campaign for the Moscow City Duma was not limited to the nationalist parties. Only United Russia did not stress the problem of illegal migration as part of its party platform.

“The state seems to be using some racists as a political tool,” said Lev Levinson, an expert at the Institute of Human Rights who helped to draft anti-extremist laws in the State Duma. “It is easy to point at extremists and say: “Unless you vote for us these guys may come to power.”

The youth group “Nashi” (Our Guys), which has enjoyed open support from the Kremlin, was formed last year with combating racism as one of its stated goals. However, the organization’s strong patriotic message has been seen as trying to capitalize on xenophobic feeling in the country, a charge that its leaders deny.

“If you come to our office, you will see the portraits of three people, whom we consider to be fascists,” Vasily Yakemenko, Nashi’s leader said at a meeting of the organization in Moscow in May 2005. “The are [the London-based controversial businessman Boris] Berezovsky, [Chechen terrorist Shamil] Basayev and [self-styled punk writer, former Soviet ?migr? dissident and the leader of the National Bolshevik party Eduard] Limonov. With them, no discussions are possible. They can only be fought against.”

There is little in common between these three figures other than their opposition to the Kremlin and their roots in Russia’s turmoil of the 1990s, leading some to charge that Nashi’s anti-racist rhetoric is far too selective, directed primarily at the government’s opponents.

Nashi, however, is not the only group that has been out marching, and the nature of the different demonstrations provides some insight into the nature of the issue of racism in Russia.

On Nov. 4, at the Red Square ceremony to mark the new national holiday “People’s Unity Day,” Putin stressed the “unification of peoples” as one of the country’s strengths. On the other side of the Kremlin, a crowd of 3,000 (вранье) people marched in a nationalist demonstration that included signs reading “Moscow Against Occupiers” and “The Russians Are Coming,” as well of chants of “Russia for Russians” and “Moscow for Muscovites.”

The march, which was organized by the Eurasian Youth Movement, an organization founded by Alexander Dugin, who has garnered notoriety for public statements in support of the ideas of Third Reich, attracted a number of racist groups, including the Movement Against Illegal Migration. When Proshechkin’s Moscow Anti-Fascist Center filed a complaint with the Moscow Prosecutor General’s Office, the prosecutor’s answer was that the official organizers of the rally could not be held accountable for the actions of people who just joined in the march. Human rights groups, dismayed by the state’s inept reaction to the “fascist march,” responded by organizing an anti-fascist rally on Nov.27. The rally was billed as open to all, but attended mostly by supporters of the Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces parties.

The demonstrations most directly related to the question of racist violence have not been organized by Russian citizens in Moscow, but rather by groups of foreign students in St. Petersburg and Voronezh – arguably the centers of racial attacks. During the 2004-2005 academic year, the St. Petersburg city court convicted members of four racist groups four times on charges of racially motivated murders. In Voronezh, three dark-skinned foreign students were murdered, one of which police first tried to classify as not racially motivated.

Despite the numbers of violent racial attacks, racist statements in the media and xenophobic literature, however, are much more prevalent.

Anti-Semitic and other racist literature can be purchased easily in Moscow, even in the bookstore of a high-profile public organization like the Editorial Council of the Russian Orthodox Church. Despite the Church’s public denunciations of anti-Semitism and racial violence, Sergei Nilus’ book “Bliz Yest, Pri Dverekh” (It Is Near, Right at the Door), which includes “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an infamous early 20th-century document forged by the Tsarist secret police and purporting to contain the plans of Jewish leaders to establish world domination, was on sale in the store last year.

Sergei Chapnin, the managing editor of the official newspaper of the Moscow Patriarchate, Tserkovy Vestnik, said that there are simply too many publications moving across the bookstore’s shelves for it to check each title for offensive content, and that the majority of the Church’s members would oppose the sale of any anti-Semitic literature in the store.

“The store failed to keep proper control of what it sells,” Chapnin said. “There is a huge community of Orthodox believers that abhor anti-Semitism. In the churches, where you have such priests and parishioners you won’t find this kind of books. The problem is that these people are quiet and the groups like the one which published this book are loud.”

The Russian Orthodox Church publicly denounces anti-Semitism and in fact, on the day of the attack against the synagogue, Patriarch Alexy II sent a letter to Russian Chief Rabbi Berl Lazar.

“Committing a blasphemy against everything sacred, the attacker broke into the synagogue during the evening prayer,” Alexy II wrote. “The authorities, police, religious leaders and society in general should do everything possible to stop such incidents of ethnic and religious hatred.”

Although the patriarch’s message was clear, some criticize the Church for not taking as strong a stand in combating anti-Semitism within the ranks of its members. Church supporters argue instead that while the Church is firmly against racial attacks, combating xenophobic sentiments isn’t high up on its list of priorities.

“Doing this is difficult for the Church, because it is so obsessed with preserving its unity,” said Alexander Shchipkov, the editor of the website Religion and Media. “Inside the Orthodox Church, you have representatives of just about every ideology in Russia. You have Orthodox liberals, monarchists, nationalists etc. Where does the limit between the acceptable and unacceptable lie? The Church still seems to have no answer.”

The state doesn’t appear to have an answer either. A law passed by the State Duma in 2002 called for the creation of a list of materials to be banned, but four years later, the list has yet to be released. Such a list is arguably not even a valid answer to the problem since it would raise questions about freedom of speech.

“The fact that the federal list has not been published is an outrage,” said Genry Reznik, a member of the Public Chamber and chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of the Russian Jewish Congress (REK). “There are no more than 20 commonly recognizable titles of extremist literature. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the infamous “Protocols.” By publishing the list and enforcing the ban we will not remove all racist literature, but we will reduce the scope of its distribution.”

With regard to questions of extremism and xenophobia, the Public Chamber will clearly have its work cut out for it. Whatever agreement it reaches on the topic will need to be supported by the state and reinforced by action by groups in all segments of society – including religious, educational and law enforcement – to truly have an effect on the problem

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