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A RE-IMAGINED COMMUNITY: MOSCOW SINCE ‘iHE FALL OF
COMMUNISM AND THE RACIALIZATION OF NON-RUSSIANS

presented by

Meredith L. Roman

has been accepted towards fulfillment
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11/00 cJCIRC/DateDuelpes-p 14

A RE-IMAGINED COMMUNITY: MOSCOW SINCE THE FALL OF COMMUNISM
AND
THE RACIALIZATION OF NON-RUSSIANS
By

Meredith L. Roman

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial ﬁilﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of History

2000

ABSTRACT

A RE-[MAGINED COW/IUNITY: MOSCOW SINCE THE FALL OF COMIVIUNISM
AND THE RACIALIZATION OF NON-RUS SIAN S

By

Meredith L. Roman

This work uses Russian newspapers and Human Rights Watch/Helsinki reports to
examine how the fall of Communism has affected the lives of all “people of color” who
live and/or work in Moscow. By people of color, I am referring to all groups and
individuals who do not have light skin and physical characteristics typical of Slavs from
both the former Soviet republics and beyond. These include representatives from the
Caucasus (Azeris, Georgians, Chechens, Armenians, etc), Africa, the Middle East,
Central Asia and the Asian subcontinent (Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, Afghans, Uzbeks, Tajiks,
Indians, etc.). Under Communism, all these peoples were welcomed into the Soviet
community because it was ofﬁcially imagined as an inclusive brotherhood of peoples based
on the principles of intemationalism. Consequently, popular racism was never reinforced
or fueled by the state. In striking contrast, with the fall of Communism municipal
authorities have used oﬂicial discourse and the registration system as the two main tools
to racialize people of color in the capital. Administrative and law enforcement ofﬁcials’
treatment of dark-skinned non-Russians since the Soviet Union’s demise proves that the
Moscow community has been re-imagined ofﬁcially not only as non-Communist but also
as white and Slavic. The ofﬁcial reconceptualization of the capital from an inclusive
multinational community to an exclusively white community has meant that the darker the
skin color or the less Slavic the features an individual has the more abuse he/she is
subjected to at the hands of police and city bureaucrats. Although this racialization
process is continuing just as the community is being constantly reconﬁgured, this paper
focuses primarily on the ﬁve year period from 1992-1997 when “black” was deﬁned not

only as African but also as Caucasian and Central Asian.

Copyright by
Meredith Lynn Roman
2000

 

In Loving Memory of
MICHAEL J. ROMAN

iv

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 1:
THE SOVIET UNION AS THE FRIENDSHIP OF PEOPLES ....................................... 6
CHAPTER 2:

THE FALL OF COMMUNISM AND THE RISE OF THE STATE OF DISORDER... 17
The Discourse of Disorder and the Racialization

of People of Color ................................................................................................. 22
The Discourse of Disorder and the Justiﬁcation for the Existence of the
Registration System ................................................................................................ 34
CHAPTER 3:

ENFORCEMENT OF THE REGISTRATION SYSTEM AND THE RACIALIZATION
OF PEOPLE OF COLOR
Political and Administrative Ofﬁcials’ Implementation

of the Registration System ..................................................................................... 40
Law Enforcement Ofﬁcials’ Enforcement of the Registration System and
the Racialization of People of Color ....................................................................... 47
CONCLUDING REMARKS ......................................................................................... 65
END NOTES ................................................................................................................ 70
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 87
v

INTRODUCTION

On 31 August 1999, the eve of the Moscow City Day celebrations, a bomb
exploded in the Okhotny Row mall on Manege Square near the Kremlin injuring 41
people, seven of them seriously. Approximately eight days later, on September 8th at
11:58 PM. a bomb went oﬂ° in an apartment building at No. 17/ 19 Guryanov Street in
southeast Moscow killing 92 people and injuring 264 others, 73 of them seriously. Less
than a week later on September 13th at 5 AM. an explosion rocked apartment building
No. 3 at 6 Kashirskoye Highway in Moscow leaving 121 dead (twelve of them children)
and nine injured. Federal Security Service [FSB] ofﬁcials immediately implicated Chechen
terrorists as responsible for these three bombings and imposed a heightened security
regime on the city which targeted not only Chechens but all individuals of Caucasian
nationality. Municipal authorities even attempted to prevent Caucasians from merely
entering the capital, a measure which Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov emphasized needed
to be legislated.1 The FSB could have blamed any of these dark-skinned Caucasian
nationalities for these terrorist acts but it was Grozni not Tblisi or Baku that Moscow
sought to invade for a second time. In July 1996 a Moscow resident commented on the
relationship between the then recent trolleybus bombings in the capital which were also
attributed to Chechen terrorists and the escalation of Russian activity in Chechnya which
applies to the September 1998 situation as well. “‘The real Chechen war,” he astutely
observed “was being fought in Moscow.”’2

This work examines how the fall of Communism has affected the lives of all
“people of color” who live and/or work in Moscow and thereby indirectly addresses the
questions of why these accusations against Chechens were so readily accepted at the
ofﬁcial and popular levels and why all individuals of Caucasian nationality immediately
came under suspicion in the wake of these bombings. By people of color, I am referring
not only to Caucasians but to all groups and individuals who do not have “fair

complexions and features typical of Slavs” from both the former Soviet republics and

l

beyond. In addition to the Caucasus, these include representatives from Africa, the
Middle East, Central Asia and the Asian subcontinent (Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, Afghans,
Uzbeks, Tajiks, Indians, etc.). Under Communism, all these peoples were welcomed into
the Soviet community because it was ofﬁcially imagined as an inclusive brotherhood of
peoples based on the principles of intemationalism. Racism was ofﬁcially nonexistent and
if it did exist it was only at the popular level and was never reinforced or fueled by the
state. In striking contrast, with the fall of Communism municipal authorities have used
ofﬁcial discourse and the registration system as the two main tools to racialize people of
color in the capital. Administrative and law enforcement oﬁicials’ treatment of
dark-skinned non-Russians since the Soviet Union’s demise proves that the Moscow
community has been re-imagined ofﬁcially not only as non-Communist but also as white
and Slavic. The ofﬁcial reconceptualization of the capital from an inclusive multinational
community to an exclusively white community has meant that the darker the skin color or
the less Slavic the features an individual has the more abuse he/she is subjected to at the
hands of police and city bureaucrats.3 Although this racialization process is continuing
just as the community is being constantly reconﬁgured, this paper focuses primarily on the
ﬁve year period from 1992-1997 when “black” was deﬁned not only as African but also
as Caucasian and Central Asian.

The fall of Communism precipitated both a crisis of Russian national identity and
incited Russians’ fears of the “other” and the “outsider.” These xenophobic fears and this
crisis of Russian national identity largely stemmed from the fact that initially Russians did
not know who the other was or on what grounds the boundaries of the post-Communist
community were drawn. The collapse of the friendship of peoples forced the former big
brother to question who was the other or outsider? and what did he/she look like? In order
to deﬁne themselves Russians needed to distinguish who or what the outsider was as a
way of demonstrating what they as Russians were not. Tim McDaniel emphasizes that

throughout history because Russians subconsciously conceptualize of the world in pairs of

2

absolute alternatives Russian national identity has been to an unprecedented extent based
on negative self-deﬁnition or “deﬁned in opposition to something else.”4 Moscow
officials helped give an easily identiﬁable face to the other or the outsider (through both
ofﬁcial discourse and the enforcement of the registration system) and thereby facilitated
the reconstruction of Russian national identity and the boundaries of the post-Communist
community. Authorities constructed the outsider as a dark-skinned predatory male,
largely although not necessarily Muslim with non-Slavic features and in this way
reconceptualized the community as white, Slavic and to some degree Orthodox. A clear
division consequently has emerged in post-Communist Moscow between those who fall
within and those who fall outside the conceptual boundaries of the newly imagined
community. This development is consistent with Russian history because as McDaniel
argues Russians’ binary consciousness has always generated a sharp societal division
between those who did and did not belong to the community.5

However, it was not dark skin alone which was the reason for the exclusion of the
person of color from the newly imagined community but what that dark skin indicated,
namely that the individual lacked a basic knowledge and understanding of the “Russian
idea.” Discussion of the Russian idea, a term and concept debated among nineteenth
century Slavophiles, was revitalized by the collapse of the Soviet Union and has come to
be regarded again as the heart of what it means “to be Russian.” This idea emphasizes the
community over the individual, disdains self-interest in favor of the common good,
privileges order above law and professes the belief that Russia is destined to embark on a
different if not hostile road to that taken by the West.6 Ignorant of these principles,
dark-skinned non-Slavs staying in Moscow ﬂaunt their goods in the capital’s markets
which they “buy low and sell high,” prey on innocent Muscovites as drug traffickers,
weapons dealers, auto thieves and racketeers, act as parasites on the capital’s resources
without giving anything back to the community in return and thereby jeopardize the

Russian idea’s vision of reestablishing a community distinct from and morally superior to

what exists in the West. This is a serious offense for McDaniel emphasizes that Russians
have always been able to acknowledge the advanced nature of Western society while
emphasizing the superiority of the Russian community.7 Even under Communism the
Party stressed how the Soviet socialist community with its basis on the multinational
ﬁiendship of peoples was superior to the Western capitalist community. In order to retain
its historical claim, Luzhkov has called for the physical expulsion of dark-skinned
non-Russians (especially Caucasians) from the post-Communist community.

The source base of this paper rests largely on information found in Russian
newspapers and in reports published by Human Rights Watch/Helsinki organization. In
regards to newspapers it is necessary to acknowledge the ownership of and/or political
orientations of each. Nezavisimaya gazeta, Novia Izvestia and Kommersant-Daily as
controlled by Boris Berezovsky and Izvestz'a as operated by Vladimir Potation and the
Inters group were generally considered supporters of President Yeltsin rather than
Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov. The Moscow Times is owned by Independent Media
overseen by Derek Saucer which disseminates the magazines Cosmopolitan and Playboy.
Vladimir Gusinsky and Media—Most control the Sem Dnei Publishing House which
produces the newspaper Sevognya. Moskovskz'ye novosti has virtually lacked a consistent
political orientation while another paper Moskovsky komsomolets controlled by a magnate
typically has supported Luzhkov.8 While this work acknowledges the fact that
newspapers operated by Yeltsin allies had a vested interest in depicting one of his political
adversaries, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov unfavorably, it does not dismiss their
arguments as invalid. This is because condemnations of Luzhkov and of what transpired
in the capital were not conﬁned to one publication and were largely supported by the
investigations of the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki organization. For example, Izvestia
writers have been joined by Sevognya, Kommersant—Daily and most importantly Human
Rights Watch/Helsinki activists in denouncing the registration system as “antiforeigner

legislation,” as harking back to the days of serfdom and as signaling the return to a

4

historically disgraceﬁil era.9 F urtherrnore, papers that were considered to be in Yeltsin’s
corner criticized him for his indifference to the racist actions of Moscow law enforcement
ofﬁcials during the October 1993 state of emergency. 10 Finally, despite the fact that
Izvestia journalists have been at the forefront of denouncing the mayor for his campaigns
to rid the capital of individuals of Caucasian nationality, that newspaper along with
Moskovsky Novosti has published several reports about the high representation of
Caucasians in the capital’s crime scene.

Chapter one examines how the Soviet Union was ofﬁcially imagined as an
all-inclusive, multinational community and how ofﬁcials used Moscow as the stage from
which to project this image to the world. It also explores the conceptualization of the
relationship between Russians and non-Russians (both Soviet and non-Soviet nationalities)
and brieﬂy discusses the purpose of the Soviet registration system.

The collapse of the Soviet Union precipitated three major processes important to
this work: the re-imagining of the Moscow community; the reconceptualization of the
relationship between Russians and non-Russians; and the consequent racialization of the
representatives of these non-Russian nationalities who are living and/or working in the
capital. Chapters two and three examine the nature of these new conceptualizations and
the racialization process and the means by which they have been accomplished, namely
through ofﬁcial discourse and the registration system. The processes of
reconceptualization and racialization are interrelated and complementary, for by racializing
dark-skinned non-Russians as “blacks” Moscow authorities have then deliberately
re-imagined the capital as white and Slavic in order to exclude them. More speciﬁcally,
chapter two concentrates on how a discourse of disorder has racialized people of color,
incited racist feelings among the populace and has allowed Moscow to operate above
federal and international law. Chapter three is divided into two parts and focuses on how
administrative and law enforcement ofﬁcials’ enforcement of the registration system has

racialized dark-skinned non-Russians in the capital.

CHAPTER 1: THE SOVIET UNION AS THE FRIENDSHIP OF PEOPLES

The Soviet Union was ofﬁcially imagined as an inclusive community founded on
the friendship of the multinational peoples who inhabited its borders. Soviet leaders began
to systematically emphasize the peace, solidarity and friendship which existed among them
in the mid-19305 when the country was faced with German rearrnament, the Spanish civil
war and conﬂict between China and J apan.l The Party enlisted historians to depict this
ﬁiendship of peoples as having deep historical roots. The official version of history that
consequently emerged in the history textbooks of each of the national republics was that
“‘in the struggle against the common enemy, Tsarism, the ﬁiendship of our peoples took
on its initial shape...It became a brotherhood of peoples based on the greatest historical
cause, on the construction of a new Socialist society, on the movement towards
Communism.”2 Although it began to develop under tsarism, this friendship reached its
highest level under Communism. In 1950 Khrushchev declared this ﬁiendship of peoples
to be that which “make(s) our Motherland invincible.”3

Ofﬁcial rhetoric essentially attributed the indestructibility of this ﬁiendship of
peoples and the strength of this inclusive multiethnic, multiracial community to the Party’s
promotion of national differences. Lenin had consistently taught his disciples that
encouraging the development of non-Russians’ national identities would lead to
intemationalism.4 Brezhnev testiﬁed to the wisdom of his teacher’s paradoxical
instruction when he declared some ﬁfty years later that “‘Socialism has long...proved that
the more intense is the growth of each national republic, the more apparent becomes the
process of internationalization.”5 In his essay “The USSR. as a Communal Apartment”
Yuri Slezkine discusses how the Soviet system promoted this development of
non-Russians’ national identities by giving each of them their own room which they were
advised to decorate and adorn. Because of this Leninist formula for intemationalism even
in the late 193 Os when the number of ofﬁcially sponsored rooms or non—Russian

nationalities decreased as the size and decoration of the Russians’ room became more

elaborate, Moscow never launched any concerted effort to eradicate the national identity
of these national minorities but instead encouraged the remaining rooms to become even
more distinct from their neighbors.6

The Party’s intention in actively encouraging the development of the non-Russian
nationalities was to make them deﬁnitively distinct from but not the equal of Russians.7
Although Soviet propaganda persistently emphasized the equality that existed among large
and small nations, in practice Russians occupied another level in this friendship of peoples.
Soviet leaders did not use this inequality which existed between themselves and
non-Russians to render the latter “alien,” “black” or even “criminal” and never blatantly
declared Russians to be a superior people. Instead they “euphemized” or “sanitized” their
superiority by framing it in positive familial terms which elevated Russians to the role of
big brother or ﬁrst among equals. In December 1936 Pravda characterized the Great
Russian People as “‘ﬁrst among equal participants of this brotherly union of peoples.’”8
The 1955 Kratky Filosofsky Slovar stated that “‘all peoples and nations of the USSR,
see in the great Russian people their best ﬁiend and guide, their elder brother, who played
a decisive role in the struggle for the victory of the proletarian revolution and triumph of
socialism.”9 With Russians as big brother, the non-Russian nationalities consequently
emerged as “little brothers,” faithful Communists ever ready to come to the aid of their
Russian big brother to whom they were expected to show their eternal gratitude.

Non-Russians were required to express eternal gratitude to their Russian elder
brother because as little brothers they were considered the chief beneﬁciaries of the Soviet
system for which he was responsible for founding. Jeffrey Brooks emphasizes how
propaganda made it clear that non-Russians like Stakhanovites “could be nothing outside
the (Soviet) system.”10 In 1942 Kalinin, Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme
Soviet expounded on the beneﬁts of the Soviet system on the Caucasus which he
characterized as “‘the most enlightening demonstration of the reforming beneﬁcial effect

of the Soviet system on the psychology and character of people...The Caucasians have

now become a social people who see in the collective system their bulwark, the foundation
of material prosperity and a higher intellectual life...the whole Caucasus has become one
mountain village for its peoples. The whole Soviet land, from border to border, has
become their beloved home. ”’11 Pravda likewise attributed Uzbeks’ and other
non-Russians’ achievements to the Soviet system “rather than to indigenous pre-Soviet
Uzbek (and other non-Russian) traditions.” Propaganda portrayed these national
minorities as making pilgrimages to Moscow to present their “cultural offerings” to their
elder Russian brother to whom they owed their uplifted existence. These offerings
included everything from musical and theatrical performances to art and architectural
exhibits. 12

Non-Russians themselves followed the script and supported their ofﬁcial image as
little brothers and the system’s chief beneﬁciaries by consistently giving thanks and praise
to their elder brother for their civilized existence. The Kirghiz poet Dzhangaziev wrote
“‘Thank you from the land of the Kirghiz,...Thank you, beloved Russian brother, to whom
I owe my life.”’ A national poet from the Uzbek SSR, Gaﬁir Gulyam wrote “‘You are
kind, you are truly greater, Oh how dear you are to me, my own, my Russian
brother-elder! ’” Similar sentiments were captured in the non-Russian republics’ national

(LC

anthems. The Azeri SSR anthem sang of how the mighty Russian brother is bringing to
the land the triumph of freedom and...we have strengthened our friendship and our kinship
with him.” In November 1959 Chairman of the Presidium of the Uzbek Supreme Soviet
declared that “‘As in a family the elder brother is always regarded with esteem and
respect, so in our great family of peoples we regard with respect, esteem, love, devotion
and ﬁdelity our dear elder brother, the great Russian people from which all peoples are
learning to build a new life, and are learning courage, heroism, self-sacriﬁce and
wisdom.’”13

Soviet leaders sought to convince themselves and the world that the Soviet Union

was in both theory and practice an inclusive, multinational community based on the

friendship of peoples. Consequently, in the mid-193 Os in conjunction with the ﬁiendship
discourse officials launched a concerted effort to make non-Russians more visible and
thereby render the imagined community as real as possible. Pictures of non-Russians
donning ethnic garb and/or hairstyles began to appear more frequently in the all-union
press, those who looked most distinctly non-Russian were particularly exhibited as labor
heroes at agricultural conferences and served as delegates at republican and national
congresses.14 Thus especially during the 19305, to “look non-Russian” was to some
degree advantageous for members of non-Russian nationalities.

