Dispatches from Moscow: Racism and Hope in Russia
Posted By The Editors | March 26th, 2010By Jelani Cobb
The Moscow subway is the deepest underground transit system in the world. Designed to serve as a bomb shelter in the event of nuclear attack, its tunnels lie hundreds of feet below the ground in some places. In my first days in the city I took advantage of the long descents down to the platform, practicing my Russian by reading the advertisements or translating portions of overheard conversations.
But mostly I scanned the faces, a parade of serious expressions in the crush of rush hour. On my third day in the city I found myself on an escalator next to another black man. He nodded almost imperceptibly but the moment we reached the platform he turned and introduced himself. Upon learning that I was new to the city he explained that he had come to Moscow from Nigeria eight months earlier.
“There are many things we should discuss,” he said. “It is hard here…”
In my four weeks here, scenes like that have been replayed with something approaching regularity, almost always in the subway, usually ending with a bit of advice to “be careful” or an anecdote telling of the difficulty and danger associated with being black in Moscow. On my first weekend a white American journalist offered me a cryptic hope that “they treat you more like an American than an African here.”
Moscow is a city of contradictions. Some are obvious: streets where 18th century architecture of the tsarist era nestles against staid Soviet-inspired office buildings, which in turn contrast the post Cold War skyscrapers. Others remain below the surface but are no less complex.
For the better part of the 20th century, the USSR served as a counterpoint to the governments of the West, criticizing the legacy of racism, slavery and colonialism and assisting African states in their struggles for independence. Soviet scholarships allowed generations of African students access to higher education. Motivated by racism and lack of opportunity in the US, a number of African Americans even emigrated to the Soviet Union beginning in the 1930s.
Yet a very different reality has taken hold in Russia today. Racial violence and intimidation has become a common feature of life for Africans here.
In 2008, Etizok Ernest, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Ulyanovsk, was attacked and killed by a gang of neo-Nazis. The murder was not an isolated incident. Last year the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy conducted a survey which indicated that 60 percent of Africans living in the city had been subject to racially motivated violence. Virtually all those surveyed reported at least one incident in which they were verbally assaulted.
There is another set of contradictions at play here, too.
To an extent that we find hard to imagine in the United States, World War II remains very much present in the minds of contemporary Russians. The United States suffered roughly 400,000 casualties during the war. The Soviets lost nearly 25 million people. It remains a source of fierce pride that the Soviet army played a huge role in the defeat of Hitler and German fascism. Yet neo-Nazi gangs are widespread enough to motivate those unprompted warnings in the subway.
Two weeks ago the MPC sponsored a meeting at the United States Embassy with the goal of bringing attention to racially motivated violence. More than 30 ambassadors or embassy representatives from African and Asian countries attended. Many of the Asian embassies and all of the African ones had dealt with students, tourists or emigrants from their countries being assaulted, and they shared a common belief that the problem was not taken seriously by the Russian authorities.
There are no firm numbers on the assaults, yet each of the embassies reported violent attacks on their nationals occur with increasing frequency. A Kenyan representative explained that the rising violence is driven in part by resentments that emerged with the collapse of communism. “There is a belief that the Soviet Union wasted all its resources trying to help lazy Africans and we are to blame for the current problems in Russian society.” Another representative from Sierra Leone reported that a student was stabbed and nearly killed and his attackers were charged with “hooliganism” and given minimal punishments.
That reality is even more complicated given the internal politics of post-Cold War Russia. Labor competition and religious bias have meant that there is an even higher degree of contempt directed at emigrants from the former Soviet republics. “You must remember,” one representative pointed out, “that these thugs will bypass a Kenyan to get at a Kazakh.”
Later that week I spoke to Yelena Khanga, an Afro-Russian journalist and author who grew up in Moscow and watched as the racial landscape changed. She pointed out that separate realities operate in the city; it is simultaneously a cosmopolitan capital filled with art galleries and a place whose outskirts are increasingly fueled by resentments of foreigners.
There are hopeful signs.
Twenty-two skinheads were convicted this month for the Ernest killing. The ambassadors closed the meeting with plans to approach the Russian foreign ministry as a group with demands that stronger protections be put in place. They have public attention on their side. Russia will host the 2014 winter Olympics, they pointed out, and they do not want racial intolerance to mar the moment in the global spotlight. But few hold any illusion that this problem will disappear immediately.
Two days ago as I headed north toward the Partisanskaya subway station, I struck up a conversation with a young Nigerian who has been living here for eight months. Shortly into the conversation I asked him about his experience in Moscow and he sighed and said “It is difficult. Lots of racism in Russia…”
William Jelani Cobb is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Spelman College. His book, The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, will be published by Walker & Co in May 2010.
