Systematic racist violence in Russia between ‘hate crime’ and ‘ethnic conflict’

Abstract

Racist violence in Russia has recently become a subject of interest to scholars and analysts of Russian politics. What are the similarities and differences between racist violence in Russia and the West? How does the level of Russian racist violence compare to other societies? Do racist hate groups in Russia have similar origins to groups in the West? This article considers these questions. I first demonstrate that Russia is indeed the most dangerous country in Europe for ethnic minorities, and argue that such violence is more ‘systematic’ (structured, ideologically coherent, patterned) than in other developed societies. The high level of violence against ethnic minorities in Russia is ‘over-determined’ by a combination of post-Soviet social and economic social changes, the brutalizing consequences of a long counter-insurgency campaign, and government passivity (and sometimes complicity) in the face of racist violence and hate speech. Thus, Russia’s systematic racist violence is analytically closer to outright ethnic conflict than to a form of criminal deviance that could aptly be termed ‘hate crime’.

Keywords

Former Soviet Union hate crime neo-Nazis racists Russia skinheads systematic racist violence violent racism

Introduction

In 2006, an estimated half of the world’s racist skinheads lived in the Russian Federation (Tarasov, 2006: 19, cited in Shnirel’man, 2007: 186). That year, the UN special rapporteur for racism, Doudou Dienne, found that ‘Russian society is facing an alarming trend of racism and xenophobia, the most striking manifestations of which are the increasing number of racially motivated crimes and attacks’ (United Nations, 2007: 2) while no less prominent a racist than David Duke praised Russia as the ‘White World’s Future’ (Arnold and Romanova, 2013). More recently, the Russian Interior Ministry identified over 150 ‘extremist’ groups (Interfax, 2010), a number which omits non-affiliated adherents of the racist subculture. Together, these accounts suggest that, in the post-Soviet period, Russia has gone from being the world center of socialist internationalism to the epitome of xenophobia. What are the main features of racist violence in Russia? How does Russia compare to other societies blighted by racist violence? How comparable are the social causes of racist violence in the Russian Federation to those in the West?

Although there is now an extensive literature on hate crimes in Russia, to which I have contributed elsewhere (Arnold, 2009, 2010a, 2010b), this essay is the first to consider Russian racist violence in an international comparative perspective as a complex phenomenon with empirical, regulatory, and discursive aspects. As such, the article should be of interest to western criminologists for at least two reasons. First, it adds to knowledge of Russian racist violence by drawing on Russian sources not frequently read by western researchers, many of which have not been published in English. Second, Russia also helps elucidate the distinction between ‘hate crime’ and ‘ethnic conflict’, precisely because Russia’s experience straddles the conceptual divide between these phenomena. Thus, Russia draws attention to assumptions about hate crime based on the experience of contemporary western cases that may not apply elsewhere in the world.

The focus of this article is racist violence, and specifically the ‘systematic racist violence’ characteristic of Russia. I thus follow Bowling (1998), who prefers the term ‘violent racism’ to identify a specific type of hate crime. Systematic racist violence—racist violence that structures its individual cases into more comprehensive patterns—is a subset of the more expansive concept of ‘hate crime’. Thus, whereas all instances of systematic racist violence are hate crimes, not all hate crimes are instances of systematic racist violence. At the same time, racist violence is also closely tied to the related concept of ‘ethnic conflict’. The main differences between these concepts relate to the context of social stability and the breadth of the term. MacGinty (2001) addresses the dimension of ‘stability’ in analyzing hate crimes in ‘deeply divided societies’ such as Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, and post-Apartheid South Africa. Where social relations are (relatively) stable, as in North America and Western Europe, it is proper to speak of racist violence. But where social relations are fluid, it is more precise to speak of ethnic conflict. In other words, although individual acts of systematic racist violence and acts of violence in situations of ethnic conflict may be formally similar, the difference in terminology reflects a judgment about the place of the violent act in the broader society.

The difference between ‘racist violence’ and ‘ethnic conflict’ is also one of scale. Russian sociologist Mikhail Savva (2004) offers the following definition of ethnic conflict: ‘[a] social confrontation in which at least one party defines itself as an ethnic community … [that is,] organized political activity, social movements, riots, separatist speeches, and even civil war in which the confrontation takes place through ethnic community’. Systematic racist violence, by contrast, concerns itself solely with perpetrating violence, not with goal-oriented political action.