Soviet leaders also promoted intercultural activity in order to make non-Russians
more visible and to further prove to themselves and the global audience that the Soviet
Union was genuinely an inclusive, multinational community. Stalin proclaimed that all
Soviet nationalities uniquely enriched world culture and beginning in the mid-193 Os he
called on them to share these valuable contributions as part of this friendship of peoples.
Armenian music was consequently played on Kazakh radio, Uzbek art was displayed in
Azerbaijan galleries, and Tajik poetry was recited in the Ukrainian SSR.15 Most
signiﬁcantly, because Soviet leaders used Moscow as the primary stage from which to
project this image of the Soviet Union as a multinational community, the policy of
intercultural activity systematically brought non-Russians to Moscow. Beginning in 1936
and continuing until the outbreak of war a series of festivals known as dekady (ten-day
period) were held in the capital which allowed for the exhibition of ofﬁcially sponsored
non-Russian people. In the ﬁrst year this included Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Georgians, in
1937 Uzbeks and Tajiks, in 1938 Azeris, in the fourth year Kirghiz and Armenians made
the pilgrimage and ﬁnally 1940 welcomed Azeris, Tajiks and Belorussians.16 Yuri
Slezkine characterized this type of intercultural activity as “one of the most visible aspects
of Soviet official culture” which was ingrained in popular consciousness from the

mid-1930s through 1980.17

As a result of the Soviet state’s persistent commitment to projecting the image of
the Soviet Union as an all-inclusive community based on the peace and friendship of
peoples, even when this “brotherhood” started to crumble, Soviet television news
broadcasts initially provided no coverage of the ethnic strife which erupted in various
regions. 18 Such coverage would have required Moscow to both depict non-Russians in a
negative manner and to explain how ethnic conﬂict which was ofﬁcially non—existent
existed. Thus the ofﬁcial images disseminated throughout the union and most especially
on display in Moscow over a nearly ﬁfty year period were non-Russians as cultural
ﬁgures: Azeris as artists, Armenians as poets, Georgians as musicians and Uzbeks as
dancers. These ofﬁcial images of non-Russians would be replaced in the post-Communist
period by Azeris as drug traffickers, Armenians as number—runners, Georgians as car
thieves and Uzbeks as weapons dealers.

The Party used Moscow as the stage from which to project the image of the Soviet
Union as an all-inclusive, multinational community by systematically inviting individuals
from Aﬁican and Asian countries to study in its institutions of higher learning.19 These
students, in whom Soviet leaders clearly had a vested interest because of their desire to
spread socialism to Third World nations were provided with scholarships, generous
stipends and the opportunity to be ﬁrsthand witnesses to the workings of the Communist
system without any fear for their safety.20 The clearest example of this accommodation of
students from Third World countries can be found in the establishment of the Patrice
Lumumba Friendship University the announcement of which was made by Khrushchev in
February 1960 during his address at the Hadja Mada University in Indonesia.21 In 1958
when Soviet leaders started accepting signiﬁcantly larger numbers of students into the
capital’s university system from Asia, Africa and Latin America, they discovered the
problems of training foreign students in regular higher education facilities. The Friendship
University which was renamed Patrice Lumumba University in 1961 after the Congolese

revolutionary’s assassination was to address these problems.22

10

Unlike the average Soviet institution of higher learning which Africans and Asians
also continued to attend, the Friendship University was organized to cater to the needs
and interests of African, Asian, and Latin American students. Thus, for example visual
learning was often emphasized over the straight lecture and students were not required to
study the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (C.P.S.U.) as they would
have been had they attended any other Soviet educational institutions.23 If the student
lacked a high school level education or could not speak Russian s/he was enrolled in a
three—year or one-year preliminary training program which would precede his four year
academic or ﬁve year medical program.24 In addition to their monthly stipend, students
did not have to pay for transportation to Moscow, for their tuition, textbooks, housing,
furniture, winter clothing and medical care.25 The Soviet Union’s stated mission in
opening its universities to foreign students and in establishing the Friendship University
was to eradicate the backwardness which was the legacy of Western imperialism. Moscow
ofﬁcials claimed they were helping the newly independent countries remain independent by
educating and training specialists.26 The Friendship University observed the Independence
Days of the students’ various home countries in order to emphasize this mission.27 Soviet
ofﬁcials’ primary objective was therefore no longer to produce good Communists but to
prepare Africans to run non-Communist institutions including professional academies,
student agencies and trade unions.28

Soviet leaders were largely successful in presenting the country’s image as an
inclusive, multinational community. Many African Americans ﬂocked to the Soviet Union
because they did believe in this ofﬁcial image of the Soviet Union as a community which
had discovered the cure for racism.29 Communist leaders had invited many of them to live
and work in Moscow as a means of furthering the image of the Soviet Union as an
all—inclusive, multinational community. These invitees included African American
technicians, cultural ﬁgures, pilots and skilled laborers both those who were and were not

afﬁliated with the Communist Party. African Americans were well-represented in the

11

Communist University for the Toilers of the East (also known as the Far East University)
in Moscow which the Comintern had established in 1921 for the instruction of Communist
Party leaders. The Party made their black invitees as visible as possible by giving them
places on reviewing stands in Red Square for May Day celebrations and having them
elected to the Moscow Soviet alongside such ﬁgures as Stalin, Molotov and
Khrushchev.30 The state also sought to make African Americans feel as welcome as
possible by making them the beneﬁciaries of a reverse racial inequality which allowed them
to jump to the front of long lines, to receive goods and services for free and to earn high
salaries.31 The majority of these black pilgrims who came on speciﬁc Moscow invitation
were not displeased with their ﬁndings. Paul Robeson explained how “in the Soviet Union
I felt like a person for the ﬁrst time.” Robeson marveled at how in school children were
taught to treat people equally and how no thought was even given to skin color.32
Yelena Khanga whose African—American grandfather moved to the Soviet Union in 1931
to help build this new society without racism testiﬁed to this. In her autobiography Soul
to Soul, Khanga explained how unlike blacks in American schools she was “never made to
feel less intelligent, less capable, less likely to achieve than my white schoolmates.”33
William Patterson was impressed by the absence of racism when he was sent to the Soviet
Union by the Communist Party Worker’s School in 1927 to study its cure. During his
four year residence in Moscow Harry Haywood was subjected to only one instance of
racial insult and when this occurred the man (who reportedly was drunk) was detained by
bystanders until the police arrived.34

Although the Soviet Union did become a “mecca of human rights” for oppressed
people of color all around the world, Aﬁican and Asian students were not always treated
in a manner which was consistent with oﬁicial discourse. One African student who left his
program prior to its completion testiﬁed to this slippage between image and reality when
he explained that “Russians consider us an inferior race and treated us accordingly.”

Many Russians resented blacks because of the privileged treatment they received and

12

because they were never as grateful and subservient to their gracious Communist
benefactors as everyday Russians thought they should be.35 Signiﬁcantly, the racism these
students experienced took place on an individual rather than ofﬁcial level. Etienne Balibar
has emphasized the importance of making the distinction between sociological racism
(racism from below) and institutional/ofﬁcial racism (racism from above) and this is
especially important when comparing the Communist and post-Communist periods.36

The integral difference between these two eras is that the popular racism that
African and Asian students experienced was not supported by ofﬁcial racism under Soviet
rule. Instead, Soviet leaders counteracted it by systematically pumping out positive
propaganda in an attempt to demonstrate to the world and to themselves that the Soviet
Union as proven in the Moscow experience was an inclusive community based on racial
equality,37 Moscow released booklets lauding the merits of Lumumba and Moscow State
Universities by incorporating the voices and testimony of the African and Asian students
whom they so nobly served. In striking contrast to the comments of the African student

at

mentioned above, Kom David Dagobert explained that After the lecture (at Moscow
State University) we would often go for a walk and wherever we went, Muscovites would
come up to us, ask us about our country and our people. We saw what warm feelings that
Russians cherished for us and how concerned they were for the destiny of long—suffering
Africa.”38 Other students were quoted praising the Soviet Union for schooling them in
modern science and for helping Africa truly liberate itself.39 Two separate students from
India and Sudan claimed that Muscovites demonstrated their inﬁnite hospitality
“everywhere-in the streets, at the University, or in their homes” and thus “‘we are never
allowed to feel, even for a moment, that we are in a strange country?”40 Gunad Prasad
Mukerdji explained that what really “strikes us Hindus...is the complete absence of
racialism or discrimination.” He emphasized that as testimony to Russians’ commitment
to humanism everyone from Somalis to Vietnamese received equal medical treatment in

Moscow hospitals.41

The relationship between Russians on the one hand and Aﬁicans,
African-Americans and Asians on the other was not couched in familial terms as was their
relationship with the non-Russian Soviet nationalities. Instead of the big brother/little
brother dichotomy, Africans and African-Americans’ subordination to Russians was
framed in a positive manner in a teacher/student dichotomy. Russians instructed them in
the tenets of Communism and schooled them in the practical skills they needed to remain
independent of Western capitalists. While Soviet leaders portrayed white Western
capitalists in a blatantly negative manner, the images of Africans and African-Americans
disseminated in the Soviet media and schools were consistently as victims of oppression.
This imagery ﬁieled Russians feelings of intellectual superiority42 and paved the way for
Aﬁicans’ and Aﬁican-Americans’ post-Communist racialization.

Communist leaders never used the registration system as a tool by which to
racialize non—Russians in Moscow. Soviet society was ofﬁcially imagined as an inclusive
community and the propiska or residence permit system merely allowed authorities to
guarantee that everyone had his proper place. The Bolsheviks had initially abolished the
internal passport and residence registration systems through a 20 June 1923 statute “On
the Establishment of Identity” because they constrained an individual’s freedom of
movement.43 However in 1932, Soviet leaders reinstituted the residence permit system
thereby making possession of a propiska mandatory for all citizens sixteen years and older
in order to receive an education, get married, and obtain legal employment. They justiﬁed
such actions on the ideological level as the necessary means by which to expel “class, alien
elements” while more practically seeking to curtail the growth of large cities by curbing
the exodus from the famine ravaged countryside.44 The registration system required an
individual to obtain formal permission to live and work in Moscow and this permission if
granted took the form of a stamp in the person’s internal passport.45 This regime allowed
law enforcement ofﬁcials to monitor peoples’ movement by conﬁning every citizen to one

legal place of residence.

l4

During the Communist era, Moscow’s status as the “most privileged city” in the
Union where consumer goods were relatively abundant and its place as the stage from
which the image of the Soviet Union as an inclusive community was projected rendered
the Moscow propiska highly coveted and difﬁcult to obtain.46 Stalin had done his best to
establish Moscow as the center of Soviet life and a visit to Moscow for an honored
kolkhoznik was considered a reward in itself.47 Although Moscow remained an
overwhelmingly Russian city in terms of population throughout the Soviet period,
Russians could never legitimately claim the city as their own. Its primary identity was as
the capital of a multinational Union of peoples and in 1960 Brezhnev declared that “‘to
make Moscow a model Communist City is the bounden duty of the entire Soviet
People.”’48 For these reasons, Moscow occupied a special place in Soviet legislation.
Special laws were instituted in April 1958 which invested Moscow authorities with the
power to cleanse the capital of individuals who were engaged in socially suspect
activity.49 Residence decrees were periodically adopted (on 25 June 1964 and 27 April
1972) which rendered entry into Moscow increasingly difﬁcult and an extremely detailed
set of passport laws (were implemented in February 1975 which) identiﬁed the
twenty-three categories of people who could be registered as residents of the capital.50

By euphemizing the existing power relations between the Russian and non-Russian
people through the use of the big brother/little brother dichotomy, Soviet ofﬁcials were
claiming that this friendship had become so close and had reached such a high level under
Communism that the Russian and non-Russian nationalities considered each other as not
merely friends but brothers. Little brother status as the system’s principal beneﬁciaries
meant wide cultural autonomy but denial of the full political power which was integral to
Russians’ identity as the elder or superior sibling. This ﬁrndamental component of ethnic
Russian identity which denied non-Russians their political independence ultimately proved
problematic for the existence of this brotherhood of peoples. This is because political

independence was the end goal of all the nationalistic rhetoric which the Soviet system

15

paradoxically fueled.51 Non-Russians renounced the ﬁdelity and respect which the system
claimed they owed their “dear elder brother” by seceding from the Soviet Union thereby
ending the ﬁiendship of peoples which in the words of Khrushchev had been the source of
the country’s “invincibility.” Moscow was able so quickly to portray and conceive of their
former little brothers as criminals and parasites because according to the logic of the
ofﬁcial Soviet script non-Russians’ foolish secession from the system in which they were
the chief beneﬁciaries simply meant their degeneration to their pre-Soviet uncivilized
existence. Non-Russians’ degeneration to criminals justiﬁed Moscow’s reimagining of the

community to exclude them.

CHAPTER 2: THE FALL OF COMMUN ISM AND THE RISE OF THE STATE
OF DISORDER

In a work entitled the Foundations of Ethnography from the early 1970s, Soviet
ethnographers made it a point to note in their discussion of the physical anthropolgy of
ethnic groups of the Caucasus that “the majority of the population is dark in
pigmentation...(but that)...Lighter color hair and eyes can be found among the population
of Western Georgia in the mountains of the High Caucasus and also among the Abkhaz
and Adyges.”1 For roughly seventy years, the Soviet system had worked to develop the
distinct national identities of many of the peoples from this region and other non-Slavic
areas, but the fall of communism has reduced all of them to their “dark pigmentation.”

In his essay, “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusions,
Fabrication and Choice,” Haney-Lopez explained how when Mexico gained its
independence, American leaders did not conceive of its residents as a race. However
twenty years later, due to changes in American interests, in dominant ideology and in
political, social and economic conditions, “Mexicans” became racialized or degraded in
racial terms, and transformed from a nationality to a race.2 Upon the fall of the Soviet
Union, the dominant ideology obviously collapsed and Russians’ interests and the political,
social and economic conditions in Moscow underwent drastic changes. Ofﬁcial
propaganda about non-Russian nationalities and the ﬁiendship of peoples disappeared as
the little brothers turned ungratefully on their Russian big brother, gaining their
independence and the complete political power which he had consistently denied them and
which had been so integral to his national identity. Russians sought to maintain some form
of inequality (no longer in its positive, familial form) between themselves and their
non-Russian former colonials as a result of the latter’s acquisition of complete political
independence. The former colonial master accomplished this by racializing the non-Slavic
nationalities, by systematically speaking of them and treating them in a demeaning manner.

Through this dehumanizing rhetoric and policy, ofﬁcials lumped together all dark-skinned

l7

 

 

non-Slavs irrespective of their national differences into the discursively constructed
category “blacks.” The myriad of diﬁ’erent nationalities from the Caucasus were especially
reduced in legislation, the media and popular thinking into what quickly became the
extremely derogatory if not racial categories of “individuals of Caucasian nationality” and
“Caucasians.”3

A class component clearly exists in this post-Communist racialization process for
all ofﬁcial rhetoric and corresponding measures against non-Slavic nationalities have been
geared towards portraying the former little brothers as “criminals” and “parasites.”
Consequently, for “Azeris,” “Georgians,” “Chechens” the fall of Communism has meant
their transformation from what the Communist era had made distinct nationalities who
contributed positively and uniquely to world culture into a criminal Caucasian race. As
the term “little brothers” suggests, initially authorities targeted the dark-skinned male in
their racializing discourse and enforcement of the registration system and not his female
counterpart. The man of color was racialized as predatory and criminal (morally weak) as
opposed to eﬁ’eminate and physically weak and his mere presence in the public sphere was
denounced as dangerous. The image of the dark-skinned woman as criminal and or
dangerous has not been as readily available to authorities because Moscow’s ethnic
criminal organizations are predominately male and the Caucasian vendors in the capital’s
markets who are resented for “buying low and selling high” are overwhelmingly men.
However, because race has its own “autonomous effectivity” which renders every
dark-skinned individual suspect4 it is not surprising that by 1997 law enforcement ofﬁcials
began deﬁning women of color as a threat to societal order by increasingly subjecting
them to the daily harassment that dark-skinned men had been victims of since the Soviet
Union’s collapse.

The dark-skinned woman poses a different type of threat to the capital’s law and
order than her male counterpart. Moscow ofﬁcials do not necessarily conceive of her as

constituting disorder for the capital in terms of crime but see the woman of color as

18

 

threatening disorder in the sense of placing a greater burden on the capital’s resources.
This is because she is frequently accompanied by her children and her presence often
communicates to city oﬂicials and residents that the man to whom she is almost always
connected intends on staying in the city beyond the short-term period. The dark-skinned
woman who is in Moscow by herself can also be considered dangerous because she
constitutes a threat to the sexual purity of the newly imagined white, Slavic community
and to the maintenance of the strict boundary between black and white.

Haney-Lopez emphasized that races are relationally constructed and that the
“denigration of Mexicans” was inseparable from “the celebration of Anglos, something
Etienne Balibar deﬁnes as hetero-referential and auto-referential racism.5 Similarly, the
denigration of Chechens, Azeris, Armenians and Uzbeks is inseparable from the
celebration of Russians for by racially deﬁning individuals of Caucasian and Central Asian
nationality Russians are also racially deﬁning themselves. Therefore Russians have gone
from their role as big brother to that of racial superior.

The collapse of the Soviet Union similarly rendered Africans’ and Asians’ identity
as students of Communism and the corresponding teacher/student dichotomy irrelevant.
Similar to the big brother/little brother relationship between Russians and the Soviet
national minorities, Russians reconceptualized what had essentially been a positive power
imbalance or unequal relationship between themselves and Aﬁicans and Asians
(epitomized in the teacher/student dichotomy) into a negative one, racial superior/inferior.
Consequently, Russians, the former teacher became racial superior by remaining
indifferent to and actively encouraging the racialization of Africans and Asians.

Along with the racial, class and gender components of the racialization process

)7 6‘

which has rendered the man of color “black, criminal” and “predatory,” the process also
contains a religious component which renders the dark-skinned Caucasian or Central
Asian “Muslim.” As discussed earlier, Tim McDaniel argues that to an unparalleled degree

Russian national consciousness always has been deﬁned in opposition to something else.6

19

Accordingly, the fall of Communism has caused increasingly more Russians to identify
themselves as Orthodox while prompting Russian ofﬁcials to overemphasize the religious
identity of Caucasians and Central Asians as Muslims. Referring to oneself as Orthodox
has become another way of identifying oneself as an ethnic Russian and therefore does not
necessarily mean the person is a believer, attends Church or partakes in the Sacraments.
Similarly, Russian officials’ policy of exaggerating individuals of Caucasian and Central
Asian nationalities’ afﬁliations with Islam has inadvertently inspired more of them to
identify themselves as Muslims.7

These developments in identity formation are most relevant in Moscow where the
equation of dark-skin with Islam and crime has become commonplace and where
Orthodoxy as a component of Russian national identity has become most popular. While
more Russians have come to consider themselves Orthodox this has especially been the
case among Russians who live in Moscow. In 1993, among all Russians 35 percent of
those within the 55-90 age group identiﬁed themselves as Orthodox, 32 percent in the
16-25 group, and 27 percent in both the 26-40 and 41-54 age groups. Among Muscovites
the differences in percentages are signiﬁcant: 51 percent of those who ranged in age from
55-90 identiﬁed themselves as Orthodox, as did 58 percent of Muscovites in the 16-25 age
group, 45 percent in the 26-40 group and 48 percent among individuals 41-54 years of
age.8 Since the fall of Communism Moscow leaders have symbolically reafﬁrmed their
commitment to the city’s identity as the Third Rome by undertaking the very expensive
project of reconstructing the Cathedral of Christ the Savior which Stalin had destroyed in
the 19305 and which in many ways has become the capital’s new deﬁning symbol.9

In July 1994, residents on Ostrovityanov Street in Moscow desecrated the stone
which marked the place for the future site of an Islamic Center and had written “Blacks
Out” on a nearby apartment building. When interviewed inhabitants of this neighborhood
revealed that they equated the three elements of “maﬁosi-Caucasian-Muslim.” They

expressed concern that they might have to call on the Cossacks to defend them from the

20

“blacks” (namely Caucasians, Azeris, Chechens, Dagestanis) who had invaded the capital
with their criminal ways and threatened its identity as the Third Rome with their designs to
make it “the Second Mecca.”10 The Congress of Russia’s Communities organized a
demonstration against the building of this Islamic Cultural Complex and incited the crowds
with exhortations that “Your children will be dismembered and roasted on skewers for
shish kebab.’” They also drew up a petition to Luzhkov in which they warned that the
construction of the Muslim complex would precipitate an increase in the incidence of
crime and drug addiction, which would mean undermining our Christian foundations and
threaten(ing) our safety. ”’1 1
With the fall of the Soviet Union, Moscow lost its identity as the capital of a
multinational union of peoples and its value as the stage from which Soviet ofﬁcials
projected the image of a country that had discovered the cure for racism. Just as
non-Russians were no longer conceived of as little brothers or students of Communism,
Moscow was no longer conceived as the capital of Communism or of a multinational
brotherhood of peoples. Corresponding with the official reconceptualization of the
relationship between Russians and non-Russians from big brother/little brother or
teacher/student to racial superior/inferior, the fall of Communism has also precipitated the
reconceptualization of the capital’s community from multinational and Communist to
exclusively white and democratic. Moscow authorities have used ofﬁcial discourse and
the capital’s registration system as the primary and complementary tools12 by which to
racialize people of color in the capital while re-imagining the capital’s community as white
and Slavic in order to exclude them. Whereas Communist leaders had used ofﬁcial
discourse to praise non—Russian peoples, post-Communist municipal authorities use it to
systematically degrade and dehumanize them. Post-Communist Moscow ofﬁcials have
also discovered a new use for the Soviet era registration system. They have used it as one

of the primary tools to racialize non—Russians.

