DEATH TOLL GROWS AS SKINHEAD VIEWS MOVE INTO MAINSTREAM
By John Gray

Globe and Mail, Canada
April 30 2007

MOSCOW – In the days after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya,
photographs of the crusading Russian journalist and about 20 other
people began appearing on an Internet website operated by one of
Russia’s many skinhead organizations.

Across the photograph of Ms. Politkovskaya was an unmistakable message:
"The order doesn’t matter, but the result does."

Galina Kozhevnikova was one of the 20 whose photograph appeared on what
was clearly intended to be a death list. Another message identified
her and the others as "enemies of the Russian people."

Frail and pale, Ms. Kozhevnikova nods and shrugs. It is not the first
time for such threats, and not the last.

The 48-year-old Ms. Politkovskaya was shot in the head outside her
Moscow apartment last October. Her offence was that she had been
angrily outspoken about the performance of the Russian army and the
Russian government in the republic of Chechnya, a land of dark-skinned
Muslim people who have always been regarded with suspicion, and
frequently with hatred, by fair-skinned Russians.

For Ms. Kozhevnikova, it’s all part of a climate of race hatred that
you can find almost anywhere in Russia. Racial violence, she says,
is now an almost everyday fact of Russian life. "The situation is
getting more and more grave. It is getting radically worse."

Ms. Kozhevnikova is deputy director of Sova, an organization that
monitors hate crimes against non-Slavic Russians and others such as
Chechens, Africans, Azeris and Armenians. So far this year, Sova has
identified 150 race-motivated attacks, 20 of them involving killings.

Sova’s researchers believe the number of attacks is growing by 20 or
30 per cent every year.

One day after Ms. Kozhevnikova reported those statistics, there were
two more slayings. A Tajik citizen was attacked and stabbed 35 times
in eastern Moscow by two young men who appeared to be skinheads,
complete with shaven heads and army-style boots.

An Armenian businessman was stabbed 20 times, also apparently by
skinheads. The Moscow Times said that before he died the man told
police his attackers had shouted racial epithets.

Such is the growth of racial attacks that Ms. Kozhevnikova and other
researchers believe that it is becoming almost fashionable for Russians
to join skinhead organizations. The victims of skinhead attacks are
reluctant to go to authorities because they do not expect sympathy
from police or even the government.

Even a partial list of the killings in recent months is shocking: A
nine-year-old Tajik girl was with her family in St. Petersburg when
she was stabbed nine times in the chest and stomach; a 20-year-old
Vietnamese student was attacked by 18 skinheads in St. Petersburg and
stabbed to death; five teenagers dragged a young Jewish man into a
cemetery and fatally stabbed him; a bomb thrown into a Moscow market
last August left 11 dead.

Until recently, dark-skinned immigrants have been most visible in
markets in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, but a government decree
that took effect on April 1 banned all non-Russians from selling
fruit and vegetables.

The immediate effect was that about a third of all market stalls were
suddenly empty, with signs inviting applications from tenants.

Within a few weeks, immigrants had started to drift back into the
Kiev market in central Moscow. Some were working as porters, which
is still permitted, others were working as sellers, offering a vague
explanation that their boss had arranged for permits.

People like Ms. Kozhevnikova are convinced that the campaign to
ban immigrants from Russia’s markets is only a start. She points to
the recurring theme of Russian nationalism that has been pursued by
President Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Putin has been insistent his government would defend the interests
of Russian people above all.

Ms. Kozhevnikova describes this as crude nationalism, "but they call
it patriotism."

Over the past three years, more than 150 people have died as a result
of racial violence. "It’s scary to live here. And I’m afraid for my
friends, many of whom are different from ordinary Russians," she said.