The article proceeds as follows. First it elaborates the legal definition of ‘hate crime’ in Russia and the West before describing what is known about systematic racist violence in Russia and elsewhere. The next section analyzes the causes of the rapid explosion of ‘skinhead’¹ groups and violence in Russia. Some aspects are shared with developed western countries, such as post-industrial decline and related social problems. Others, however, such as the effects of Russia’s decades-long wars in the North Caucasus, the prevalence of officially promoted exclusionary Russian nationalism, as well as official unwillingness to confront violent racism, are distinct. All make Russia particularly appealing for western racist groups.

The legal construction of racist violence in Russia and the West

Russian law prohibits racist violence and mandates additional punishment for crimes motivated by ethnic or racial hatred. However, this outward similarity to western legal doctrines is deceptive. Unlike most western societies, the punishment of racist violence in Russia primarily reflects the interests of the state and not those of the individual. Racist violence is to be punished harshly in Russia because it threatens harmonious community relations and public order, not because it violates individual rights or infringes a social norm against racism per se. This fundamental difference shows through in the legal application of the term.

Granted, one must be cautious in making generalizations about ‘western’ legal practice. To take just two examples, however, in many US states and England and Wales, the legal punishment for racist violence is harsher than for non-racist violence, when directed against members of specified ‘minority’ or ‘vulnerable’ groups (Chakraboti and Garland, 2012). The rationale for stricter sentencing ranges from greater individual harm (Gerstenfield, 2013: 18–23) to symbolic rejection of racial status hierarchies, or ‘implicitly denounc[ing] the element of prejudice’ (Mason, 2014: 87). In these places, racist violence is held to be worse than other crimes both because of its psychological effects on the victim and because of the crime’s violation of the principle of racial equality. As the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in its amicus curiae brief in the 1993 US Supreme Court case of Wisconsin v. Mitchell, which upheld the constitutionality of hate crime laws, ‘[T]he sort of bias attack that took place in this case is more than an assault on the victim’s physical well-being. It is an assault on the victim’s essential human worth’ (in Gerstenfield, 2013: 19). The motive for a ‘hate crime’ need not be necessarily overtly ideological—often simple boredom or thrill-seeking is sufficient (Gadd and Dixon in Levin and Perry, 2009; Walters, 2011). Yet as a legal matter, it is the fact that the victim was selected in part on perceived membership in a protected group that is pertinent for conviction.

On the surface, the same concept of ‘hate crime’ also seems to exist in Russia. The Russian Criminal Code stipulates harsher punishments for crimes motivated by some forms of hatred. For example, Article 105, clause 2, paragraph K (murder) lists ‘national, racial, or religious hatred’ as motives for murder that carry a longer prison sentence. Likewise, Article 111, clause 2, paragraph F (intentional infliction of a grave injury) carries a harsher punishment if the crime is motivated by hatred; and so on. Yet other provisions of the Criminal Code, as well as actual prosecutions, reveal a key difference between Russian and western legal concepts of hate crime. Whereas in western democracies racist violence is seen primarily as damaging to individuals, racist violence in Russia is officially seen as worse than non-racist violence because it destabilizes society. Thus, racist acts are frequently prosecuted under Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code, which is listed as a ‘crime against state power’. Article 282 specifies special punishments for acts aiming at the ‘incitement of national,² racial, or religious enmity’.³ Indeed, in many prosecutions, this framing of hate crime as social destabilization is carried even further than the law provides: thus, the misapplication of Article 282 to cases where there is no apparent audience (and hence no ‘incitement’) has long been a complaint of human rights agencies and non-governmental monitors (Alperovich and Yudina, 2013: 42; Kozhevnikova, 2010: 32).

In practice, skinheads are often tried under the charge of ‘hooliganism’ (Article 213) without mention of racial hatred, an offense which carries a much lesser penalty. However, even the charge of ‘hooliganism’ reflects a collectivist ethos. In Soviet law, acts that diminished the prestige of Soviet society, such as drunkenness or battery, were offenses against the collective (LaPierre, 2012). Thus, when Russian courts convict skinheads of ‘hooligan’ behavior, they are denouncing behavior that demeans Russian society.

This analysis is consistent with other legal concepts in Russia. Kharkordhin (1999: 128) writes that under Stalin the collective acted upon itself through purges and self-criticism to banish or annihilate deviant individuals. Deviant behavior was a crime against the group. In the Soviet state, the maintenance of social norms was ensured by surveillance of everyone by everyone else and not the individuated surveillance common in western societies (see Piacentini and Slade, this issue). Similarly, McDaniel (1994) argues that a central component of the ‘Russian Idea’ is that the notion of community in Russia is more genuine and superior to that in the West, and enforcing collective norms through mutual surveillance is one way in which this genuine community is achieved. The prosecution of ‘hate crimes’ in Russia evidently reflects a similar collectivist ethos, rather than an affirmation of individual rights or a rejection of bigotry.