21

The Discourse of Disorder and the Racialization of People of Color

Moscow ofﬁcials have used a discourse of disorder in which outsiders are
denounced for allegedly precipitating a crisis of law and order in order to racialize
dark-skinned non-Russians in the capital. Both ethnic Russian colonists and non-Russian
colonials are among the outsiders in Moscow who have come from various corners of the
empire and who have thus precipitated this alleged crisis. However, it is the latter’s
presence which is of the greatest concern to Moscow ofﬁcials. Dark-skinned former
colonials who serve as the most visible reminders of empire are those whom authorities
are looking to defend the capital against by racializing them and by re-imagining the
capital’s community as white and Slavic in order to exclude them. However Moscow
ofﬁcials always codify their fears of a “threatening black presence” in the capital as a

,7 ‘6

concern with “migration, the inﬂux of outsiders,” or “the prevalence of unregistered
individuals.” Thus the terms “outsiders” and “unregistered individuals” consistently serve
as code words for people of color. 13 Municipal authorities routinely characterize
outsiders as an “inherently destabilizing force,” as criminals who precipitate an increase in
crime, and as parasites who overburden the capital’s resources and infrastructure. 14 They
have even warned that the large number of these outsiders regardless of whether they are
refugees, internally displaced persons, asylum-seekers or illegal immigrants, “threaten the
city with ‘pollution,’ ‘spreading of various diseases,’ and ‘economic damage.”’15
Whereas Communist authorities had considered the settlement of white, Slavic colonists
throughout the Soviet empire as beneﬁcial to the non-Slavic population, post-Communist
ofﬁcials denounce the settlement of dark-skinned former colonials among the indigenous
white Russian population in Moscow as a threat to the moral, sexual and socio-economic
order. 16 Muscovites, who are overwhelmingly of Slavic background, generally
understand that ofﬁcials are speaking of dark-skinned individuals when ofﬁcials use the

term “unregistered individuals” or “outsiders” simply because they are more inclined to

consider outsiders to be those who do not look like them.

22

According to the logic of this discourse of disorder, a crisis of law and order exists
in the capital because unregistered individuals (read: people of color) are inherently
criminal. The characterization of Moscow as a city under siege and in need of defense
from these outsiders is a necessary component of the discourse of disorder yet it is largely
inconsistent with reality. Human Rights Watch has reported that “Moscow accounts for
only a small share of Russia’s reﬁrgee population...Moscow’s share of CIS reﬁrgees and
displaced persons accounts for a mere 1.5 percent of the Russian Federation total,
whereas Moscow constitutes 5.8 percent of the country’s population.”17 However
because this ofﬁcial discourse of disorder has succeeded in racializing the outsider as
dangerous, “with danger deﬁned through presence, particularly masculine presence in the
public sphere,” regardless of the real number of outsiders in Moscow there are always too
many. 18 The mere presence of dark-skinned individuals in the community is considered a
threat to law and order because race has its own “autonomous effectivity” and thereby
renders every dark-skinned individual “a priori a suspect, a potential criminal; a potential
agitator.”19 By depicting people of color as disruptive and criminal serves as evidence
that they lack the basic qualities of decency and civility to even qualify for Muscovite
citizenship and admission to the imagined community.

The characterization of outsiders or unregistered individuals as criminals
constitutes an important aspect of the racialization of dark-skinned non-Russians and has
given rise to a separate discourse of black criminality. Although law enforcement ofﬁcials
have found that residence permits have never historically succeeded in deterring crime,
Luzhkov has consistently invoked the inordinate number of crimes outsiders commit as
justiﬁcation for preserving the registration system.20 Luzhkov’s dismissal of these
ﬁndings betrays that his real targets in maintaining the regime are not criminals (for this
would mean including Slavs and excluding a signiﬁcant number of non-Slavs) but instead
people of color whom he casts as the visible scapegoat for the capital’s crime problems in

order to justify their expulsion. Sergei A. Kovalyov, chairman of the Presidential Human

23

u“

Rights Committee astutely observed that 1t’s easier to catch blacks than to catch
criminals.”’21
Individuals from the Caucasus are especially singled out in this racializing
discourse of criminality. Journalists have accused the capital’s authorities of fostering
Muscovites’ associations of crime with Caucasians by consistently using the term
“Caucasian” when speaking of both the power of organized crime as well as of the
imperative to “cleanse” the capital.22 Luzkhov justiﬁed the deportation of large numbers
of Caucasians from Moscow by arguing that it was a necessary step in liberating the city
from criminal organizations.23 Izvestia ’5 Irina Dement’eva argued that ofﬁcials
frequently publish short reports about the crimes of the dark-skinned former little brothers
like Chechens, Azeris, and Georgians in great disproportion with the general crime
statistics in order to create an aura of danger around individuals of Caucasian nationality.
She condemned the Russian Ministry of Security for deliberately affecting how
uninformed Muscovites viewed Chechens on an everyday basis in the capital’s markets
and train stations through incessant discourse and media images about a “Chechen maﬁa”
consistently excluding from their portrayal of Moscow’s Chechen community the “good
Chechens,” namely the children, students on Moscow visas, workers, servants, maids,
cultural workers, scientiﬁc workers, economists, lawyers and police ofﬁcers who
positively contribute to the community.24 It would be inaccurate to argue that Caucasians
and dark-skinned individuals were not associated with crime at the popular level during
the Communist era. However the signiﬁcant difference between the Communist and
post-Communist periods is that these popular stereotypes are no longer being
systematically countered by ofﬁcial images of dark-skinned non-Russians as loyal
Communists and cultural ﬁgures. One woman from the Caucasus explained that “‘They
say we are lazy, that we steal, that we are parasites on the backs of Moscow...For
forty-ﬁve years I slaved for this country and now, because I am from the Caucasus, I’m

treated like a human being of the lowest sort.’”25 Actively promoting the Russian masses’

24

popular association of people of color (especially Caucasians) with crime translates into
greater support for Moscow when it pursues imperialist policies in regions of the former
empire.26

Although journalists have been at the forefront of condemning Moscow officials
for actively promoting the association of crime with individuals of Caucasian nationality,
they do acknowledge that this portrayal does have some basis in reality. In November
1992, as published in Moskovsky Novosti, the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department
(CID) reported that 82% of narcotic dealers were from the Transcaucasus. It explained
that the most powerful of the nationalities from this region were Azerbaijanis who
numbered between 15,000-20,000 and who had successfully taken over the business of the
Gypsies, Armenians, and Georgians in the capital’s drug market.27 In October 1994
Izvestia reported that Azeris had the most numerous criminal organizations in Moscow,
followed by Chechens, Dagestanis, Armenians, Georgians, Ingush and Tatars.28 Both
Izvestia and Moskovsky Novosti have discussed the specialties of each of these ethnic
criminal organizations: Chechens were prominent in the illegal export of petroleum,
petroleum products, rare—earth metals, as well as the banking and auto business (stolen
cars) which caused them to frequently clash with Russian criminal organizations; Azeris
controlled drug—trafﬁcking and monopolized trade in the capital’s markets; Tatars were
active in economic crime, blackmailing and racketeering; Armenians thrived in the business
of thefts from and of automobiles, swindling and bribery; Georgians mastered burglary,
theft, robbery and hostage-taking; Ingush were involved in gold mining and weapons;
Dagestanis specialized in prostitution as well as mercenary, violent and property crimes;
and Ossetians dabbled in the weapons trade, racketeering and blackmailing.29

In 1994, Izvestia reported that over ﬁfty percent of crimes were committed by
individuals from the Transcaucasus and North Caucasian republics and that over the past
seven years the criminal rate among representatives from these regions had increased by

250 percent.30 Two years later the ﬁgures Sevognya published from the deputy director

25

of Moscow’s regional administration for combating organized crime, Mikhail Suntsov,
were lower.31 Suntsov claimed that individuals from the North Caucasus and
Transcaucasia committed only 17% of all crimes propagated by non-Muscovites and he
attributed Caucasians’ involvement in criminal activity to the drastic deterioration in the
political and economic conditions in these areas and the active vigilance of local law
enforcement organizations. Furthermore, he argued that Azeris were still the most
habitual offenders in Moscow out of all individuals of Caucasian nationality because of the
signiﬁcant size of the capital’s Azeri diaspora. Suntsov explained that its well—organized
criminal operations had allowed it to gain a virtual monopoly over all street and market
trade (not to mention narcotics) through which they made signiﬁcant amounts of money
illegally and which they then “‘laundered’ in legal enterprises.”32 At the same time in
1996, Moscow law enforcement ofﬁcials expressed increasing concern about the growing
involvement of Armenian and Dagestani criminal organizations in “extortion involving
hostage-taking and racketeering targeted against commercial enterprises.” While the
activity of these ethnic criminal organizations was increasing, Suntsov explained that

“‘

Chechen groups had become less active and had ceased to have any substantial
inﬂuence on the crime situation in the capital’”33 Such ﬁgures are surprising when
considering the ofﬁcial image of Chechen as criminal which has emerged from Moscow
authorities’ discourse and policies. Although journalists and human rights ofﬁcials
acknowledge Caucasians’ high representation in the capital’s criminal underworld they
emphasize that this does not justify the denunciation and treatment of all individuals of
Caucasian nationality as criminals.

Another type of racializing discourse has emerged from the rhetoric of disorder
which like that of criminality singles out Caucasians. Human rights investigators and
Izvestia journalists have denounced Moscow ofﬁcials for particularly blaming Caucasians
not only for the capital’s escalating crime rate but also for its economic crisis.34 The

kulak was the class scapegoat in the Soviet countryside and his purported exploitation of

26

the poorer peasants demanded his liquidation. Similarly, individuals of Caucasian
nationality have become the scapegoats for the capital’s economic problems. A rhetoric
of economic exploitation not unlike its Soviet predecessor has risen up around Caucasians
which depicts them not only as criminals but also as ruthless exploiters who are
responsible for keeping the prices high in Moscow’s markets.3'5 Izvestia journalists have
emphasized how individuals from the Caucasus had not always been portrayed as or
perceived as the enemy but that this changed when reports began to circulate that “too
many of them” were ﬂooding into the capital, that merchants from this region were
draining Russia dry, and that it was their monopoly of the trade in Moscow’s markets that
kept prices so high.36 Human Rights Watch denounced municipal authorities for blaming
non-Russians especially those of Caucasian nationality for the capital’s severe economic
crisis which resulted from the collapse of the administrative-command economy.
Caucasians are an easy target for such accusations because during the Communist era,
they often served as small traders, selling fresh ﬁ‘uit, ﬂowers and vegetables in the markets
of northern Russia which they had obtained from the ‘black—market economy’ that thrived
in Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Ethnic Russians and other Slavs typically
were not as well represented in this type of work. Consequently, when the country
embarked on a path towards a free-market economy, individuals of Caucasian nationality
were in a more advantageous position to capitalize on it than Slavs who worked in
science, industry and other sectors of the economy. Caucasians’ greater experience with
private enterprise and their high level of geographical mobility as migrants rendered many
of them well-disposed for Moscow’s marketplaces. Therefore, Moscow authorities and
the mass media found it easy to make individuals of Caucasian nationality the scapegoat
for the capital’s economic problems and simply conducted “an ill-disguised racist
campaign demonizing traders” from this region.37
This ofﬁcial racialization of Caucasian merchants couched in a discourse of

economic exploitation has only ﬁreled racism at the popular level. Russians who consider

27

,3 (C

themselves “true” workers engaged in “honest productive” work resent Caucasian
traders for making more money than they do. Most of these sedentary Russians are
accustomed to the state trade and ﬁxed prices of the markets of the Communist period and
thus they disdain as criminal the Caucasian who buys low and sells high. Consequently,
the term “individual of Caucasian nationality” as used in post-Communist Moscow has
acquired the negative associations of “wild free market capitalism” and “speculation.”38
Thus the livelihood of many Caucasians which requires that they constantly be in
Moscow’s markets makes them even more visible and vulnerable to police abuse. As a
result of the October 1993 clean-up campaign of individuals of Caucasian nationality,
many of Moscow’s markets’ southern traders were expelled. Although these
dark-skinned merchants from the Caucasus had been consistently blamed for keeping the
prices high in Moscow through their alleged monopoly of the markets, Izvestia reported
that Luzhkov’s deportation of a signiﬁcant number of them had caused prices to increase
by 100-200 percent.39

By making outsiders the scapegoats for the capital’s crime, economic and even
housing problems, Moscow ofﬁcials have exonerated themselves and the political system
itself of any blame.40 The hetero-referential and auto-referential components of this
racializing discourse of disorder are quite evident for Slavic Moscow oﬁicials have posited
themselves as representatives of a superior law-abiding race41 by speaking of dark-skinned
outsiders as a destabilizing, criminal force. Municipal authorities have proven the validity
of the statement that racism historically reduces the complex to the simple because they
have blamed outsiders (read: dark-skinned individuals) as one uniﬁed, pathological whole
for all societal ills. In this manner, Moscow ofﬁcials have glossed over the real roots of
the capital’s major economic and societal problems and any chance of seriously addressing
them.42

The fall of Communism has made it easier for Muscovites to recognize the enemy

because he is no longer identiﬁed by his class status but by his skin color and non-Slavic

28

features. Although municipal ofﬁcials have provided the public (read: white residents of
Moscow) with some degree of reassurance by identifying groups outside the ofﬁcially
imagined community as the threat to society,43 their primary objective has been to
convince Muscovites that a crisis of law and order exists in the capital because of this
outsider or black presence. During the October 1993 state of emergency police posted
notices in buildings throughout the city calling on Muscovites to make use of the
twenty-four conﬁdential hot lines to give information on violations of the registration
system or on other issues concerning the preservation of societal order.44 The Ministry
of Internal Affairs and Luzhkov himself have called on upstanding Muscovites fulﬁll their
duty by notifying law enforcement agencies of the addresses of any individuals whom they
suspect to be residing in the capital without a residence permit. Izvestia condemned this
as an invitation for denunciation and claimed that such blatant recruitment of informers
was not even known in the Stalinist era.45 Inhabitants of the capital or of any city are
more inclined to suspect outsiders or unregistered individuals to be those who neither look
like them (because they have darker skin, eyes and hair) nor act like them (because they
have different customs). Human Rights Watch/Helsinki has thus criticized this policy for
both encouraging Muscovites to differentiate dark-skinned individuals ﬁom the rest of the
capital’s populace and for promoting the popular association of people of color with
crime.46 This is clearly a case where ofﬁcial racism reinforces popular racism for state
discourse about the disorder outsiders wrought only validates Muscovites’ condemnation
of their dark-skinned neighbors’ customs as barbaric. The “alien” cultures of people of
color in Moscow are considered to be either the cause if not the most blatant indication of
the breakdown of this putative traditional “Russian way of life.”47
In the aftermath of the October state of emergency, Nezavisimaya gazeta reported
that Muscovites considered Luzhkov justiﬁed in calling on them to inform on all “blacks”
who had invaded the capital’s community.48 Muscovites’ enthusiastic response to this

ofﬁcial call prompted the characterization of the capital as a “city of informants or

29

stool-pigeons,” a characterization which does not fall far from that of Soviet society.49 A
Georgian woman explained how old Russian women in her neighborhood serve as
informants to the cops on the activity of “individuals of Caucasian nationality” and how
they have notiﬁed the police when relatives have come to visit her in the capital.50 When
a Georgian woman from Abkahzia asked a police oﬂicer how they knew of her and her
family’s whereabouts since they had only recently arrived in the capital, he explained that
it “was very simple” because neighbors had learned to inform on “individuals of Caucasian
nationality” and police were vigilant “not dozing.”51 The registration system is supposed
to deter crime but the mayor’s call for informants only fosters corruption by allowing
neighbors of dark-skinned non-Russians to extort money from the latter as the price for
not informing them.52 Even after this officially declared October 1993 state of emergency
was over, municipal authorities were successﬁil in convincing Muscovites that a crisis of
law and order exists in the capital. In 1995, Helsinki Watch investigators reported that
most Muscovites considered law enforcement ofﬁcials’ campaigns against “blacks” in the
capital as a necessary “compromise” of human rights in order to uphold the law and order
to which true Muscovites (read: ethnic Russians) were entitled. Ninety percent of those
polled responded that they were “extremely worried” about Moscow’s crime rate and they
believed that the existence of the registration system was integral to the preservation of
law and order.53

Whereas the state originally refrained from providing coverage of the ethnic
conﬂicts which erupted throughout various regions of the empire, this policy changed by
the last days of the Soviet system and especially following its ofﬁcial collapse. This strife
conveniently worked to reinforce the former older brother’s claim that his non-Russian
younger brothers were incapable of governing themselves without his guidance and were
degenerating to their pre-Soviet uncivilized existence because of their secession. Human
Rights Watch/Helsinki accused the media of deliberately skewing its coverage of the

ethnic conﬂict which rocked places like Nagorno- Karabakh and Southern Ossetia.

30

Activists argue that instead of elaborating on the true causes and the arguments of both
sides the media depicted these ethnic conﬂicts as the result of mere hooliganism or as
rooted in the inherently violent nature of these non-Russian peoples. The media’s focus on
the violent deportations and pogroms rather than the peaceﬁil demonstrations and strikes
fostered among the populace the image of Caucasians as “wild mountain men” and ﬁrrther
reinforced the propaganda that they were nothing but violent barbarians without the
Soviet system.54 This kind of coverage deliberately affects how Muscovites View
representatives or reﬁrgees from these regions who arrive in the capital seeking refuge.
The only logical conclusion that Muscovites could draw is that their presence will only
succeed in threatening the capital’s law and order.