Further evidence for this claim can be found in the Russian legal treatment of violence against sexual minorities. Levin (2009: 18) claims that ‘of the 45 [US] states with hate crime laws, 28 cover gender [and] 32 cover sexual orientation’. The relatively recent inclusion of LGBT groups into the class of those protected by hate crimes laws signals their increasing acceptance by wider society (Mason, 2014). In the Russian Criminal Code, however, sexual minorities are not a protected class. Indeed, Russia is not known for its openness to sexual minorities: an April 2013 poll found 78 percent of people describing homosexuality as either ‘an illness or the result of psychological trauma’ or ‘a bad habit similar to promiscuity’.⁴ If racist violence in Russia is seen as harmful to society but sexual ‘deviance’ is also seen as reprehensible, then it is entirely logical that sexual minorities are not protected by ‘hate crime’ statutes. Indeed, in the lead-up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, prominent LGBT activist Steven Fry agitated for a boycott of the Sochi Olympics after Russia adopted, in his words, a ‘fascist, barbaric law’ banning ‘homosexual propaganda’ to minors (Arnold and Foxall, 2014: 4). Following the passage of this law there was a spate of violent assaults committed against sexual minorities. While there is less written about the treatment of the disabled and homeless in Russia, anecdotal evidence (Arnold, 2014b) also suggests a similar legal indifference to violence against these vulnerable categories.

As I argue below, this contrast between the individual, rights-oriented basis for hate crimes laws in western states and the collectivist, statist basis for them in Russia has consequences for the policing of such crimes and probably contributes to their greater intensity in Russia. First, though, the next section establishes that Russian skinhead racist violence is more extreme than its counterparts in other developed countries.

Scope and characteristics of systematic racist violence in Russia

One of the most visible social movements in contemporary Russia, especially following the invasion of Crimea under the pretext of saving ethnic Russians from the allegedly ‘fascist’ Ukrainian government, is the extreme nationalist or ‘skinhead’ movement. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many observers worried about a so-called ‘Weimar Russia’ scenario (Brubaker, 1996; Luks, 2008; Yanov, 1995), noting the similarities between Germany after the First World War and Russia after the Cold War. Both cases featured legends about an internal enemy, a rejection of the West as a model of development, an ethnic diaspora living outside of the country, a transition from a highly regimented to a more open society, and the revenge of former elites. Although this analogy should not be overdrawn (see Luks, 2008), a further parallel between the two cases lies in the explosion of Russia’s skinhead subculture from about the year 2000. Shnirel’man (2007, 28; citing Tarasov, 2006: 19) estimates the number of skinheads in Russia in 1996 at between 7000 and 8000.⁵ By 2007, this number had grown to 60,000–65,000, or, as noted above, roughly half the world’s total skinhead population, with organized groups in some 85 Russian cities.

Moreover, racist violence by skinhead groups now occurs in Russia on a near-daily basis. Although there are no official published statistics, annual reports from a major NGO, Moscow’s SOVA Center (Verkhovskii, 2005, 2006, 2007; Verkhovskii et al., 2010, 2012, 2013), catalogue incidents of skinhead violence. The level of racist violence was highest between 2005 and 2009, after which (as I describe below) the state belatedly stepped up its policing efforts. In 2007, SOVA recorded skinheads as killing 97 people and beating 623. In 2009, the respective numbers were 94 and 443. This number may be an underestimate, as SOVA compiles its data from reports in regional newspapers and regional networks of monitoring experts (Arnold, 2010b). It is likely that many incidents of racist violence do not get included in these regional data, and thus in SOVA reports, because victims are afraid to report their attacks. To measure the scale of underreporting, Amnesty International conducted a survey of ethnic minorities in Moscow, finding that just 61 of 204 racist attacks were reported to the police (McClintock, 2005: 70).

These data make Russia the most violent country in the former Soviet Union for ethnic and racial minorities, far outstripping the next most dangerous country, Ukraine, where, even accounting for the difference in population size (roughly one-third of Russia’s), the statistics are much lower. In 2006, for instance, 522 people were beaten in Russia and 66 killed in racist crimes. For comparison, in Ukraine there were 12 beaten and two killed. In 2008, in Russia 434 people were beaten and 97 killed. In the same year in Ukraine, there were 79 beaten and four killed (Umland and Shekhovtsov, 2013: 48). While there has been a decline in racist violence since its peak in 2008, skinheads still remain a potent force in Russia, with 187 deaths and 206 people wounded in 2012 (Verkhovskii et al., 2013: 130–137). Racist groups still thrive in Russia and form a substantial portion of the social support for Putin’s ‘Novorossia’ policy of reuniting ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine (see Arnold, 2014c).