By seeking to convince Muscovites that a crisis of law and order exists in the
capital as a result of the threatening black presence, Moscow omcials have succeeded in
inciting popular racist feelings. The existence of chernofobiya, a fear of dark-skinned
non-Russians and Kavkazfobiya, a fear of individuals of Caucasian nationality at the
ofﬁcial level has only legitimized and promoted it among the Russian masses.55 The
ofﬁcial discourse of disorder and government efforts to foster the association of crime
with individuals of Causcasian nationality has fueled popular fears and stereotypes and
made it more acceptable to express them. In May 1992 Izvestia printed the letters of
numerous readers who lauded the actions of law enforcement officials against Chechens
during the February 1992 round-up, welcomed similar measures against Azeris and other
Caucasians, and insisted that the police’s brutality was necessary in order to protect the
inhabitants of Moscow and to cleanse it of the dregs of society who were taking over and
“buying (it) up.” Irina Dement’eva, an Izvestia journalist emphasized that such a public
response would have been unthinkable under Communism just a few years earlier.56

Russian newspapers publish advertisements of apartments for rent advising
individuals of Caucasian nationality against applying because only Russians qualiﬁed.57

The Ghanian writer, Kester Klomegah claimed that racist cartoons, pejorative terms and

31

inﬂammatory statements had become ﬁxtures in the Russian press and that in an article
about the murder of an African studying at Patrice Lumumba University, Moskovsky
Komsomolets had reported that this institution was one of the best for learning foreign
languages because “black monkeys” begin to speak Russian only a few months following
their departure from the Aﬁican rain forest. He criticized Argument)» 1' Fakty for referring
to the African students at Patrice Lumumba University as “children” and explained how

’3 6‘

racial slurs which included “ﬁlthy nigger, chocolate,” “black monkey or ape,”
“Snickers,” and “Uncle Ben” had become commonplace in the press and on the streets.58
Human Rights Watch/Helsinki investigators have similarly found that popular animosity
towards people of color had come to be expressed freely in public and that the racial cry
“You Blacks-Get out of Russia” was heard quite ﬁ'equently on the metro, on the buses
and in the markets.59

Moscow ofﬁcials’ success at inciting Muscovites’ racist feelings through their
discourse of disorder and corresponding racialization of dark—skinned non-Russians, has
been captured in statistics released by the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of
Sociological Research, its Center for the Sociology of Interethnic Relations as well as the
All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion and Human Rights Watch/Helsinki.
The Institute’s Center for the Sociology of Interethnic Relations reported that whereas in
1992, 32 percent of Muscovites polled responded that the city’s interethnic relations were
stable, this ﬁgure had plummeted to 14 percent in 1995. Likewise, those Muscovites who
sensed the existence of a certain degree of interethnic tension in the capital steadily
increased from 34 percent in 1992, to 46 percent in 1993 to 49 percent in 1994 and 51
percent in 1995.60

Municipal authorities have singled out individuals of Caucasian nationality in their
discourse of crime and disorder and statistics reveal that Muscovites have the most hostile
feelings towards these Caucasians. Human Rights Watch reported that between 30 and 34

percent of ethnic Russians surveyed in 1994 said they did not trust Azeris, Armenians, or

32

Chechens.61 The Institute of Sociological Research reported in late July 1996 that of all
non-Russian nationalities Muscovites had the most negative feelings towards Caucasians,
as 28 percent of those polled expressed animosity towards them, a number which they
claimed had increased signiﬁcantly from 18 percent in 1995.62 The All-Russian Center for
the Study of Public Opinion reported in May 1998 that Russians felt the most hostility for
Azeris and Chechens and that of all Russian cities ethnic intolerance was most rampant in
Moscow.63 One journalist has argued that anti-Caucasian sentiment has replaced
anti-Semitism as the major xenophobic force in the capital. Similarly, Human Rights
Watch/Helsinki investigators reported in 1998 that it was no longer Jews but ethnic
Caucasians who constituted the primary targets for the manipulation of popular ethnic
xenophobic feeling.64 This hardly means that Jews are no longer discriminated against or
that anti-Semitism is non-existent but simply that for the time being they have ceased to be
the main scapegoat.

Sevognya and Moskovsky komsomolets have both argued that racist feelings had
noticeably started to emerge in Moscow in 1993 and that by 1997 they had taken the
organized form of roughly twenty different skinhead groups whose members numbered
over 10,000. They explained that although they all had different orientations, these groups
targeted individuals who by their assessment were “non-white” including Aﬁicans,
African-Americans, Asians, Caucasians or essentially anyone whom authorities had
succeeded in racializing as blacks.65 The All-Russian Center for the Study of Public
Opinion reported that in the fall of 1993 more than 60 percent of Muscovites were to
some degree “anti-black.”66 Similarly, in 1996, the Center for the Sociology of
Interethnic Relations found that for Muscovites under the age of twenty, 58 percent had
negative feelings towards non-Russians.67 These ﬁndings indicate that ofﬁcial discourse
had succeeded in promoting the development of racist feelings among Muscovites thereby
creating a well-spring of approval for their racist enforcement of the registration system

which will be discussed below.

33

The Discourse of Disorder as the Justification for the Existence of the Registration
System

Moscow ofﬁcials have not only used the discourse of disorder to racialize
dark-skinned non-Russians and incite popular racism against them, but also to justify the
continued existence of the registration system and to allow Moscow to operate as its own
state above federal and international law. In 1991, the USSR Constitutional Supervision
Committee had abolished the residence permit system (effective 1 January 1992) because
it violated an individual’s right to freedom of movement. However cities which were
threatened by substantial levels of in-migration due to the empire’s collapse immediately
ratiﬁed municipal legislation reinstituting the regime.68 Moscow was especially affected
as individuals from various regions of the crumbling empire ﬂocked to the former capital,
ﬂeeing severe economic crises, ethnic conﬂicts and rampant unemployment, all of which
were direct or indirect products of Moscow’s policies. Mayor Yury Luzhkov adamantly
insisted that the only way to “defend” the capital from this “revenge” of the empire and
preserve stability and order was through the maintenance of the Soviet propiska. In
1993, President Yelstin sought to eliminate the last municipal vestiges of the registration
system through the ratiﬁcation of the constitutional law “On the Rights of Citizens of the
Russian Federation to the Freedom of Movement and Choice of Place of Arrival and
Residence within the Boundaries of the Russian Federation.” Luzhkov conveniently used
the October 1993 state of emergency in Moscow as reason to postpone and ultimately
avoid implementing this new constitutional law. Even after the end of this oﬁicially
declared state of emergency, Moscow’s mayor continued to claim that a crisis of law and
order still existed in the capital thereby precluding any chance of abolishing the propiska
and abiding by the Constitution in the near ﬁrture.

Luzhkov and Moscow ofﬁcials are actually the “winners” by depicting themselves
as losers in the struggle for the restoration of public order because it augments their power

and resource base.69 The Moscow Migration Service has been accused of actually

34

padding the ﬁgures of the number of unregistered individuals in the capital in order to
receive more money and justify their police measures against dark-skinned
“undesirables.”7O Most signiﬁcantly, Luzhkov’s successful employment of this discourse
of disorder allows Moscow to operate as its own state above federal law. A Federal
Migration Service ofﬁcial has responded to complaints about Moscow ofﬁcials’ efforts to
deport reﬁrgees by explaining that they were in Moscow not Russia and that Luzkhov’s
clean-up directives overrode federal legislation.71 Thus, whether or not a crisis actually
exists in the capital is unimportant. What is important is how municipal authorities have
used these claims to gain if not consolidate their desired position of power.72 1995
federal reforms recognized the need to maintain some form of registration system but
sought to replace the Soviet era propiska in the capital with a system which operated more
on the basis of notiﬁcation rather than permission. However, Luzhkov insisted that the
city would not observe the new federal law “On the Right of Citizens of the Russian
Federation to the Freedom of Movement, Choice of Place to Stay and Place of Residence
in the Conﬁnes of the Russian Federation’” until the crisis-like conditions which existed in
the capital ended.73

Consequently, Moscow’s registration system remained inconsistent with federal
standards and the capital continued to exist independent of the state. Newcomers to
Moscow are required to make their presence in the capital legal by registering with the
police or more speciﬁcally with the Directorate for Visas and Registration (UVIR) in
order to obtain a temporary residence permit. Whereas federal laws give an individual
three days in which to register if the visit is expected to exceed nine days, Moscow, aka.
“the city under siege” allots that same individual a mere twenty-four hours if the visit will
exceed two days. Human rights ofﬁcials point to the fact that this twenty-four hour period
is insufﬁcient time for people to learn how to register but that it conveniently beneﬁts the
city’s coffers by creating a signiﬁcant number of law breakers.74 Although all CIS citizens

must register within twenty-four hours of their arrival, dark-skinned non-Russians are the

35

ones most often caught as offenders because they are more visible on Moscow streets than
ethnic Russians who are also non-Muscovites. For the majority of the time this paper
covers this temporary residence permit was valid for a maximum of forty-ﬁve days and
once those forty-ﬁve days expired the person had to go through the bureaucratic hassle of
trying to extend that stay or else be subjected to steep ﬁnes if not ultimate expulsion.

A 9 July 1997 decree extended the maximum time period for which a newcomer
was initially allowed to register from this forty-ﬁve days to six months. Although the
decree also reduced the registration fee signiﬁcantly from 1.5 million (at the time roughly
$259) to 250,000 rubles (approximately $43), the Moscow City Department of Internal
Affairs (GUVD) began to require that CIS visitors who were staying with ﬁiends or family

’3’

for more than forty-ﬁve days “pay 250,000 ‘rent to Moszhilservis which supplies gas,
electricity, maintenance and sewage to the capital’s housing complexes. This 250,000
ruble rent is in addition to and does not replace the 250,000 ruble basic registration fee
required of CIS citizens. Thus an Armenian from Yerevan who is visiting ﬁiends in the
capital for more than forty-ﬁve days had to pay 500,000 rubles up front out of an average
monthly salary of 83,000 rubles when he registers with police. Let it be known that
federal legislation unlike municipal laws states that the only registration fee required of an
individual is one percent of the monthly minimal wage to cover basic government
procedure. Additionally, federal law clearly stipulates that CIS citizens (who do not need
a visa to enter Russia) have the right to register in the same manner as Russian citizens.
However, the procedures and fees discussed above apply to C18 citizens alone and not
Russian citizens who are also non-Muscovites. Signiﬁcantly, the only Russian citizens
who are subjected to these fees are ethnic Chechens.75 Luzhkov explained that he would
discuss amending the legislation so that ethnic Chechens would be considered “Russians”
and not have to register as foreigners only after the Chechen government agreed to a

peace treaty with Russia.76

36

In regards to the registration system, Luzhkov’s claims that a crisis of law and
order exists in the capital has not only allowed him to act above federal law but also
international laws to which Russia is a signatory. Human Rights Watch/Helsinki activists
denounce Moscow’s registration system for violating Russia’s commitment to Article 12
of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which guarantees that
“‘everyone lawﬁrlly within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right
to liberty of movement and freedom to chose his residence.”’77 Furthermore, because an
individual without a residence permit cannot obtain lawful employment, medical treatment
in a state hospital or school enrolhnent for their children the registration regime violates
the rights of children to medical care and education as guaranteed in Articles 24 and 28 of
the UN Convention as well as an individual’s right to work as upheld in the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.78

Another way in which Luzhkov’s claims of crisis allow Moscow to operate outside
the domain of federal and international law is in regards to “black” refugees and
asylum-seekers from both the former Soviet republics and beyond. Moscow ofﬁcials have
decreed that only CIS and Baltic citizens who have a permanent Moscow residence permit
or have close relatives who do are eligible for refugee or asylum status.79 Consequently,
the Federal Migration Service (FMS) often reﬁrses to accept the applications of
dark-skinned asylum seekers informing them that there is no possibility that they will
receive refugee status in the capital.80 Because the overwhelming majority of Moscow’s
population is Slavic, this policy essentially guarantees the capital’s continued monoethnic
composition and thereby reinforces its ofﬁcial reconceptualization as white and Slavic.
However, this system blatantly violates federal and international laws which uphold an
individual’s right to asylum. The decentralized and disorganized state of the FMS means
that most reﬁigees are unaware of these stringent restrictions on eligibility prior to their
arrival in the capital and are then not even able to remedy their situation by applying for

asylum for other regions of the Russian Federation.

37

Furthermore, what makes their situation even worse is that Moscow authorities
have made it necessary for reﬁrgees to register with the police along with all other
outsiders and visitors, thereby placing them in an even more vulnerable position than they
were in under the Soviet system. The problem as a Moscow city prosecutor, Vera
Pestrakova explains it is that police registration requires proof of a place to live and 18
square meters of living space when most reﬁigees arrive in the city without a place to stay.
As a result refugees become trapped in a vicious cycle in Moscow, where they lack status
and protection, and where because of their “often distinctive looks,” they are victimized by
law enforcement oﬂicials for violating the registration system.81

Refugees living in ﬁelds or abandoned lots are unable to meet the proof of
residency requirements for registration82 and are thus reduced to routinely bribing law
enforcement ofﬁcials not to expel them for their unregistered status. Refugees who the
government had at one time settled in Moscow hotels are not in a much better position.
Under the pressure of privatization and the desire to sell the hotels, hotel directors
frequently reﬁrse to give these refugees the proof of residence documents that they need
for police registration in hopes of forcing their departure. The Moscow Migration Service
(MS) has not tried to stop this practice because it wants to resettle all reﬁigees outside
the capital. Many reﬁrgees resist being removed from their jobs in the capital and resettled
in remote areas where the medical and other services are not as highly-developed. The
MS has had a history of issuing resettlement assignments which were nonexistent or
were already inhabited by other families and has even evicted refugees without giving
them any resettlement assignments.83

The city under siege also deﬁes international and federal law at the expense of
African reﬁrgees who are seeking asylum in the capital. Russia is obligated by
international agreements (the 1951 UN Convention of reﬁrgees and its 1976 Protocol) to
review applications from all displaced persons in the country, determine within a three

month period whether to confer reﬁigee status, and pay for the deportation of those who

38

are denied such status. However, Russian ofﬁcials have avoided these requirements “by
reﬁising even to accept asylum applications from refugees. This de facto policy leaves
non—Soviet refugees without any legal status, neither as refugees nor even as displaced
persons awaiting a decision on status.” Consequently, reﬁrgees who have ﬂed
conﬂict—ridden countries like Angola and Rwanda are subjected to police harassment and
are unable to gain lawful employment and housing in Moscow.84 Representatives of
Migration Services justify their violations of international standards by claiming that
Moscow cannot afford to deport those who are refused refugee status and by the simple
claim that they don’t want to occupy themselves with individuals who would rather gain
permanent residence in the wealthier nations of the West. However, human rights ofﬁcials
have emphasized that “despite its own problems, Russia also has a moral responsibility to
accept these reﬁigees, most of whom have ﬂed wars in Afghanistan and Aﬁica in which
the Soviet Union was a direct or covert participant.”85 As a result of these racist policies
against blacks from the CIS and beyond, Lidia Grafova of the independent organization of
the Coordinating Council for Aid to Refugees and Forced Migrants has denounced the
government-sponsored Federal Migration Service as one of the “primary culprits in

denying the rights of refugees.”86

39

CHAPTER 3: ENFORCEMENT OF THE REGISTRATION SYSTEM AND THE
RACIALIZATION OF PEOPLE OF COLOR

Part I: Political and administrative officials’ implementation of the registration
system

Luzhkov’s exhortations that a crisis of law and order exists in the capital have also
allowed Moscow to operate above federal and international laws in the enforcement of the
registration system. While the mere existence of the Moscow registration system is in
itself a violation of federal and international laws, the manner in which it is enforced by
law enforcement and administrative ofﬁcials infringes on countless other human rights and
serves as a major tool in the racialization of dark-skinned non-Russians. In theory the
system does not discriminate by race or ethnicity because it is supposed to “defend”
Moscow from all outsiders. However, administrative and law enforcement ofﬁcials have
identiﬁed the true “outsiders” to be people of color by primarily enforcing registration
laws against them.1 Representatives of the Chechen diaspora in Moscow explained how
“the registration process has been implemented exclusively toward dark-skinned
immigrants, and then capriciously at best.”2 Diederik Lohman, director of the Moscow
ofﬁce of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki explained that the capital ostensibly gives the
appearance that it welcomes visitors when it “In fact,...remains a closed city at least to
what I would call unwanted guests - Chechens, Caucasians, Central Asians, reﬁigees from
the Third World...”3 Through the racist enforcement of the registration system
administrative and law enforcement ofﬁcials have sought to make the ofﬁcial
reconceptualization of the community as white and Slavic a reality.

In principle, registration and entry (even if it’s just temporary) into Moscow should
be simple as long as the individual has a place to stay. However, because this community
has been ofﬁcially and popularly reimagined as white and Slavic registration is often an
unsuccessful ordeal for the dark-skinned individual. Thus instead of operating as a form

of notiﬁcation to municipal authorities the registration system has continued to function in

40

a fashion much like that of the Soviet era when by registering an individual was seeking
permission to be in the city. Municipal authorities have frequently denied “dark-skinned”
immigrants registration, have established bureaucratic obstacles which prevent many of
them from receiving it, and have even ﬁightened signiﬁcant numbers into not even
attempting to register4 much in the same way that ofﬁcials in the American South had
ﬁightened blacks into not registering to vote. Human Rights Watch/Helsinki reported in
1997 that the majority of asylum seekers “confront a range of obstacles by which they are
effectively denied the opportunity to register with the police as residents of Moscow: their
failure to do so means they are deemed to be in Moscow illegally.” Members of the
capital’s Chechen diaspora explained how Chechens are frequently given the bureaucratic
run-around if not physically kicked out of police stations when they have attempted to
register.5 Director of the independent Coordinating Council for Aid to Reﬁrgees and
Forced Migrants, Lidia Grafova explained that ever since Luzhkov had launched his
October 1993 clean-up campaign to evict Caucasian merchants from the capital, a de facto
prohibition of registering Chechens has existed. In his 1995 meetings with representatives
of the Moscow Chechen community (which he himself characterized as signiﬁcant in
number between 20,000-40,000 and deep-rooted), Luzhkov vowed to “‘carefully
consider’” reconﬁguring the capital’s registration procedure for Chechens. Mukhadi
Israilov, a Moscow State University professor and 29 year resident of Moscow dismissed
this promise as “a purely propagandistic statement.”6 Some non-Russians have found that
the only way to gain registration and receive a temporary propiska is through bribery.

F arkhun Atachiev, a twenty-four year old Azeri explained that he “‘had to keep shoving
money across the desk until the police ﬁnally agreed to register him.”’7
Like their “black” CIS counterparts, Aﬁican and Asian refugees suffer ﬁom

administration ofﬁcials’ abuse of the registration system. Individuals from countries
outside the former Soviet Union who are able to submit an application for asylum are also

required to register with the police in order to make their presence in the capital

41

 

completely legal. However, the central Directorate for Visas and Registration (UVIR)
typically reﬁrses to register them. One Somali refugee explained that when he tried to
register in the summer of 1996 with the UVIR he was told that the agency did not
“recognize reﬁrgees” and would only register him if he purchased a plane ticket to
Somalia. When one Afghan reﬁigee who had an UNHCR identiﬁcation card tried to
register in the Southern Administrative District of Moscow he was ordered to report to
the central UVIR where he was then informed that he lacked the right to register.8 Badin
Galalia, a Kurdish reﬁrgee from Iraq, attempted to register with the UVIR but was told by
ofﬁcials that his UNHCR and MMS certiﬁcation cards were invalid and they threatened
him with arrest if not deportation.9 Even Aﬁicans and Asians who are awaiting word on
their status from the MS are considered illegal aliens as long as their UNHCR and MMS
certiﬁcation cards do not bear a UVIR stamp signifying police registration. Therefore,
individuals from various African countries are represented in the capital’s holding centers
(operated by the UVIR) for failing to have registered or for being denied registration. For
example, in December 1996 two Somali reﬁrgees who had been waiting three years for
status determination and whose MMS cards had not yet expired were placed in one of the
capital’s holding centers because they were not registered. 10 Ofﬁcials’ efforts to deport
these reﬁigees “to the countries in which they fear persecution” is a blatant violation of
Russia’s commitment to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees.11
City ofﬁcials have transformed their ofﬁcial discourse of black criminality into a
self-ﬁrlﬁlling prophecy. Denying dark-skinned individuals registration encourages many of
them to turn to criminal activity because without a propiska they are unable to gain lawﬁrl
employment. 12 Therefore, while the registration system is supposed to deter crime it
actually promotes it because of the way in which administrative ofﬁcials abuse it. If
Caucasians, Central Asians and Aﬁicans are not criminals in the obvious sense of
complicity in narcotics, robbery or any other criminal activity then Moscow ofﬁcials have

at least made them criminal or forced them to become “unwilling law-breakers” by

42

rendering it nearly impossible for them to register and gain a legal existence in the capital.
Because his existence in Moscow is illegal, the dark-skinned immigrant has no rights and
thus is even afraid to lodge a complaint with police and city ofﬁcials when he is denied
registration. 13 Muscovites in general consider the judicial system to be rife with
corruption and lack a basic understanding of the rights that it is supposed to afford them.
This is even more the case for dark-skinned non-Russians.14 Human rights activists
emphasize that people of color should be denied permanent or temporary residence for
only legitimate reasons such as public health concerns, national security interests, or if it
threatens the rights of others. They advise that the person be notiﬁed in written form the
speciﬁc reasons for his rejection so that the document could be used in court if the denial
was ever appealed. 15 Human Rights Watch/Helsinki ofﬁcials argue that those seeking
asylum and who have UNHCR identiﬁcation cards should not be required to register with
the police because most are unaware of what is required of them, are afraid to do so, or
are simply denied registration by hostile authorities. 16
Preventing if not denying registration to dark-skinned individuals allows ofﬁcials to
conduct periodic campaigns to nominally cleanse the city of all unregistered peOple when
speciﬁcally targeting blacks. For this reason Moscow has been characterized as the

((C

forerunner among all Russian cities in “cleansing” itself of ethnically undesirable
elements. ”’17 These campaigns allow Moscow ofﬁcials to literally shape the community
in the manner in which they have reimagined it since Communism’s fall. In May 1997
Luzhkov ordered the Russian, Moscow and Moscow Province migration services to expel
illegal reﬁrgees and forced migrants from the capital. Human Rights Watch emphasized
that “refugees are illegal because Moscow has reﬁrsed to register most of those coming to
Moscow from the conﬂicts in the Caucasus.”18 Human rights activists have repeatedly

denounced Luzhkov for signaling out individuals from the Caucasus in his directives to

police to cleanse the city of unregistered people. 19

43

Luzhkov’s October 1993 campaign to rid the capital of unregistered people (read:
people of color) served as a major contributory factor in the racialization of dark-skinned
non-Russians and revealed that the capital’s community had been reimagined as white and
Slavic. Because of authorities’ equation of crime with outsider status (read: dark skin) the
mayor justiﬁed this clean-up operation (in the midst of the armed battle between President
Yeltsin and representatives of the Parliament) by emphasizing the need to protect the
capital ﬁom unregistered people (read: blacks) because of the inordinate number of crimes
they commit. Human rights ofﬁcials and journalists denounced this crusade as another
deliberate attempt by Luzhkov to foster negative images of Caucasians and Central Asians
among Muscovites.20 Moscow ofﬁcials detained roughly 14,000 individuals and deported
between 9000 and 12,000 others who they claimed had violated the registration regime.21
Aleksei Smirnov, director of the Moscow Human Rights Research Center claimed that the
majority of individuals who registered complaints against the police to the Human Rights
Research Center during the mayor’s “clean-up” operation, did not incur law enforcement
ofﬁcers’ wrath because they had broken any laws or violated the curfew but simply
because they didn’t “look Russian.”22 Similarly, journalist Yury Shchekochikhin argued
that following the October 1993 shelling of the White House, provincial Interior Ministry
Units rounded up herds of Caucasians simply because they didn’t “look right.”23 The
Society for the Defense of Human Rights in Central Asia, the Memorial human rights
organization, and the Helsinki Watch and the organized a press conference at which they
denounced the persecution, violence, beating and the illegal eviction of dark-skinned
refugees which occurred during the October 1993 state of emergency. Sevognya reported
how Central Asian political emigres who were “awaiting the status of political refugee”
were threatened with deportation back to their homelands which for most would have
meant a return to prison life.24 This clean-up campaign betrays Luzhkov’s realization that

anti-Caucasian/anti-black feelings among the populace had become a strong political force

44

which allowed him to conduct such a racist campaign against dark-skinned non-Russians
without any serious political repercussions.25
As a result of Luzhkov’s incessant claims that a crisis of law and order exists in the
capital, by 1996 these campaigns to cleanse the city of unregistered people had assumed
the form of pseudo-military operations to which Moscow ofﬁcials assigned military code
names. These have included Operation Regime, Operation Law and Order, Operation
Arsenal, and Operation Signal.26 Moscow ofﬁcials seemingly play the role of colonial
governors in the tradition of the British Empire by using military code names for these
operations against the capital’s “colonies” of dark-skinned former colonials.27 Luzhkov
launched Operation Regime immediately following the terrorist bombings of two Moscow
trolleybuses on the 11th and 12th of July 1996 in order to stabilize conditions in the

6“

capital by cleansing it of all elements dangerous to society.”’ Roughly 23,000 heavily
armed Interior Ministry forces invaded the capital combing over its streets, apartment
buildings and metro stations, targeting people of color but most especially individuals from
the Caucasus. Moscow’s minority leaders argued that regardless of Moscow ofﬁcials’
claims to the contrary, police predominately checked the documents of Chechens, Azeris,
Armenians and any other dark-skinned individuals during their raids on markets and
apartment buildings. On 14 July 1996, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that as part of
Operation Regime police called one of their writers and inquired how long he had been a
resident in Moscow simply because he had an Armenian name. An ofﬁcial of the
Moscow-supported Chechen government, reported that police had raided Chechens in
their apartments, 12,000 of whom were officially registered.28

The physical abuse that law enforcement officials rained on Azeris during their
Operation Regime market raids ended up in hospitalization for at least two of the victims.
In their speciﬁc raid of the Cherkizovskii market on 18 July 1996 police beat nearly a

dozen Azeri merchants and destroyed their registration papers in the process. The

Azerbaijani embassy in Moscow responded by ofﬁcially registering a complaint with the

45

district prosecutor’s ofﬁce. A week later masked law enforcement agents raided the
Krasnogvardeiskii market, “destroyed 100 million rubles worth of fruits and vegetables”
and conﬁscated what was left of the goods. Representatives of the Azerbaijani embassy
again accompanied some of the victims of police abuse from this raid to the procuracy in
order to register their complaints.29 During his visit to Moscow in the wake of this
Operation Regime, the President of Azerbaijan, Geidar Aliyev met with mayor Yuri
Luzhkov and police chief Nikolai Kulikov and expressed concern for the safety of the
capital’s large Azeri community which then consisted of roughly 240,000 people. While
acknowledging Azeris’ high representation in criminal activity and emphasizing his interest
in helping the mayor reduce the capital’s crime level, Aliyev denounced Luzhkov’s
anti-crime campaigns for being directed against nationalities instead of speciﬁc individuals
and condemned law enforcement ofﬁcials’ blanket suspicion of putative “persons of
Caucasian nationality.”30
Nezavisz'maya gazeta has warned that the eviction of Caucasians and Central
Asians from the capital is prime material for Islamic extremists and would not help the fate
of ethnic Russians who lived in the Caucasus and Central Asia because these deported
“national minorities” could easily incite the local population against them.31 Similarly,
Georgy Melikyants of Izvestia questioned Moscow ofﬁcials’ lack of concern with possible
repercussions and revenge in the former colonies as a result of the former imperial
capital’s discriminatory policies and actions against non-Russians.32 However another
journalist from Izvestia pointed out that such repercussions might be the exact intention of
city and state ofﬁcials. Irina Dement’eva has argued that Moscow officials launch attacks
on Chechens in the capital in order to precipitate violent retribution against Russians in
Chechena—Ingushetia, thereby granting Russia reason to intervene in the region.33
The February 1992 round-up of individuals who appeared to be of Chechen

nationality served as one of the ﬁrst major steps in the racialization of non-Russian

nationalities in Moscow and in deﬁning the capital as an exclusively Slavic community.

46

 

On 14 February 1992, Russian Supreme Soviet Chairman, R.I. Khasbulatov held a
ten-minute meeting in the White House with the directors of every Moscow hotel during
which he ﬁrst advised them against “accommodating” individuals from the
Checheno-Ingushetia republic and then ordered them to evict those already residing there.
He cited Moscow’s crime problems as justiﬁcation for such measures and warned that if
the directors failed to comply then they would be dismissed. Hotel directors subsequently
carried out the Russian Supreme Soviet Chairman’s orders and police and OMON raided
several hotels, arbitrarily arresting individuals who appeared to be of Chechen nationality.
The fact that Khasbulatov is himself of Chechen nationality only served to legitimize the
authenticity of his leading role in ordering these “preventative measures” against possible
terrorist or criminal acts.34 However all of the 37 individuals whom OMON forces
rounded up from the Zarya Hotel were subsequently released because none proved to be
weapon or drug dealers and one detainee was actually an Afghan war veteran receiving
medical treatment in the capital. Irina Dement’eva of Izvestia argued that the roundup as
a whole constituted part of the Russian ministry of Security’s efforts to ingrain in popular
consciousness the notion of Chechens as “criminal” even though a mere 58 had been
arrested on criminal charges in 1991. She condemned the Supreme Soviet the principle
legislative power of a supposedly democratic Russian state for openly disregarding the
Constitution and emphasized the absurdity of a parliamentary representative Khasbulatov
giving orders to hotel workers.35
Part H: Law Enforcement Officials’ Enforcement of the Registration System and
the Racialization of People of Color

While official racism has clearly reared its ugly head in administrative ofﬁcials’
enforcement of the registration system, it is most obscenely prevalent in the actions of law
enforcement ofﬁcials. Luzhkov’s employment of the discourse of disorder has given free
reign to law enforcement ofﬁcials to enforce the registration regime in a manner which

violates basic federal and international human rights laws. Holly Cartner, the executive

47

director of the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki explained that “‘we do not question the
need to monitor a civilian registration system or to maintain law and order...We deplore,
however, the predatory way the Moscow police go about it. For them, the registration
system means open season on non-Muscovites and refugees, open season for violence and
bribes.’”36 Human rights ofﬁcials and journalists criticize the registration system as a
masked form of ofﬁcial racism nominally adopted to deter crime and restore law and order
in the capital while actually giving free reign to law enforcement ofﬁcials to abuse their
power at the expense of people of color.37 Human Rights Watch/Helsinki investigators
concluded that “law enforcement authorities in Moscow...are not only failing to uphold
Russia’s obligations to ﬁght racial discrimination but indeed for approximately the past
three years, have been conducting a campaign of harassment and brutality against
dark-skinned people.”38
Participants in the July 1996 roundtable of “Moscow News Media and Diasporas
of Caucasian Pe0ples” concluded that xenophobia was on the rise among all Muscovites.
However, they expressed the greatest distress about “ofﬁcial” hostility towards
dark-skinned non—Russians among law enforcement oﬂicials.39 The Moscow Times argued
that by routinely referring to individuals of Caucasian nationality as “blacks” law
enforcement ofﬁcials believe that they have the right to harass and arbitrarily exact ﬁnes

C“

from them. One native of the Caucasus explained that, whenever they get the chance,

they like to remind us that they can round us up and drive us out of town like dogs.”’40
By 1995, less than ﬁve years after the ofﬁcial collapse of the ﬁiendship of peoples,

(CC

Asadaga Mekhtiev, an Azeri merchant explained that there is terrible harassment of
Azeris, Georgians, and Armenians. As soon as they see that there are blacks, not
Russians, that means they can arrest them immediately. ”’41 Accordingly, journalist Yury
Shchekochikhin claimed that every night at least 80 percent of the individuals detained are

Caucasians, whom he characterized as “the second-class citizens of our multinational

state.”189 Police have repeatedly told an ethnic Georgian from Abkhazia that they harass

48

people of color because they have a “quota” which requires that each law enforcement
ofﬁcial apprehend at least ten individuals a day.42 Aﬁican men are subjected to countless
document checks in the markets, on public transportation and on the streets which not
infrequently lead to their detention.43

Refusing the dark-skinned individual registration renders his existence illegal in the
capital and therefore makes him extremely vulnerable to police harassment if not direct
expulsion. Svetlana Gannushkina, head of the Grazhdanskoye Sodeystviye, or Civil
Assistance Group denounced the capital’s policy of rendering it nearly impossible for
refugees to register because in addition to clean-up campaigns it allows police to extract
bribes and exact their own form of justice from these most visible offenders.44 In 1995
Human Rights Watch/Helsinki released a report entitled “Crime or Simply Punishment?
Racist Attacks by Moscow Law Enforcement.” In it, investigators charged the rnilitsia, the
OMON (Otrz'ady militsii osobogo naznacheniia) or Ministry of Interior special forces and
road ofﬁcers of the GAI (Gosudarstvennoe agenstvo avtomobil ’noi inspektsii) or State
Agency for Automobile Inspection for disproportionately victimizing people of color in
their enforcement of registration laws.45 Police abuse often assumes the forms of
“identity checks, searches, degrading treatment, extortion or illegal seizure of property,
detention and beatings.” Harassment can be so severe that for the person of color it
means being stopped as many as ten times a day for document checks, being ﬁned ﬁve
times a day, being detained at the police station once a day (with the average holding time
ranging from thirty minutes to ﬁve hours) and being subjected to physical abuse three
times a day. In most situations, the detainee is released without being formally charged
with any offense, but if he is it is usually for violating a certain aspect of the registration
law, a trafﬁc violation or on the suspicion of criminal, narcotics or weapons activity.46

The ofﬁcial discourse of disorder and exhortations that a crisis of law and order
exists in the capital allows law enforcement ofﬁcials to conduct “group checks” or

arbitrarily raid apartment buildings, dormitories, markets and hotels. Moscow City

49

Government Ordinance No 1122 from December 1993, “On Measures to Regulate
Temporary Residence of Reﬁrgees Residing in Hotels and Government Dormitories of the
City of Moscow” stepped up police ofﬁcers’ authority in enforcing the residence permit
laws in areas where predominantly dark-skinned individuals live.47 Human Rights Watch
investigators have found that during these “group checks” or raids, law enforcement
ofﬁcials routinely employ physical abuse and that OMON forces are more inclined to
inﬂict this abuse than regular police ofﬁcers.48 OMON units typically “storm” the market
or apartment building (sometimes breaking down doors in the process) dressed in military
fatigues if not masks and armed with automatics. They then proceed to round up
dark-skinned individuals often without even looking at their papers.49 Occasionally they
force the victims into human sacks in strategically parked buses where they “shock them
with cattle prods,” spray them with a form of tear gas or beat them in the kidneys with
their weapons. These victims are stripped of any money or valuables before being released
and are rarely charged for any crimes.50 Although human rights ofﬁcials acknowledge the
right of the Russian government to punish those who are in the country illegally, they
emphasize that federal law allows law enforcement ofﬁcials to use physical force only in
cases of self-defense and not against individuals who have merely violated immigration or
residence permit laws.51 Sergei Alekseyev of the Russian Academy of Sciences has
argued that if Russia was going to return to an authoritarian system which restored order
through force then her leaders should not conceal it behind exhortations of a crisis of law
and order.52

Consistent with this ofﬁcial discourse of disorder, law enforcement ofﬁcials have
implemented registration laws in a manner characteristic of a state of emergency by
systematically violating dark-skinned individuals’ right to privacy.53 These raids on
private residences blatantly inﬁinge on an individual’s right to privacy as protected by both
article 25 of the Russian constitution and by article 17 of the ICCPR54 while also

depriving dark-skinned individuals of a safety zone into which to retreat from Moscow

50

law enforcement oﬁicials’ abuse. Presidential Decree No. 1226 issued on 14 June 1994
renders both a search and arrest warrant unnecessary for these group “searches” as long as
the police suspect that there is “sufﬁcient evidence” that the individual has committed a
crime.55 In addition to pursuing a criminal suspect, Article 10 of the Law on the Militia
extended law enforcement ofﬁcials’ right to enter individuals’ private residences on count
of accidents “and to ‘protect the safety of citizens and public security in times of natural
disaster, catastrophe, and ...massive disturbances. After each entry police are required
to report to a prosecutor. Human Rights Watch investigators emphasize that under these
legal stipulations checking ﬁrlﬁllment of the registration requirements does not qualify as a
valid reason for entry.56 However, they have found that Moscow police often consider an
individual’s skin color “sufﬁcient evidence” to enter a home.57

Local law enforcement ofﬁcials have raided the apartments of most of the Somali
refugees who inhabit the area surrounding Biryulova Street in southern Moscow beating,
detaining, and ﬁning their black occupants.58 These home raids give police and OMON
agents the opportunity to conﬁscate or damage property in the individual apartments out
of the eyesight of witnesses who would be considered impartial. Abdulla Khamzayev, an
ethnic Chechen and former Moscow judge, claimed that OMON forces ransacked his
family’s apartment “only because we are Chechens. Before cops wore uniforms. Now
they come with stockings over their heads. That is so that they can say later that it was
robbers. I don’t know another country where representatives of the government conduct

,3,

business with masks on. A Georgian woman questioned why the police came to her
family’s apartment armed with automatic weapons when it was only herself, her
grandchildren, daughters and son-in-law who lived there. These raids undertaken under
the guise of enforcing the registration laws reafﬁrrns the connection between dark-skinned
individuals, crime and moral danger and thus serve as tools in the racialization of

Caucasian and Central Asian nationalities.59

51

Government authorities’ indifference to Moscow law enforcement oﬁicials’ racist
implementation of the registration system has only promoted the continued violation of
human rights and furthered the racialization of non-Slavic nationalities. This ofﬁcial
silence was especially glaring during the October 1993 state of emergency. The Society
for the Defense of Human Rights in Central Asia, the Memorial human rights organization,
and Helsinki Watch criticized the prosecutor’s ofﬁce and the state’s human rights
institutions for failing to condemn law enforcement and municipal ofﬁcials’ racist actions
against Transcaucasians and Central Asians during this period.60 Nezavisimaya gazeta’s
Lerman Usmanov and Izvestia’s Marina Lebedeva condemned Yeltsin and the entire
Russian Federation government in general for failing to assume an ofﬁcial stance on the
Moscow law enforcement ofﬁcials’ racist treatment and mass deportation of Caucasians
and Central Asians between October 3-October 17th. Usmanov emphasized how this void
was ﬁlled by both Zhirinovsky’s promises to take care of non-Russians and the so-called
Russian democrats’ vows to cleanse the entire country of them.61 At the municipal level,
Luzhkov was not indifferent to the liberties taken by law enforcement and administrative
ofﬁcials during the October 1993 state of emergency but instead openly applauded them.