Comparisons with the West are more difficult. The best available resource, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) report on systematic racist violence for 2012, recorded nine violent hate crimes in Austria, 98 hate crimes of violence in Germany, one case in the United States, and 10 in the United Kingdom. The same report estimated violent racist crimes in Russia at over 120. The level of racist violence in contemporary Russia is thus the highest in the OSCE. These statistics are almost certainly undercounted for every country and especially so in Russia.⁶ In looking for historical parallels, one author reports that ‘during the 1980s … the tally of skinhead violence [in the United States] included 121 murders of blacks and gays in urban areas across the nation, 302 racial assaults, and 301 cross burnings’ (Bowling, 1998; Wooden, 1991, cf. Hamm, 1993: 3). The level of racist violence for one year in Russia is thus higher than the entire decade in the United States where Americans were most concerned about this violence. Thus, Russia experiences a very high level of racist violence compared to other OECD countries.

Statistics on the number of racist crimes, moreover, do not capture the qualitative differences between them, which further reveal the systematic nature of Russian racist violence. Elsewhere (Arnold, 2009), I have disaggregated the concept ‘ethnic violence’ (of which racist violence is a part) committed by skinheads into four ideal-types: symbolic violence; lynching; pogrom; and massacre. Symbolic violence refers to non-widespread property damage such as graffiti, and pogrom to widespread property damage. Lynching refers to the murder or physical injury of persons. Finally, massacre refers to widespread physical injury and killing of persons. The type of skinhead violence varies by the ethnicity of the subject. Most symbolic violence is used against Jews, as in the spate of anti-Semitic signs erected in Russia by the side of highways from 2002 to 2005. Most lynching is used against Africans, as in the 2002 beating of an African-American US embassy guard. Most pogrom-style violence is used against migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia, as in the 2002 skinhead raid on the Tsaritsino open-air market in Moscow, the 2006 pogrom in the town of Kondopoga, and the 2013 pogrom in Birulyevo, a Moscow suburb. Massacre is most commonly used against the Roma, as in a 2006 incident outside Volgograd when skinheads armed with iron bars beat eight Roma in their camp. This use of racist violence to send such inter-community messages reflects its systemic nature.

Explaining the proliferation of skinheads in Russia and abroad

Several aspects of post-Soviet social change contribute to racist violence and skinhead proliferation. Part of the attraction of the skinhead subculture in Russia comes from (mainly) young people’s problems of anomie and alienation. One of the most commonly cited causes of skinhead groups in the West is economic decline (Bowling, 1998: 54; Hamm, 1993: 215–216). Unemployed youths with time on their hands need outlets for their frustration. Just as the rise of the skinhead movements in Britain and the United States coincided with industrial decline, Russia experienced an even more precipitous economic decline in the 1990s. Despite economic recovery in the 2000s, unemployment, poor career prospects, and lack of entertainment options remain a problem for many Russian young people. Without the ideological glue of communism, social bonds have frayed as Russian society struggles to find new social legitimations. Elsewhere in the world, racist ideas have historically appealed to young men unhappy with their prospects, as studies of white supremacism in the United States have shown (Hamm, 1993: 211–213). In Russia, however, the 1990s economic and ideological collapse was more severe than any analogous transformation in contemporary western societies, so that organized racism truly emerged as an ‘alternative to Communism’ (Shnirel’man, 2007: 58). As with homicide (see Lysova and Shchitov, this issue), Russia’s persistently high levels of racist violence thus reflect not so much temporary economic hardship as the continuing failure to create an appealing alternative to the communist system.

As in other developed countries, Russian skinhead groups violently reject immigration (and internal migration) by ethnic minorities. Extremist groups regularly refer to a ‘genocide’ of ethnic Russians,⁷ playing on widespread racialized fears of demographic decline. In 1993 Russia’s population stood at 148.6 million but by 2012 had declined to 143 million, the largest peacetime population decline ever recorded in any modern country (Heleniak, 2013). The decline is largely explained by low fertility rates and a low male life expectancy (which in the 2000s fell to 57.5 years). To make up for the labor shortfall, Russia has experienced increased immigration from other post-Soviet countries, most of whom are drawn from non-Russian ethnic groups, such as Armenians, Azeris, and Georgians from the Caucasus, and Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, and Tajiks from Central Asia. Heleniak offers the claim (which Russian officials are fond of repeating) that Russia now has the second-largest number of immigrants in the world after the United States, including some five to six million undocumented immigrants. The official Muslim population grew from 7.9 percent of the total in the 1989 census to 10.2 percent in 2012, a likely underestimate, given heavily Muslim undocumented immigration from Central Asia.