‘(6

Sevognya reported that the mayor thanked public organizations, volunteer police aide
detachments and democratically minded young people” for assisting these authorities in
the clean-up operation. Aleksei Smimov, director of the Moscow Human Rights Research
Center criticized Luzhkov for instituting the state of emergency without taking
precautions against law enforcement ofﬁcials’ abuse of power.62
In 1997, Moscow leaders’ continued inability or more disturbingly their
unwillingness to “prevent and punish” law enforcement ofﬁcials’ routine violation of
human rights on the pretext of implementing the registration system prompted Human
Rights Watch/Helsinki to launch an investigation and issue their report entitled “Moscow:

Open Season, Closed City.” Human Rights Watch activists criticize municipal ofﬁcials for

not placing any legal restrictions on police enforcement of the registration system but for

52

allowing stipulations regarding sanctions to be so vague that allow individual law
enforcement ofﬁcials themselves determine whom to deport outright and whom to subject
to countless ﬁnes. Consequently, police are free to abuse their power and enforce the
laws in an arbitrary, discriminatory and violent way “characteristic of a state of
emergency.”63 In this manner, law enforcement ofﬁcials’ implementation of the
registration system reinforces Luzhkov’s discourse of disorder and his exhortations that a
crisis of law and order exists in the capital. Chairman of Yeltsin’s presidential human
rights committee Sergei Kovalyov has warned that “the lack of control over the actions of
the security organs is the path back to a totalitarian regime.”64

In addition to physical abuse, dark-skinned non-Russians are also subjected to
arbitrary ﬁnes as law enforcement ofﬁcials use the registration system to obtain “ofﬁcia ”
and “unofﬁcial” revenue.65 The de facto policy discussed above of denying or preventing
people of color from registering, guarantees a large crop of “visible” unregistered people
from whom police can exact ﬁnes to beneﬁt both the city coffers and their own pockets.
Thus not only is there a lack of incentive to abolish the capital’s registration system but
there is actually a strong impetus for its continued observance. At least six separate law
enforcement agencies conduct document checks in the capital which means that an
individual can be ﬁned several times a day because police neither issue a receipt of
payment nor record the transaction at the station.66 The fact that receipts are not issued
and that violators are not required to sign a police report when detained suggests that
most if not all of the money ends up in the law enforcement ofﬁcial’s hands rather than in
the municipal treasury.67 Vitalii Khachaturyan, an Armenian refugee explained that police
typically asked for and preferred US. money.68

Despite law enforcement ofﬁcials claims that they conduct passport checks
randomly, in reality they are dictated by skin color. An ethnic Russian of Tajik citizenship
explained how when walking with two ethnic Tajik friends in Moscow February 1994,

police stopped all three of them but only asked to see the papers of his two ethnic

53

non-Russian companions for they had just assumed that he was a Muscovite or in the
capital legally because of his appearance. However this Russian from Tajikistan produced
his documents anyway explaining that he was an “outsider” or “‘a black-ass, too.”’69
Police do not waste their time checking identity papers of Slavic looking people (some of
whom are legally outsiders) when they have a greater chance of earning money from
dark-skinned individuals whom they know administrators routinely deny registration.
Participants in the July 1996 roundtable discussion on “The Moscow News Media
and Diasporas of Caucasian Peoples” concluded that as a result of the registration system,
Russian law enforcement ofﬁcials considered individuals of Caucasian nationality and
anyone with dark skin a substantial source of income.70 One Azeri cigarette merchant
who used to be ﬁned several times a day by law enforcement ofﬁcials eventually realized
that it would be more economical to pay a large one-time fee ($1000) to an indigent
Muscovite and pensioner Marfa Alekseyevna, for her to register him as her 24 year old
husband (at her own place of residence) for a ﬁve year period than to continue to pay
small ﬁnes daily to Moscow police for ﬁve years.71 Discussing his situation in June 1995,

“C

a thirty-six year old Kurd from Azerbaijan explained that on the street if you have black
hair and a dark face they stop you often...If the ﬁne is for 10,000 rubles they take 40,000
or 50,000. This usually happens once a day.”72 Aziz Mohamadi, an Iranian asylum-seeker
explains that law enforcement ofﬁcials often asses the ﬁne by how much he has in his
pocket: “‘since September of 1994 I have been receiving $65 a month in support from [the
humanitarian aid organization] Equlibre. One month the cops got it all. My jobs earns me
only enough to pay off the police.”’73
In addition to the money Moscow police earn during daily passport checks many
also have a more regular source of income which they receive from groups of unregistered
reﬁrgees who are living in either makeshift housing or private apartments. These pay them

an agreed upon monthly “ﬁne” or “tax” in return for not expelling them.74 In June 1995,

the Moscow Times reported how Moscow police enjoyed a steady income from Tajik and

54

Nagorno-Karabakh reﬁigees who live in cardboard shantytowns in the capital’s eastern
outskirts.75 Human Rights Watch investigators found that by September 1997 police
were “visiting” apartments of African and Georgian families with increasing frequency,
each time demanding ﬁnes ranging from 50,000 ($9) to 150,000 ($27) rubles. Many
African and Asian refugees are forced to move at least two if not three times each year
because the ﬁnes become too burdensome or because the police threaten them with arrest
if they refuse to move. Through both these apartment checks and identity checks on the
streets, police reveal that they are more interested in establishing an informal system by
which dark-skinned non-Russians pay them a regular, monthly “ﬁne” than in helping them
register properly.76

If the dark-skinned individual does not have the amount of money which the police
demand, he is typically detained in a jail cell referred to as the “monkey cage” until a
relative or ﬁiend can post it.77 Aslan Mustafa, a Kurdish asylum-seeker from Syria
explained in June 1995 that the police descended on the market every hour looking only
for money. “‘If you have money, there’s no problem...1f you don’t have money they take
you in and demand money anyway. They say, ‘Go call a ﬁiend and have him bring some
money.”’78 Law enforcement ofﬁcials frequently carry out body searches looking for
money to meet the ﬁnes they arbitrarily level. Occasionally if the individual is unable to
produce the money whether on his own merits or those of his ﬁiends, law enforcement
officers force him to clean-up the precinct by mopping the ﬂoors and taking out the
garbage.79 Another popular strategy law enforcement officials have adopted in order to
obtain the money they demand is to appropriate the dark-skinned individual’s passport or
other important papers in order to guarantee that he returns to pay the ﬁrll amount
demanded of him.80 A Somali refugee discussed how on 11 June 1997 police told him that
his MMS card was invalid and then conﬁscated his passport so that he would return from
home with a 50,000 ruble ﬁne for lack of registration.81 Several months earlier, in

February 1997 law enforcement ofﬁcials conﬁscated a young Tajik’s passport on the

55

grounds that he could retrieve it once he was able to pay the ﬁne they demanded of him
for not being registered. However, this man ended up in a holding center for those
awaiting deportation because he was not able to produce his passport when different law
enforcement ofﬁcials stopped him a couple of days later. If Moscow police had been even
slightly interested in helping this man and other blacks make their existence in the capital
legal and thereby eliminate some of the abuses they suffered, then they would not have
conﬁscated this Tajik’s passport and the passports of other non-Russians. This is because
without their passports people of color are unable to register with the UVIR and are even
more vulnerable to arrest if not expulsion.82
Strong proof that the capital’s community has been reimagined as white and Slavic
lies in the fact that even those dark-skinned individuals who are actually able to register
and obtain a temporary residence permit are still subjected to police abuse.83 Human
Rights Watch/Helsinki investigators have found that when conducting both individual
passport checks as well as group checks or raids police detain, ﬁne and physically abuse
persons of color who have not violated the capital’s registration laws and who are thus in
possession of legal permits.84 Law enforcement ofﬁcials who actually look at the
dark-skinned individual’s temporary residence permit often reﬁrse to recognize its
authenticity. Police have the option of verifying a document’s validity but this is a
time-consuming, drawn-out process which until the system is fully computerized involves
making phone calls to police precincts or housing boards which are not reached easily.
Consequently, law enforcement ofﬁcials often simply declare the document a fake and levy
a ﬁne without going through the hassle of making phone calls or computer checks.85
Therefore, people of color who are properly registered are ﬁned for beating the
system and for overcoming the obstacles which are designed to keep them down. They
are penalized for having dark skin and for not living up to the stereotypical image that
ofﬁcials had established of them. Blacks are ﬁned for legally existing in a community

which they are conceived of as not rightly belonging to because of the color of their skin.

56

A Kurdish man explained that in the marketplace where he worked the OMON forces
“‘don’t (even) look at the propiska-If you’re dark-skinned (chemyi), it’s just ‘Let’s
go.”’86 Natasha Okhunova who has been in reﬁigee housing in the capital since the Baku
pogroms explained that they constantly ﬁne dark-skinned, non-Russian men “for one
reason or another. [Even] if there is a document, they say, ‘You still need this and this.’
In other words, they will ﬁnd a reason to ﬁne you.’”87 A 34 year old ethnic Georgian
from Abkhazia explained how “in broad daylight” in the summer of 1996 law enforcement
ofﬁcials stopped him on the Arbat, tore up his temporary residence permit and told him
“‘Now you don’t have registration. Let’s go to the station, you’re going to pay a ﬁne.”’88
Police and OMON ofﬁcials not only destroy legal residence permits, but they often
refuse to recognize the validity of certiﬁcation cards issued by the United Nations High
Commission for Reﬁrgees (UNHCR) and the Moscow Migration Service (MMS).
Consequently, when they routinely stop reﬁrgees on the streets or conduct raids on
apartment buildings they often tear up these papers and then demand ﬁnes from them for
not having proper identiﬁcation. Human Rights Watch/Helsinki found that not only do law
enforcement ofﬁcials refuse to respect the UNHCR and MMS certiﬁcation cards as valid
identity documents (some dismissing them as “toilet paper”) but many are even ignorant of
or feign ignorance of the existence of these institutions. Some police ofﬁcers have alleged
that the MS was a private institution which issues false identiﬁcation documents.89
Dark-skinned non-Russians have no effective way to report instances of police
abuse because the source of their injustice is also their main form of legal recourse.90 By
complaining to police ofﬁcers about the actions of other police ofﬁcers, people of color
know that they will either be ignored or not believed. When Giorgi Papashvili, an ethnic
Georgian (who sought reﬁrge in Moscow after being wounded in the Abkhazian war) ﬁled
a complaint for the severe beating and robbery he endured at the hands of law enforcement
officials on 6 April 1995, the police ofﬁcer on—duty remarked “‘So what if we beat you

up? You Georgians-how many Abkhazians have you beaten up?”’91 A forty year old

57

Tajik journalist Iusuf Khakimov explained how although he and fellow Tajiks, Azeris and
Armenians were subjected to physical and verbal abuse at the hands of the police, “‘I did
not go to the authorities to complain; it’s useless to appeal to anybody in Moscow.”’92
The Ghanian writer, Klomegah explained how he has been assaulted and his documents
conﬁscated not only by skinheads but also by police ofﬁcers but that there was nothing he
could do about it.93 Elnur Talybov, an Azeri was rushed to the emergency room as a
result of injuries he suffered at the hands of law enforcement officials during their raid of
the Shukinskii market on the 29 July 1997. After ﬁnding out that his injuries were police
inﬂicted, the hospital would not release a medical report attesting to them.94 Law
enforcement ofﬁcials’ awareness that people of color lack any form of legal recourse,
emboldens them and invests them with feelings of invincibility for it means that they do not
have to answer to anyone but their own conscience for their actions against blacks.

As a result of law enforcement ofﬁcials’ racist implementation and/or abuse of the
registration regime and the absence of any legal recourse for blacks, people of color have
been forced to adopt survival or self-preservation tactics in order to reduce the risk of
harassment. Human Rights Watch/Helsinki investigators have found that the darker the
individual’s skin color is the greater amount of abuse to which he is subjected.
Consequently, groups or families often designate the lightest dark-skinned individual
among them to run errands in an attempt to reduce the harassment and ﬁnes to which they
are subjected while men of color “shave cleanly and regularly so as to look as
light-skinned as possible.”95 Non-Russian men testify that they are stopped more often
when they do not follow this unwritten rule of survival. In July 1996, a 24-year old Azeri
fruit and vegetable merchant in Moscow’s Butyrsky market who has a temporary
residence permit explained how he is ﬁned ﬁve to ten times a day when he does not shave
(thus looking more non-Russian). He tolerates such harassment because by working in
Moscow he makes thirty times more than his brothers in Azerbaijan who are employees of

the Azeri government.96

58

 

 

In addition to monitoring their appearance, dark-skinned individuals have resorted
to restricting their movement in the capital in order to make themselves as least visible as
possible. This has meant everything from avoiding public transportation in favor of
private cars to actually placing themselves under de facto house arrest.97 Human rights
activists emphasize how the enforcement of the registration system has violated
non-Russians’ freedom of movement by intimidating them into not leaving the house out
of a legitimate fear that they will be stopped, harassed, beaten, detained or ﬁned regardless
of whether or not they have a legal permit. A Tajik woman explained how she made her
sons stay home as much as possible “‘because otherwise it is too expensive; We go out for
bread and end up paying 20,000 rubles [as ﬁne or bribe to the police] We let my daughter
go on errands but she sometimes gets stopped too. We all try to stay home and keep
quiet.”’98 As this woman alluded to, by 1997 sending out the women to do the errands
had ceased to be an effective survival tactic among people of color in the capital for they
had become increasingly subject to police harassment. Afghan women testiﬁed that they
like their male counterparts had come to be stopped and harassed by police at least once a
day.99

In order to survive in the capital people of color have also found it necessary to
carry as little money on them as possible, to pay the ﬁne or bribe to law enforcement
ofﬁcials immediately when its demanded from them, to show no kind of resistance, to
make no efforts to assert their rights and to refrain from registering any complaints with
the police or from making known in their neighborhood the injustices they have
suffered. 100 The self-preservation tactic that many black vendors have been forced to
adopt is to simply abandon their stalls upon the approach of OMON or police forces. This
survival tactic is rather costly for the dark-skinned trader because it results in a lot of
down-time, sometimes leads to the spoiling of goods and allows law enforcement ofﬁcials
to have a free hand of their merchandise. However, choosing not to ﬂee is also rather

risky because police can still conﬁscate some of their goods while additionally demanding

59

a heavy ﬁne, subjecting them to physical abuse and sometimes detaining them the latter of
which also translates into serious down-time.101

Finally, another survival tactic or last resort response of dark-skinned individuals
to the racist enforcement of the registration system has been ﬂight. Blacks who ultimately
choose this option come to ﬁnd that despite their adoption of survival tactics the brutality,
humiliation and ﬁnancial loss of having dark skin in the capital is still too burdensome for
them to stay. 102 Because they had been forced to live in an environment where abuse and
degradation were the everyday norms their departure would most accurately be described
as indirectly coerced. A Somali refugee, Akhmed Muhammed Ali explained how ﬁve
years of constant harassment, intolerable ﬁnes and physical abuse from Moscow law
enforcement agents forced him to return to his native land in May 1997.103 Dark-skinned
individuals’ primary objective in closely monitoring their appearance and restricting their
movements is to signiﬁcantly reduce their visibility in order to survive in a community into
which they have not been imagined. The racist enforcement of the registration system has
forced all people of color, regardless of whether or not they are in the capital legally to
stay perpetually on guard and out of the gaze of law enforcement ofﬁcials.

The systematic violation of dark-skinned individuals’ human rights, in the form of
passport checks, beatings, ﬁnes and apartment checks contribute to their dehumanization
and racialization.104 Signiﬁcantly, most of this abuse committed on behalf of the struggle
to restore law and order in the capital takes place in front of a Russian audience. Seeing
people of color being stopped and harassed on the streets, in the markets and metro
stations by white Slavic men in positions of authority on an everyday basis de-sensitizes
Russians to it and reinforces their equation of dark skin with crime. Through these racist
actions, justiﬁed as crime-deterring measures Moscow authorities are not only
communicating to their populace that dark-skinned non-Russians are outsiders who are
not welcomed in the newly imagined community but are criminals who threaten the very

existence and well-being of that community. An ethnic Georgian from Abkhazia who only

60

had a Georgian embassy refugee card for his identiﬁcation was beaten and repeatedly
called a “black-ass” by police in front of customers in the Pervomayskoe department store
on 7 January 1997. He was eventually thrown in the “monkey cell,” subjected to further
physical abuse and ﬁnally ﬁned. 105 Nezavisimaya gazeta and Izvestia have warned that
the eviction of non-Slavs or “blacks” from the capital encourages Muscovites to associate
dark-skinned non-Russians’ with criminal activity. 106 Because of this socially constructed
association of dark skin with crime, moral panic about the prevalence of racial violence is
nonexistent in the capital as it is not considered a crime on either the popular or ofﬁcial
level. 107 Consequently, in dealing with racial attacks police show greater concern with
determining if the black victim was an illegal immigrant than with arresting his
perpetrators. 108
By 1998, Nezavz’simaya gazeta reported that racial assaults on Africans and Asians
had become daily occurrences in Moscow. This development is hardly surprising
considering what had become accepted discourse among both authorities and the masses
since the fall of Communism as well as law enforcement oﬁicials’ systematic violation of
blacks’ human rights in their enforcement of the registration system. In late May 1995,
Sevognya reported that Chan Chung Tkhik, a Vietnamese diplomat was attacked by six
Russians. Instead of coming to his aid, a police ofﬁcer slapped him around, locked him in
a cell with his attackers and released him only after the arrival of an embassy
representative. The most punishment his attackers received was either a several hundred
thousand ruble ﬁne or a ﬁfteen day jail sentence. 109 Officials of the Republic of South
Africa, Sudan, and Kenya have lodged ofﬁcial complaints with the Russian Foreign
Ministry regarding the rising incidence of racial violence and the lack of justice for its
victims. 110 Michael Waganda, a Kenyan historian and researcher who has lived in Russia
for almost two decades emphasized how the fall of Communism has meant a loss of
protection for foreigners in Russia and he criticized the State Duma and law enforcement

officials for failing to seriously address the problem of racism. 1 11 An African professor

61

 

and fourteen year resident of Moscow, explained that “‘Our world has been turned upside
down. If before we had no problems in the hostels, today it’s the opposite. You can get
accosted anywhere.”’1 12 Similarly, Choi Young Shik who served as chairman of the
Association of Korean Students in Moscow explained that “In the past, this occurred only
late in the evening or at night” but now the attacks occur in broad daylight, in the Metro
stations and even against women. 113 In September 1997, the daughter of a Kenyan
diplomat in Moscow was assaulted and tossed into the Moscow River. 114