Could one, then, argue that Russia’s skinhead violence was somehow directly produced by higher levels of immigration and resulting ethnic and cultural changes? To be sure, immigration clearly figures into the rise of Russian skinheads, just as the original skinhead movement itself grew out of the ‘Teddy Boy’ subculture that emerged in post-Second World War Britain in part as a reaction to what was then a new phenomenon, large-scale non-white immigration from the Commonwealth (Hamm, 1993: 15–17). However, the ‘fact of’ immigration should be distinguished from the ‘response to’ it in seeking to explain the extreme growth of systematic racist violence in post-1991 Russia. If immigration itself, or even large-scale non-white immigration, produced such violence, then countries of immigration such as Canada and Australia would today be world leaders in such violence. Thus, as an analytical matter, Russia’s skinhead problem is puzzlingly large even for a major immigration-receiving country. In consequence, it is more promising to consider how immigration is received in a given society than to treat immigration as an objective cause of racist violence. Only a discursive and political analysis can explain why Russian society has become particularly fertile ground for such violence.

Discursive and ideological factors

Pseudo-scientific racism has a longer pedigree in Russia than one might suppose. Although in the USSR such racism was largely constrained by the regime’s official ‘socialist internationalism’, racist ideas entered Russian intellectual life even before the fall of communism. The ‘Soviet Theory of Ethnos’, formulated in the late 1970s, claimed that ethnic distinctions were real and immutable, and had evolved in dialogue with the local environment (Tishkov, 1997). Thus, Lev Gumilev (1990) theorized in Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere that the behavior of ancient nomadic tribes could be traced to fluctuations in solar radiation based on their geographic location. This was fertile soil for more doctrinaire racist thinking. By 1997, there were 10 neo-pagan groups in Moscow and Leningrad alone. The neo-pagans and in particular their most prominent figure, Aleksandr Dugin, preserved theories espoused by Nazi thinkers. Dugin is a former professor at Moscow State University, the chief ideologist of the ‘Eurasian’ movement in Russia, a consultant for the Kremlin, and frequent participant in televised debates.⁸ In this milieu, the idea of the ‘Great White Race’ appeared with specifically Eurasian characteristics (Moroz, 2005).

In the post-Soviet era, such views have become more widespread and have won official backing. Indeed,

since the 1990s, the idea of the Aryan origin of the Russian people has discreetly entered into academic studies of history … In 1999 [several individuals] founded an organization Biblioteka rasovoi mysli (‘library of racial thinking’) which publishes nineteenth and twentieth century works on physical anthropology, some of them by Russians but primarily by Western authors.

(Laruelle, 2010: 26)

These Aryan ideas have evidently played out in at least some documented acts of racist violence. For example, anti-Semitic neo-pagan literature was found in the possession of a young man who walked into a synagogue in 2006, shouting ‘I will kill Jews’, and stabbed several congregants (Shnirel’man, 2007: 88–89). Such ideas may also influence Russian government policy, as think-tanks espousing racist ideas have emerged.⁹

As a related matter, officially promoted Russian chauvinism has made a substantial comeback during the presidency of Vladimir Putin. Some authors describe Putin’s ideology as ‘civilizational nationalism’—the idea that Russia represents a different and better version of modernity than the West (Verkhovskii and Payin, 2012) and has its own Sonderweg, or special historical path. Such a ‘special path’ was implicit in the claim by Putin’s chief ideologist, Vladislav Surkov, that Russia is a ‘sovereign democracy’ that does not need to imitate the institutions of liberal democracy. This ‘civilizational nationalism’ is attractive to the Kremlin because it helps square a particular ideological circle. While the direct endorsement of ethnic Russian chauvinism (or overt racism) might be destabilizing for a multiethnic country such as Russia and would lead to condemnation from western officials, the claim that Russia is distinct from the West and does not need its institutions gives the regime an ideological basis that some people in Russia find appealing, and also deflects criticisms of Putin’s undemocratic practices.

In addition to this official endorsement of exclusionary nationalism, particular official attitudes toward the management of ethnic diversity and geographic mobility may facilitate the rise of skinheads. These attitudes predate the current Russian regime. While the Soviet Union formally endorsed ethnic diversity, it adopted a primordialist view of ethnicity as unchanging and linked to specific historic ‘homelands’ in which particular ethnic groups could flourish. This ideology was reflected in the ethno-federal structure of the USSR, with 15 republics ostensibly determined by the dominant ethnic groups within them, as well as formally autonomous ethnic homelands for the non-Slavic ethnic groups within the Russian republic (Slezkine, 1994). Even in the post-Soviet period, Tishkov (1997) argues that primordial conceptions of ethnicity still dominate the Russian intellectual establishment. This can be seen in the widely popular concept of ‘ethnic distance,’ identified by Payin and Susarov (1996: 53), namely ‘the cultural differences between the representatives of different ethnic groups that limit capacities for mutual adaptation’. Such a position implicitly presents hostile interactions as an inevitable part of inter-cultural encounters.

Russian officials exhibit hostility to the emergence of new cultural practices as a result of migration. The Soviet government strictly regulated emigration, immigration, and internal migration using a complex system of internal passports and ‘residence permits’ (propiska) (Light, 2012b). Soviet migration policies also entailed the mass displacement of populations for reasons of state. Hill (2003) argues that the Soviet leadership conceived of territory without a population as a security risk and so relocated vast numbers of people to Siberia, where there was neither the climate nor the economic base to support them. In addition, although Soviet migration management had a number of goals, including political surveillance and economic mobilization, it was also used to govern specific ethnic groups, such as the ‘punished peoples’ whom Stalin subjected to internal exile during the Second World War (Polian, 2004).

Although the 1993 post-Soviet Russian constitution repudiated the previous draconian migration restrictions, their residue remains in much policy and practice. Thus, some regions of Russia, such as the southern province of Krasnodar, continue to limit residence rights based on ethnicity, although such restrictions are formally illegal (Kuznetsov and Popov, 2008). Moreover, much official discourse is still premised on assumptions derived from Soviet policies concerning the geographic boundaries of particular cultures. This means, in effect, that certain cultural practices, or certain people, are ‘out of place’, even when they are legally present.

In consequence, although migration per se is not new in contemporary Russia (as the Soviet Union also featured extensive internal migration), neither Russian society as a whole nor political elites are well prepared to accept the consequences of post-Soviet migration, whether in the appearance of new ethnic minorities throughout Russia, or the cultural or religious practices of such new migrant communities. For example, the population of Soviet-era Moscow was overwhelmingly ethnically Russian, although Moscow was the capital of a multi-ethnic state in which Russians were barely half the national population (Colton, 1995: 407). Today, post-Soviet migration has created a truly multiethnic Moscow, with millions of residents from Central Asia and the Caucasus and the largest Muslim population of any European city. Yet the Moscow government and many residents continue to reject public expressions of non-Russian culture, often in highly racist terms (Light, 2010; Vendina, 2013). Likewise, although post-Soviet migration has produced Muslim communities in new regions of Russia, their right to practice their religion is widely infringed, often through the official argument that Islam is not a traditional religion of the region (Light, 2012a).

Thus, the effects of increased non-ethnic Russian immigration on racist violence are not direct, but rather are mediated through official ambivalence about racial and cultural equality and the rights of migrants. Primordial concepts of identity, geographically circumscribed ethnic homelands, and ‘ethnic distance’ provide tacit legitimation for racist violence, or at least limit the extent to which official condemnation of racist violence can be effective. Although the exact influence of such attitudes on systematic racist violence would be difficult to capture, they are clearly part of the milieu in which it flourishes. They are also reflected in lax enforcement policies that have facilitated the infiltration of Russia by western skinhead groups, as I chart below.

Official passivity and international connections

No country has a sterling record when it comes to fighting racist violence. Scholarly analysis should consider the degree of official involvement or complicity in such violence, as well as the historical trajectory of the official response. In the United Kingdom, it took a series of violent events (most notably the 1993 death of Stephen Lawrence) to make the police take the problem of violent racism seriously (Bowling, 1998). Formally non-state but effectively state-sanctioned violence—widespread lynching of African-Americans—continued in the United States from the end of the Civil War through the 1960s. And many western societies, including the United States, continue to experience racialized police violence against minorities. Even so, in post-Soviet Russia, it has proved especially challenging to build a professional police force capable and willing to investigate racist violence effectively. In part, this is because racist attitudes are widespread in the police themselves and openly displayed, as evidenced in a study of police ethnic profiling on the Moscow metro which found ‘the most extreme and egregious ethnic profiling ever documented through a statistical survey of the practice’ (Open Society, 2006: 31). Light (2010) links such profiling to violent police extortion practices targeting minorities with the tacit approval of city officials.