The promotion and tolerance of racism among law enforcement ofﬁcials and in the
press has rendered justice non-existent for Aﬁicans and Asians in Moscow since the fall of
Communism. An example of these forces at work conspiring against these “non-white”
visitors can be seen in the murder of the nineteen year old Zimbabwean student, Gideon
Chimusoro on 11 August 1992 by a police ofﬁcer on the campus of Patrice Lumumba
Friendship University. Despite the fact that numerous witnesses testiﬁed and forensic
reports conﬁrmed that Chimusoro was shot when trying to ﬂee, the investigating ofﬁcer
Solovko insisted and several newspapers reported that the Zimbabwean was drunk and
that the police ofﬁcer had shot him in self-defense when Chimusoro tried to smash his
head with bottles. 115 Vladimir Ivanidze ofMoskovsky Novosti as well as the Ghanaian
writer Kester Klomegah emphasized how racist articles in the media have rendered it easy
for the reader to believe such testimony of law enforcement ofﬁcials. 1 16 Ivanidze accused
authorities of deliberately trying to incite feelings of racial intolerance and generate the
desired popular response by reporting inaccurately on the incident and circulating
stereotypical charges in the press particularly through the papers Moskovsky Komsomolets
and Vechemyaya Moskva.117 The procuracy’s ofﬁce never conducted a serious
investigation and the police ofﬁcer/murderer of Gideon Chimsoro was never brought up
on charges but ended up studying to be an international lawyer at the Russian University
of People’s Friendship. “8 Similarly, the murdered Moscow State University journalism

student from Rwanda, J can-Claude Nsengiyumva received no respect or justice in the

62

press and from law enforcement ofﬁcials. Ivanidze claimed that the press played its typical
role by reporting inaccurately on the murder while the police conducted a reprehensible
investigation dragging their feet so much that students requested that the Russian Ministry
of State Security oversee the investigation. One of the guards in the dorm in which the
murder took place explained that police merely dismissed any serious investigation and
limited their eventual search to the ﬂoor on which the crime had been committed, claiming
that the African’s murderers probably could not be apprehended.119

While the Communist era had worked so hard towards establishing the distinct
identities of Soviet national minorities, the post-Communist era has erased them by
reducing people to their skin color. When city ofﬁcials ordered operations speciﬁcally
against individuals of Chechen nationality, police demonstrated that the real target was
skin color for they used these directives to harass all blacks. As a result of the outbreak of
war in Chechnya in December 1994 police abuse escalated not only against Chechens but
also for all dark-skinned non-Russians. Afghan reﬁrgees and teenagers in the markets
were consistently dragged down to police stations and forced to pay an average 100,000
rubles to the police for their release. 120 One Armenian who claims to be stopped
frequently by militsia and GAI explained that the soldiers ﬁghting in Chechnya “who are
militia ofﬁcers come back (to Moscow) bitter. They don’t care who you are Armenian,
Chechen or [whatever]...He is just a ‘person of Caucasian nationality.’ It all starts
building up in him, seeing us, and he looks for an excuse to ﬁnd fault with something.”121
When officials stepped up security in Moscow as a result of renewed ﬁghting in Chechnya,
a Chechen representative in the capital warned that “All this means is that ‘black’ and
‘colored’ passers-by will be stopped all the time in the street and searched...All these new
repressions will affect not only Chechens, but reﬁigees from Georgia, Abkhazia and
Azerbaijan. ”’122 As ﬁirther testimony that it is skin color rather than actual nationality as
indicated in an individual’s internal passport that is targeted by law enforcement ofﬁcials,

ethnic Chechens who do not “look Chechen” or who look more Slavic are not stopped as

63

often by the police for document checks while ethnic Russian refugees from places such as
Abkhazia who by police estimates don’t “look Russian” are beaten and told that their

passports are fake. 123

64

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Since the fall of Communism in connection with the reconceptualization of both
the capital’s community and the relationship between Russians and non-Russians the
seemingly straightforward term “outsiders” has acquired dual meanings. The ﬁrst
deﬁnition of outsiders is the legal one which refers to all individuals who do not posses a
valid Moscow residence permit. Although this includes representatives of all ethnic
groups including ethnic Russians of Russian Federation or CIS citizenship, these outsiders
are not as visible on Moscow’s streets, on the metro or in its markets as are their
non-Slavic counterparts. The second, more ﬂuid deﬁnition of outsiders which unlike the
ﬁrst has no legal basis refers to all dark-skinned, non-Slavic looking individuals in the
capital. This second deﬁnition has emerged from administrative and law enforcement
ofﬁcials’ enforcement of the registration system because it is people of color whom they
routinely deny registration and harass daily on the streets and in the markets. Skin color
and not lack of Moscow registration documents marks outsider status in the minds of
Moscow ofﬁcials for even dark-skinned individuals who do have Moscow residence
permits are still seen or mistaken on the streets as outsiders. They are harassed by law
enforcement agents who frequently destroy their legal permits in the disbelief that they can
be one of “us” instead of one of “them.”

In this way, police enforcement of registration laws affect not only unregistered
people of color but also legally registered people of color who are typically suspected to
be in the capital illegally simply because of their dark skin. Thus the system in practice
perpetuates a societal division between “blacks” and “whites” by rendering all
dark-skinned, non-Slavic looking individuals vulnerable to abuse to which Slavic looking
individuals are largely immune.l
Accordingly, the Moscow based Ghanian researcher and writer Kester Klomegah argued

that while the Soviet era ofﬁcial slogans of “Peace, Friendship and Solidarity” had

65

suppressed racist feelings, in post-Communist Moscow, the black person confronted
racism on a daily basis.

The reason why possession of legal residence documents does not even gain
people of color temporary access or admittance to the capital’s community is because it
has been reimagined to include only those individuals with light skin and Slavic features.
Therefore even those Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians who are Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS) or Russian Federation citizens who do not have Moscow
residence permits and who are thus legally outsiders are assumed to be members of the
imagined community. Consequently they are treated as such (as honorary members) until
absence of documents betrays their true identity. In short, experience in Moscow since
the fall of Communism has shown that inclusion in the newly imagined capital community
is not guaranteed by legal residence permit but is instead based on skin color.

The emergence of exclusive and inclusive racism2 in post-Communist Moscow
serves as proof that the community has ceased to be ofﬁcially imagined as inclusive and
multinational. By deﬁnition exclusive racism seeks to rid the community of the racialized
other while inclusive racism concedes the other’s presence in the community but institutes
an apartheid system which denies him the privileges of full citizenship. Historically the
two have coexisted and the Moscow experience is no exception. Moscow omcials’
efforts to cleanse the body politic of dark-skinned individuals directly through clean-up
campaigns and indirectly through the constant harassment of people of color which they
hope will eventually lead to their departure constitute forms of exclusive racism. This
same abuse and harassment can also be classiﬁed as inclusive racism because it
hierarchizes society until the cleansing process is complete. By denying blacks registration
and subjecting them to raids, ﬁnes, beatings and document checks, administrative and law
enforcement ofﬁcials are deliberately casting them as second class citizens if not members
of an inferior criminal race. Luzkhov indirectly alluded to the objective of reimagining the

capital as an exclusively Slavic community when he remarked that Muscovites should not

66

look at the expulsion of Caucasian traders from the markets as a loss of exotic fruits and

6“

vegetables but as a necessary return to markets ﬁlled with traditional Russian goods.”” 3

The Soviet system had established a precedent for blaming and punishing entire
groups of pe0p1e (whether they be a class or nationality) for the “sins” of some of its
members and the ills of society. Because some wealthy peasants or kulaks exploited
poorer peasants and because some Crimean Tatars collaborated with the German invaders,
Moscow deported all whom they deﬁned as kulaks as well as the entire Crimean Tatar
nation, disregarding the existence of hard-working kulaks in the villages and loyal Crimean
Tatars in the Red Army and partisan units. Similarly, in post-Communist Moscow
authorities are using the existence of criminals and drug dealers among the capital’s
national groups from the Caucasus, Central Asia and Aﬁica as a reason to discriminate
against if not expel individuals of Caucasian, Central Asian or Aﬁican nationality. Just as
Soviet oﬁicials justiﬁed the liquidation of kulaks as the necessary means by which to make
the countryside safe for Communism, municipal authorities argue that the expulsion of
people of color alone will make Moscow safe for democracy. Communists had identiﬁed
the ﬂuidly deﬁned “kulaks” as the reason why peasants could not yet reap the beneﬁts of
the socialist system. Likewise, post-Communist Moscow leaders identify the presence of
“blacks” (similarly deﬁned quite loosely) whom they have succeeded in racializing as
criminals and parasites as the reason why Muscovites are not yet enjoying the fruits of the
democratic system. Having seemingly depicted themselves as warriors on the battleﬁeld
for democracy,4 post-Communist ofﬁcials consistent with the Soviet tradition argue that
any means including racist measures and violations of human rights justify the lofty ends of
democracy.

Political authorities who seemingly constitute the ofﬁcer corps and law
enforcement oﬁicials who serve as infantrymen are not alone on this battleﬁeld for
democracy in post-Communist Moscow. Human rights ofﬁcials and several concerned

journalists are also ﬁghting for the establishment of democracy in the capital. However

67

they target law enforcement oﬂicials and political authorities themselves as the true
obstacles preventing the realization of democracy rather than dark-skinned non-Russians.
The difﬁculty for human rights activists and journalists lies in determining where reality
ends and racism begins in city oﬁicials’ anti-crime campaigns. They concede the existence
of criminals among these non-Russian diasporas in Moscow but emphasize that this
warrants neither the blanket condemnation nor treatment of all people of color as
criminals. They argue that such racist measures and blatant violations of human rights will
never lead to democracy but actually threaten its existence especially in a nascent
democratic country trying to shake its image as a totalitarian police state. Chairman of
Yeltsin’s presidential human rights committee and former Soviet dissident, Sergei
Kovalyov warned that “the Bolsheviks justiﬁed their totalitarian regime with the struggle
against crime.”5 Likewise, Sergei Alekseyev of the Russian Academy of Sciences argued
that although instituting public order and controlling crime were important Moscow
ofﬁcials had gone too far and were threatening the Russia’s image as a country committed
to democratization.6 Izvestia’s Irina Dement’eva conceded that like other presidents
Chechen President Dudayev probably did have agents in the capital. However, she
emphasized that this did not justify round-ups of individuals solely on the basis of
nationality.7 Journalists and human rights activists emphasize that the means by which to
make the former Soviet capital safe for democracy is by bringing an end to such
operations, by respecting human rights and by eradicating the pernicious train of thought
that democratic ends can result ﬁom authoritarian means.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has precipitated the widescale movement of
people to Moscow. The migration of Caucasians, Central Asians and Africans to the
capital which had once promised them refuge, ﬂeeing conﬂicts which imperial Moscow
had a hand in instigating constitutes an integral aspect of the revenge of the empire on the
former metropolis. Ofﬁcials have responded by making it difﬁcult for if not denying

former colonials the right to register thereby making them illegal, “criminal,” the “enemy,”

68

“black” and the moral “other.” Although living in Moscow had always meant a degree of
privilege, what it means to be a Muscovite since the collapse of the Soviet Union has
taken on a distinctly racial component. The main issue is not ethnicity or nationality for a
person does not have to be of Russian nationality (as stated in one’s passport) to be a
Muscovite. Instead an individual is only required to “look Russian.” As testimony to the
constructedness of race and what it means to be “white” and “black,” the term
“Caucasian” in the United States connotes a white privileged segment of the populace. In
contrast, in post-Communist Moscow the term “Caucasian” has become derogatory and
refers to “blacks” from the Transcaucasus and North Caucasian republics who are at the
very most considered “second class citizens” if not criminals. Though they are deemed
“black” they do not resemble the Aﬁicans who have also been racialized since the fall of
the empire. This ﬁrrther supports Anne McClintock’s observation that “black” and “white”

are categories based on the realities of power rather than appearance.

69

END NOTES

1 “‘Caucasus Connection’ Seen in Moscow Bombing,’” Current Digest of the Post-Soviet
Press 51, no. 36 (1999): 8; “Second Apartment House Bombing Rocks Moscow,”
Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press 51, no. 37 (1999): 1-4; “Terrorist Act in Center
of the Capital is Unprecedented since the Time of the ‘Trolleybus Series,”’ Current Digest
of the Post-Soviet Press 51, no. 35 (1999): 17.

2 “Russia: Crime or Simply Punishment? Racist Attacks by Moscow Law Enforcement,”
Human Rights Watch/Helsinki (HRWI-I) 7, no. 12 (Sep 1995): 7-8.

3Ibid., 2-3.

4Tim McDaniel, The Agony 0f the Russian Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996), 28,17.

5Ibid., 42.
6Ibid., 23.
7Ibid., 41.

3 “The Russian Media: Who Controls What?” Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press 51,
no. 33 (1999), 13-14.

9Marina Lebedeva, “Priekhal v stolitsu i ne zaregistrirovalsya—gotov’sya k shtrafu v 50
zarplat,” Izvestia, 23 October 1993, 4; “If You Come To The Capital and Don’t Register,
Be Prepared to Be Fined 50 Months’ Wages,” The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet
Press XLV, no. 43 (1993): 20-21; Georgy Melikyants, “Plata za prebyvanie v stolitse
uslozhnit zhizn’ ne tol’ko ee gostei,” Izvestia 10 Nov 1993, 2; “Charges for Visiting the
Capital Will Complicate the Lives of More Than Just its Guests,” in The Current Digest of
the Post-Soviet Press XLV, no. 45 (1993): 29; “Human Rights Organizations Talk About
Cleansing in Accordance with the Ethnic Principle,” Sevognya 16 Oct 1993 in The
Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLV, no. 42 (1993): 10; Dmitry Kamyshev and
Maksirn Zhukov, “Freedom of Movement Means a Recognized Need to Restrict that
Freedom,” Kommersant-Daily 30 March 1995 in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet
Press XLVII, no. 13 (1995): 21.

10Marina Lebedeva, “Iz stolitsy-pod dulom avtomata,” Izvestia, 19 Oct 1993, 5. The
Russian Federation Ministry of Internal Affairs declared a state of emergency in Moscow
on 4 October 1993 in the midst of President Yeltsin’s armed conﬂict with the Supreme
Soviet and its pro-Soviet supporters which left the White House in ﬂames. It ended on 19
October 1993 after Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov had conducted a clean-up/anti-crime
operation which nominally sought to expel all unregistered people from the capital but

70

which targeted pe0ple of color.

CHAPTER 1: THE SOVIET UNION AS THE FRIENDSHIP OF PEOPLES

1Yury Shchekochikhin, “They are Fanning the Fires of Hatred Again,” Moscow Times, 8
Feb 1995 inMoscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscoMimesru/archive/ issues/ 1995/Feb/8/story35.html; Internet; Kester
Klomegah, “Victims of Racism in New Russia Defenseless,” Moscow Times 26 Nov 1997
inMoscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/1997/Nov/26/story34.html; Internet.

2Lowell Tillett, The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian
Nationalities (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 3; The
Ministries of Education in each of the Union Republics required that all the republics’
history textbooks discuss the emergence of this friendship of peoples especially the
beginnings of the individual relationships between each national minority group and the
Great Russian people. Thus whereas the Party originally depicted the annexation by the
Russian empire as oppressive, by the mid-19303 it came to be ofﬁcially interpreted as
progressive for non-Russians’ development, Robert Conquest, Soviet Nationalities
Policy in Practice (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 81-84, 86.

3Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin Friendship among the peoples makes our Motherland
invincible (Moscow 1950), 4.

4Ronald Suny, Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the
Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 284.

5Greg Castillo, “Pe0ples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National
Question,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 715.

6Yuri Slezkine, “USSR as a Communal Apartment or How a Socialist State Promoted
Ethnic Particularism,” Becoming National, A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald G. Suny
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 203-238.

7Khrushchev, 4-5; Slezkine, 227; Conquest, 90.

8Conquest, 94.

9Ibid., 91.

10Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! .' Soviet Public Culture ﬁom Revolution to
Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 97, 242.

llConquest, 103.

71

12Brooks, 96.

13Conquest, 91.

14Brooks, 75, 94; Fitzpatrick emphasizes that national minorities were among “the
celebrated ordinary people of the Stalin era.” Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin ’s Peasants:
Resistance and Accommodation after Collectivization (Oxford 1994), 279.

”Slezkine, 226.

16Brooks, 96.

17Slezkine, 226-227.

18Ellen Mickiewicz and Dawn Plumb Jamison, “Ethnicity and Soviet Television News,”
Mass Culture and Perestroika in the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991), 153.

19Ibid., 131.

20Jim Vail, “Sage Advocate Unites City’s Foreign Pupils,” Moscow Times, 5 Feb 1997 in
Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at

www. moscowtimes. ru/archive/issues/ l 997/Feb/5/ story71 .html; Internet.

2 1 Two Universities: An Account of the life and work of Lumumba Friendship University
and Moscow State University (Moscow, 1963), 7 -9.

22Seymour M. Rosen, The Development of Peoples ’ Friendship University in Moscow
(Washington, DC: US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1973), 2-3.

23 Two Universities..., 11, 2.

24Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought
(Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1986), 134.

25 Two Universities... , 29.

26The Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow. (Moscow: Novosti Press
Publishing Agency, 1973), 88; Two Universities..., 5-7.

27Two Universities... , 15.

28B1ake1y, 134.

72

29Ibid, 101, 88, 99.
30Ibid., 80-82, 92, 101.
311bid., 99-100.
321bid., 149.

33Yelena Khanga, Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992 (New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992), 18-19, 22.

34Blakely, 88, 149.
35Ibid., 88, 140—141.

36Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities,
ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1988), 39.

37Blakely, 136-137.
38Two Universities..., 40.
39Ibid., 41.

4°Ibid., 46-47, 49.
411bid., 48.

42Blakely, 141.

43Mervyn Matthews, The Passport Society: Controlling Movement in Russia and the
USSR. , (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 19.

44David L. Hoﬁ’mann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 52.

45Robert A. Lewis, Population Redistribution in the USSR: its impact on society,
1897-1977 (New York: Praeger, 1979), 37.

46“Russian Federation, Moscow: Open Season, Closed City,” Humans Rights
Watch/Helsinki (HRWH) 9, no. 10 (Sep 1997): 3.

47Brooks, 93; Richard Stites and James von Geldem, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia
(Bloomington, 1995), 220-8.

73

48V. Promyslov, Moscow Past and Present (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), 1.
49Matthews, 32.

501bid., 32 n14, 35.

“Slezkine, 227.

CHAPTER 2: THE FALL OF COMMUNISM AND THE RISE OF THE STATE
OF DISORDER

1Konstantin Symmons-symonolewicz, The Non-Slavic Peoples of the Soviet Union, A
Brief Ethnographic Survey (Ann Arbor: Edward Bros, Inc, 1972), 37.

2Ian F. Haney-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusions,
Fabrication and Choice,” Harvard civil rights-civil liberties law review 29, no. 1 (Winter
1994): 30-33.

3HRWH 7, no. 12, 6.

3”

4Errol Lawrence, “‘Just Plain Common Sense: the “Roots” of Racism, The Empire
Strikes Back: Race and Racism in ‘70s Britain, Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 31.

5Haney-Lopez, 33-34;Ba1ibar, 39.

6McDaniel, 21,17.

7John B. Dunlop, “Orthodoxy and National Identity in Russia,” Identities in Transition:
Eastern Europe and Russia after the Collapse of Communism, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell,
(Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1996), 118-119; Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of
Russian Power (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), 355-356.

8Dunlop, 120.

9Ibid., 124.

10Yelena Lebedeva, “A Black Stone with Red Paint,” Moskovsky Novosti, 7-14 Aug
1994,10 in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLVI, no. 32 (1994): 4.

11Valery Musin, “Orthodox Believers Don’t Want Muslim Culture,” Sevognya, 16 Aug
1994, 2 in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLVI, no. 32 (1994): 4.