Other factors are also important. In part, investigation and prosecution of hate crimes may suffer from broader problems of police management and service (see Light et al., this issue). The Russian government has consciously refrained from aggressive prosecution of racist hate crimes, probably because such prosecutions would interfere with the official promotion of Russian nationalism (Schenk, 2010: 114). The government has often preferred to bring charges of ‘hooliganism’ rather than charges of racist violence, even when the latter would clearly have been appropriate, suggesting an unwillingness to acknowledge the problem or tackle it seriously.

Yet it is not all bad news. Since 2009, for instance, the state has begun prosecuting racist violence with greater vigor in an attempt to defang the neo-Nazi movement, after several high-profile skinhead attacks on officials (Verkhovskii et al., 2013). Thus, in 2010, there were 91 hate crimes convictions affecting 297 people, and in 2011, 61 convictions affecting 193 people. These figures can be compared with the 23 convictions affecting 65 people in 2007, when hate crimes were at their most frequent. Nonetheless, the increase in prosecution may just reflect concerns about the potential of racist organizations to challenge the state itself rather than a fundamental change in official policy, let alone a newfound desire to protect ethnic minorities against racial violence.

One effect of the official unwillingness to confront racist violence has been the infiltration into Russia of international racist organizations. In the early 1990s, racist groups in the United States, Britain, and Germany began establishing branches in Russia (Belikov, 2011). Shnirel’man (2007: 23) identifies 1997 as a turning point, when Russian skinheads started to ‘get regular support from their European and American brethren’. Such support initially came from the American Ku Klux Klan and German skinhead groups such as ‘The Right Union’ and ‘Young Vikings’, who gave their Russian counterparts literature, uniforms, and audio-cassettes with recorded speeches about ‘white internationalism’. Other skinhead groups, such as the British ‘Blood and Honor/Combat 18’ and ‘The White Bulldogs’ also set up Russian ‘franchises’. A special Russian forum has existed on the international skinhead ‘Stormfront’ website since 2002. There is evidence that such transnational racism motivates systematic violent racism in Russia. Thus, in October 2013, some youths attacked the Biru-za shopping center in southern Moscow, while shouting ‘White power!’—in English.

Moreover, prominent western and Russian racists have become increasingly friendly over the years, sometimes with official involvement. At an international racist convention in 2006, attended by former Louisiana state senator and leader of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke, Russia was designated as the ‘white world’s future’ and the ‘great hope’ of the white race (Arnold and Romanova, 2013). The conference concluded with exhortations to construct a new racially homogenous home in Russia, styled the ‘white Eurasia’ or ‘white Siberia’. Other international meetings of western and Russian racists have followed, with a 2007 conference in Yalta, and presentations in Belgium by Russian racist ideologue Pavel Tulaev. Likewise, in October 2014, the ‘Eurasianist’ Aleksandr Dugin met with US and European racists in Budapest (Arnold, 2014a). Figures close to the Kremlin have also funded similar racist and homophobic conferences (Shekhovtsov, 2015). Indeed, the Kremlin has been courting the leaders of European Far Right parties, such as Marine Le Pen, leader of the French Front Nationale; Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party; leaders of the Belgian racist movement Vlaams Belang; and Gabor Vona of Hungary’s racist party, Jobbik (Shekhovtsov, 2015). Members of these parties helped monitor the ‘referendum’ in Crimea on its annexation by Russia in 2014, suggesting that the Russian government can now mobilize international right-wing support for its policies.¹⁰

The North Caucasus insurgency

So far, this article has considered factors that have some counterparts in contemporary western countries, even if they are much more marked in Russia. But the rapid increase in skinhead membership in Russia has also occurred against the backdrop of an ongoing domestic insurgency based in the ethnically distinct North Caucasus, which has no counterpart in contemporary Western Europe or North America. This insurgency has facilitated the rise of racist organizations and ideologies, through the brutalization of Russian society and the demonization of North Caucasian ethnic groups and Muslims, and has provided racist groups with a focal point for mobilization.