12Davis emphasizes the notion that “tools” were used in the racialization process, David

74

Brion Davis, “Constructing Race: A Reﬂection,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1
(1 Jan 1997): 11-16.

13The parallels with the British experience are striking. Lawrence, 27.

14British historians have similarly emphasized in their studies of black workers in the
former metropole that government ofﬁcials and members of the media consistently claimed
that the invasion of these outsiders had wrought crime and disorder, John Benyon, A Tale
of Failure: Race and Policing (University of Warwick: Centre for Research in Ethnic
Relations, 1986), 26; HRWH 9, no. 10, 3, 6, 26.

”HRWH 7 no. 12, 6.

16Michael Rowe, The Racialization of Disorder in Twentieth Century Britain (Vermont:
Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1998), 117-118.

”HRWH 9, no. 10, 7.

18Michael Keith, “Old Style Racism, New Style Criminalisation: ‘Racial’ Subjects and
Criminal Justice in the East End of London,” Policing Public Order-Theoretical and
Practical Issues, ed. D. Waddington and C. Critcher (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), 74.

19Lawrence, 31.

20HRWH 7, no. 12, 7; Marina Lebedeva, “Byt’ ili ne byt’... propiske? Vopros voznik posle
togo, kak Moskvy Iurii Luzkhkov otkazalsya sledovat’ prunyatomu parlamentom
zakonu,” Izvestia, 4 Sep 1993, 4; “Residence Permits: To Be or Not to Be?” The
Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLV, no. 36 (1993): 22; Morrison,
www.moscowtimes.ru/ archive/issues/1995/ Dec/14/story10.html; Valeria Korchagina,
“Activists Accuse Luzhkov of Rights Violations,” Moscow Times, 21 May 1997 in
Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ 1997/May/21/storyl l .html; Internet.

21HRWH 7, no. 12,7.

22Viktoria Averbukh, “Moscow Sets the Example,” Izvestia, 28 May 1998, 2 in The
Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press 50, no. 21 (1998): 14.

23Lidia Osheverova and Anton Bulanov, “‘Kazaki-razboiniki’ na stolichnykh rynkakh,”
Izvestia 14 October 1993, 5; “‘Cops and Robbers’ in the Capital’s Markets,”’ The Current
Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLV, no. 42 (1993): 10-11.

24Similar to Britain’s experience of decolonization and the migration of black workers to

the former metropole, British ofﬁcials deliberately released statistics about the crimes
committed by black workers in order to create moral panic among the white populace.

75

 

 

 

 

Benyon, 26-27. Dement’eva, 3; Irina Dement’eva, “Posle oblava,” Izvestia, 7 May 1992,
3; “After the Round-up,” The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLIV, no. 18
(1992): 21-22.

25”Russian Federation: Ethnic Discrimination in Southern Russia,” Human Rights
Watch/Helsinki 10, no. 8.

26Shchekochikhin, www.moscowtirnes. ru/archive/issues/ 1995/Feb/8/story3 5 .html.

27Igor Baranovsky, “The Medellin Cartel at Russia’s Threshold,” Moskovsky Novosti,
15-22 Nov 1992, 16.

28“The ‘Nationality’ Column on a Survey About Gangs,” Izvestia, 21 October 1994, 5 in
The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLVI, no. 45 (1994): 14-15.

29Ibid., 14-15; Igor Baranovsky, “Maﬁa: young wolves against ‘authorities,”’ Moskovsky
Novosti, 1 Oct 1993, 14.

30 “The ‘Nationality’ Column...,” 14-15.

31Anna Feoﬁlaktova and Aleksandr Zakharov, “Criminal Ethnic Groups’ Storm Capital
from Within,” Sevognya, 8 Aug 1996, 6 in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press
XLVIII, no. 32 (1996): 19.

”mo, 19.

33Ibid, 20.

34“The ‘Nationality’ Column...,” 14; HRWH 10, no. 8, 3.

35 “The ‘Nationality’ Column...,” 14.

36Ibid., 14.

37HRWH 10, no. 8, 3; Keith Gessen, “From the Caucasus to Moscow,” Moscow Times 19
July 1997 in Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscowtimes.ru/ archive/issues/1997/ Jul/19/ storySOhtml; Internet.

”HRWH 10, no. 8, 14—15, 3.

39Osheverova and Bulanov, 5.

40Rowe, 171.

41Balibar, 39.

76

42Keith, 75-76.

43Rowe, 171.

44Lebedeva, 19 Oct 1993, 5.

45HRWH 7, no. 12, 8; “The CIS: Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons in Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Russian Federation and Tajikistan,” Human Rights
Watch/Helsinki 8, no. 7 (May 1996): 26.

46HRWH 7, no. 12,24.

47Lawrence has emphasized that neither the British populace nor authorities distinguished
between the different blacks cultures in the capital because of their shared “alieness,”
Lawrence, 47.

48Lerrnan Usmanov, “Pristalo li Rossii derzhat’ svoi dveri zakrytymi? Deportatsiya
nerusskikh is Moskvy mozhet nanesti oshchutimyi uron RF i Russkim za ee predelami,”
Nezavisimaya gazeta, 21 Oct 1993, p. 1; “Should Russia Keep Its Doors Closed?” The
Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLV, no. 42 (1993): 12.

49Lebedeva, 19 Oct 1993, 5.

50HRWH 7, no. 12,26.

51Lebedeva, 19 October 1993, 5.

52Melikyants, 2; Valery Yakov, “Otnyne gostei stolitsy zhdet osobyi rezhim.” Izvestia,
17 Nov 1993, 5; “From Now On, Special Rules Await Visitors to the Capital,” The
Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLV, no. 46 (1993): 20.

53HRWH 7, no. 12, 4.

54“Russian Federation: Ethnic Discrimination in Southern Russia,” HRWH 10, no. 8
(August 1995): 6-7.

55HRWH 10, no. 8, 6; AM. Verkhovskii, V.V. Pribylovskii, and E.V. Mikhailovskaya,
Natsionalizm i Ksenofobiya i Rossiiskom Obshvhestve, Moskva:
Informatsionno-ekspertnaya gruppa “Panorama,” 1998, 160.

56Dement’eva (May 1992), 3.

57HRWH 7, no. 12,9.

77

58Klomegah, www. moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ l 997/Nov/26/story34 . html.

”HRWH 7, no. 12, 9.

60Kamyshev, l7.

61HRWH7, no. 12, 7.

62Kamyshev, 16-17.

63Averbukh, 14; Yevgeniya Dolginova, “Tolerance in Education,” Moscow Times 28 Aug
1997 in Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at

www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/ issues/ 1997/Aug/28/story35html; Internet.

64HRWH 10, no. 8, 6; Dolginova, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/ issues/1997/Aug/
28/story35. html; Internet.

65Yevgeny Karanyan, “A Shaven Head Resembles an Ass,” Moskovsky komsomolets, 22
Apr 1997, 4 in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLIX, no. 18 (1997): 21;
Primachenko, Masha, “Members of informal groups are big on form,” Sevognya, 12
October 1996, 9 in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLVIH, no. 44 (1996):
13.

66Yelena Lebedeva, 2-4.

67Kamyshev, 16.

68mart/11110, no. 8, 18-19; 7, no. 12, 10.

69Ellis Cashmore and Eugene McLaughlin, “Introduction” and “Out of Order?” Out of
Order?: Policing Black People, ed. Ellis Cashmore and Eugene McLaughlin (London:
Routledge, 1991), 9, 40.

70Bronwyn McLaren, “‘Open Season, Closed City,’ Rights Group Says of Capita
Moscow Times 6 Sep 1997 in Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www. moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ 1 997/Sep/6/story5.html; Internet.

“HRWH 9, no. 10, 36.

72Cashmore and McLaughlin, 15-19.

”HRWH 7, no. 12, 8.

74[trim/H 9, no. 10, 8, 34.

78

75nnd,2h9.

76HRWH 7, no. 12, 7-8.
TUhRn0J10,no.8,19.
781bid., 19.
”UhRn779,no.ux 4,16:r7
8CWarminolzzo.
81HiWH9,no.1o,17.

82Matt Taibbi, “City Gives F acelift to ‘Propiska’ System,” Moscow Times 11 Jan 1996 in
Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at www.moscowtimes.ru; Internet.

83HRWH 9, no. 10, 16.

84Frank Brown, “Reﬁrgees Find No Comfort in Cardboard Camp,” Moscow Times 1 Oct
1994 in Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscowtimes.ru/archives/issues/ l994/Oct/01/story37.html; Internet.

85Editorial, “Russia Must Bear Burden of Refugees,” Moscow Times, 11 Oct 1997 in
Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/1997/ Oct/ 1 1/story3 3 .html; Internet.

86Julia Shargorodska, “Azerbaijan Refugees Fight to Stay Near Moscow,” Moscow Times
21 Oct 1997 in Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscowtimes.ru/ archive/issues/l997/Oct/21/storyl3 .html; Internet.

CHAPTER 3: ENFORCEMENT OF THE REGISTRATION SYSTEM AND THE
RACIALIZATION OF PEOPLE OF COLOR

lHRWH 8, no. 7,26; 10, no. 8, 2o; 9, no. 10, 20.

2Ellen Barry, “Mayor to Chechens: Empty Vows?” Moscow Times 5 August 1995 in
Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ 1995/Aug/ 05/story10.html; Internet.

3Bronwyn McLaren, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ 1 997/ Sep/ 6/ story5 .html;
Internet.

4HRWH 9, no. 10, 22; Gessen, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/ issues/ 1997/ Jul/19/
story50.html.

79

5Barry, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ 1995/Aug/ 05/story10.html.

6Ibid., www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ l995/Aug/ 05/story10.html.

7HRWH 7, no. 12,28.

8HRWH 9, no. 10, 22.

9Ibid, 22.

10Ibid, 35-36.

11Ibid, 35-36.

12Carlotta Gall, “Moscow’s Refugees Face ‘Second Deportation.”’ Moscow Times 1 Mar
1996 in Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ 1996/Mar/1/storyl 5 .html; Internet; Gessen,
www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ 1 997/ Jul/19/ story50.html.

l3Bronwyn McLaren, “Court Deals a Blow to Hated Propiska,” Moscow Times 10 July
1997 in Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/ issues/l997/Jul/10/story2.html; Internet.

”HRWH 7, no. 12, 5-6.

15HRWH 9, no. 10, 3.

16Ibid., 22.

17Averbukh, 14.

18 “Luzhkov Begins Struggle Against Illegal Immigrants,” Sevognya 13 May 1997, p. 1
in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLIX, no. 19 (1997): 17; Gessen,
www.moscowtimes.ru/ archive/issues/ 1997/ Jul/19/ story50.html.

19Korchagina, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/l997/May/21/story1 1 .html.
20Yelena Lebedeva, 4.

21HRWH 7, no. 12, 7; 9, no. 10, 8.

22 “Human Rights Organizations...,” 10.

23Shchekochikhin, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ 1995/Feb/8/story35.html.

80

24 “Human rights Organizations...,” 10.

”Shchekochikhin, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/1995/Feb/8/story35.html.
26HRWH 9, no. 10, 18.

27Cashmore and McLaughlin, 22, 27, 35.

28Genine Babakian, “Crackdown on Terror Takes Aim at Caucasians,” Moscow Times 16
July1996 in Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at

www. moscowtimes.ru/ archive/issues/l996/Jul/16/story4.html; Internet.

”HRWH 9, no. 10, 29-30.

30”Chechnya’s Southern Border Will Now Be Ofﬁcially Open,” Kommersant-Daily, 13
August 1996, 4 in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLVIII, no. 32 (1996):
23; HRWH 9, no. 10, 30.

31Usmanov, 1.

32Melikyants, 2.

33Dement’eva, 7 May 1992, 3.

34Black ofﬁcers are deliberately placed in prominent positions in the British police force in
order to legitimize police actions against blacks, Cashmore and McLaughlin, 5.

3’5Irina Dement’eva, “Oblava,” Izvestia, 19 Mar 1992, 3; Dement’eva, 7 May 1992, 3;
Lidia Malash, “Who’s To Blame?” Kuranty, 7 Mar 1992, 1 in The Current Digest of the
Post-Soviet Press XLIV, no. 11 (1992): 22-23.

36McLaren, www.moscowtimes. ru/archive/issues/ 1 997/Sep/6/story5 .html.

37HRWH 7 no. 12,7.

38Ibid., 2.

39Dmitry Kamyshev, “Xenophobia as a norm of Moscow life,” Kommersant-Daily 27 July
1996, 3 in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press XLVIII, no. 30 (1996): 17.

40HRWH 7, no. 12, 15; Genine Babakian, www.moscowtimes.ru/ archive/issues/1996/
Jul/16/story4.html; Internet.

“HRWH 7, no. 12, 14.

81

189Shchekochikhin, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ 1 995/Feb/8/story3 5.html.

42HRWH 9, no. 10, 33.

43Ibid, 21.

“Korchagina, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/1997/May/2 l/storyl 1 .html.
45HRWH 9, no. 10, 3.

46HRWH 7, no. 12, 4.

47HRWH 7, no. 12, 10.

48HRWH 7, no. 12, 16; 9, no. 10,26.

49HRWH 7, no. 12, 25; Lebedeva, (19 Oct 1993), 5.
50HRWH 7, no. 12, 17.

51Ibid., 16.

52Marina Lebedeva, 4 Sep 1993, 4.

53HRWH 9, no. 10, 2.

54Ibid., 23.

55HRWH 7, no. 12,24.

56HRWH 9, no. 10, 23.

57HRWH 8, no. 7, 26; 7, no. 12, 5.

58HRWH 9, no. 10, 25.

59Gessen, www.moscowtimes.ru/ archive/issues/ 1997/ Jul/19/ story50.htm1.
60Usmanov, 1; HRWH 7, no. 12, 5.

61Usmanov, 1; Lebedeva, 19 Oct 1993, 5.
62”Human rights Organizations...,” 10.

63HRWH 9, no. 10, 2—3, 17, 35.

82

64Morrison, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/1995/Dec/14/story10html.
65HRWH 10, no. 8, 20.

66HRWH 7, no. 12, 5; 9, no. 10,37.

67HRWH 9, no. 10, 20, 37-38, 17.

68HRWH 7, no. 12, 29.

69Ibid., 12.

70Kamyshev, 17.

71Vladimir Chesnokov, “One Can Now Become a Muscovite For Up to Five Years,”

Izvestia, 17 June 1999, 2 in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press 51, no. 24
(1999)115-16.

72HRWH 7, no. 12,27.
73Ibid, 28.

74Ibid., 23.

75Ellen Barry, “Moscow: Little Refuge in a Turbulent Refugee Life,” Moscow Times 24

June 1995 in Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/ issues/1995/Jun/24/story9.html; Internet.

76HRWH 9, no. 10, 23-24, 26, 28-9.

77Ibid., 20; 7, no. 12, 5.

78HRWH 7, no. 12, 27.

79HRWH 9, no. 10, 20.

80HRWH 7, no. 12,27.

81HRWH 9, no. 10,21.

821bid., 37.

83Gessen, www.moscowtimes.ru/ archive/issues/1997/ Jul/19/ story50.html.

84HRWH 8, no. 7, 26

83

85HRWH 9, no. 10, 32.

86HRWH 7, no. 12, 18.

87HRWH 7, no. 12, 28.

“HRWH 9, no. 10, 32.

89HRWH 7, no. 12, 14; 9, no. 10, 2, 20—1.

90HRWH 9, no. 10, 4.

”HRWH 7, no. 12,23.

92Ibid., 21.

93Klomegah, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/1997/Nov/26/story34.html.
94HRWH 9, no. 10, 30.

95HRWH 7, no. 12, 5.

96Babakian, www.moscowtimes.ru/ archive/issues/l996/Jul/16/story4.html.
97HRWH 7, no. 12, 14, 5; 8, no. 7,26; 9, no. 10, 20.

98In June 1995, 20,000 rubles was the rough equivalent of ﬁve US. dollars compared to
bread which cost about thirty-ﬁve cents. HRWH 7, no. 12, 13-14.

99HRWH 9, no. 10, 20—1.
100Ibid, 20.

101HRWH 7, no. 12,29.
1021bid., 5.

103HRWH 9, no. 10,21.

104Again the parallels with the British treatment of empire blacks are striking, Cashmore
and McLaughlin, 37.

105HRWH 9, no. 10, 27—28.

84

106Usmanov, 1; “The Nationality Column...,” 14.

107A similar situation developed during the 19703 in post-colonial British cities,
Lawrence, 174.

108British police were more interested in determining if black victims of racial violence
were illegally in the country than with detaining their attackers, Benyon, 46.

109Tanya Ambaye, “Youths, Cops Beat Diplomat,” Moscow Times, 27 May 1995 in
Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at

www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/l995/May/ 27/ story2.html; Internet.

110German Aleksandrov, “Nazis terrorize foreigners in Moscow,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 7
May 1998, 2 in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press 50, no.18 (1998): 23.

111Klomegah, www.moscowtimes. ru/archive/issues/ l 997/Nov/26/story34.html.
112Vail, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/1 997/Feb/5/ story71.html.

113Stefan Scholl, “Russian Right Extremists Supported by State and Society,” Moskovsky
Novosti 2-8 July 1998, 5.

1 l4Klomegah, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ l 997/Nov/26/story34.html.
115Vladimir Ivanidze, “Run, Negro, Run,” Moskovsky Novosti 27 Sep - 4 Oct 1992, 1, 14.
116Vladimir Ivanidze, “‘We Were Ready to Kneel Down, Fresh Murder of an African
Student in Moscow,” Moskovsky Novosti, 20-27 Dec 1992, 9; Klomegah,
www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/ issues/1997/Nov/26/story34html.

1171vanidze (27 Sep - 4 Oct 1992), 14.

118Klomegah, www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ l 997/Nov/26/story34.html; HRWH 7,
no. 12, 16.

119Ivanidze (20—27 Dec 1992), 9.

120Nikolai Burbyga and Besik Urigashvili, “How ‘our’ Afghans Ceased to Be Ours,”
Izvestia 6 October 1995, 3 in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press )ﬂoVII, no. 40
(1995): 28.

121men/Iii 7, no. 12, 7.

122Andrei Khalip, “City Security Tight in the Wake of Attack,” Moscow Times, 16 June

1995 in Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available at
www.moscowtimes.ru/archive/issues/ l995/Jun/16/storyl .html; Internet.

85

123HRWH 7, no. 12, 13; 9, no. 10, 28.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

1Gordon discusses how in the British experience all blacks (former colonials) in British
cities were assumed to be and therefore discriminated against as immigrants, Paul Gordon,
Policing Immigration: Britain 's Internal Controls (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 2.
2Balibar, 39—40.

3Osheverova and Bulanov, 5.

4This concept of a battleﬁeld of democracy was used by Valery Vyzhutovich in an article
entitled “Opravdanie negodyaev, pochemu propagandisty rasizma i fashizma ostaiutsya
beznakazannymi,” Izvestia, 2 Aug 1994, 5.

5John Morrison, “Kovalyov: Rights Report to Reveal Growing Abuses,” Moscow Times,
14 Dec 1995 in Moscow Times Online [cited 12 Nov 1999], available from
www.moscowtimes. ru/ archive/issues/ 1 995/Dec/ 1 4/ story 1 0.html; Internet.

6Lebedeva, 23 Oct 1993, 4.

7Dement’eva, 19 Mar 1992, 3.

86

 

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