The entry of fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam into Russia resulted from wars fought in the breakaway North Caucasus autonomous republic of Chechnya (Evangelista, 2002; Schaefer, 2011). In the first Chechen war, from 1994 to 1996, the Chechen separatist government effectively defeated Russia, and the republic gained de facto independence. However, widespread anarchy in Chechnya allowed radical Islamists from Saudi Arabia to enter the country (Glyn Williams, 2008). Although a second Russian campaign in Chechnya in the early 2000s ousted the separatist government, the insurgency has continued as a terrorist campaign and has increasingly identified itself with radical Islam. These terrorists operate under the name of the ‘Caucasus Emirate’, a loose structure that co-ordinates terrorist attacks throughout Russia, including the hostage-taking at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow in 2002, the hostage-taking of schoolchildren in Beslan in 2004, and the suicide bombings in Volgograd in 2013. Indeed, it was the threat of attacks from the Caucasus Emirate that justified the huge security operations surrounding the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics (Zhemukhov and Orttung, 2014).

The skinhead movement in Russia positions itself as a response to this Islamist insurgency, locked in a racial war (Belikov, 2011: 81–84; Shnirel’man, 2007: 14–22). This view is reflected in the names of some of the ‘white rock’ or ‘Oi!’ music groups: ‘Russian project—great Russia’, ‘Testosterone’, and ‘Kolovrat [a modified version of the swastika]’. One of the compact discs released by a group was titled ‘Kill Chernye [literally, ‘blacks’; a derogatory term for people from Central Asia and the Caucasus]—save Russia’. Indeed, as a number of scholars show, racist groups have received a major boost from this insurgency. For Shnirel’man (2007) 1993 was the year skinhead organizations began to take off in Russia, coinciding closely with the onset of the separatist movement in Chechnya. Hahn (2007: 56–57), in contrast, identifies the Beslan school attack in 2004, in which over 300 children were killed, as a turning point after which Russian public attitudes toward ethnic minorities hardened.

Even so, it is difficult to establish the exact mechanisms by which Russia’s troubles in the North Caucasus may be stimulating racist violence. First, returning soldiers from the conflicts in the North Caucasus, trained to see enemies in every Chechen and North Caucasian, may have influenced social opinion. Shnirel’man (2007: 36) reports conversations with former soldiers whose ethnic attitudes have been colored by ‘negative experiences with Caucasians during their time in the army’. Belikov (2011: 81) puts the number of Russians who directly served in the war in Chechnya at some time over the last 15 years at 1.5 million. It seems likely that these numerous veterans have had some impact on values and opinion in Russian society, creating a more favorable milieu for racist violence. The steady drumbeat of news about terrorist atrocities, often presented in a highly racialized manner, is likely having a similar effect even on non-veterans (Schenk, 2010: 110). In addition, the insurgency benefits racist groups directly, both by motivating their existing adherents, and by giving the groups a message that is more easily ‘marketed’ to potential recruits. Russian racist groups present themselves as opposed to Muslim and North Caucasian influence in Russia. Thus, the 2002 pogrom against Caucasian ethnic groups in the Moscow suburbs followed the 2002 Dubrokva siege as explicit retaliation (Shnirel’man, 2007: 70). In 2006, I conducted interviews with skinheads in Moscow, who declared the fear of Islamic organizations as a motive for such behavior. In such examples, Skinheads present themselves as protectors of the social order from ethnic and religious groups whom they identify with terrorists.

To be sure, anti-Islamic bigotry has become more politically salient and organized in many western countries in recent years, including movements such as Pegida in Germany and the English Defence League. The post-9/11 world, with its US and NATO wars in Iraq and Afghanistan against enemies who were identified as Muslim, has created similar opportunities for anti-Muslim hate crimes in western countries. Yet Russia’s experience is nonetheless distinctive. First, the insurgency in the North Caucasus has involved an actual attempt (at times successful) to oust the Russian state in part of its territory, as well as a long-running terrorist campaign throughout Russia. Second, the insurgency has played out in Russia and has involved mainly Russian citizens, rather than an external enemy. Although parallels can be drawn with racist violence in the United States during the Civil Rights era, or with Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’, no western country is currently experiencing such a conflict. This contrast is reflected in the more explicit framing of Russian racist violence in terms of the Islamist insurgency. Skinhead groups see themselves, and are seen by others, as actors in Russia’s ethnic conflict. In consequence, while there is good reason to think that Russia’s skinhead problem would be more severe than in the West even without the insurgency in the North Caucasus, the insurgency is likely a contributing factor. In the concluding section of this article, I develop this point further.

Conclusion: Russia’s systematic racist violence between hate crime and ethnic conflict

As this essay has demonstrated, although Russian racist violence displays some formal similarities with its western counterparts, it also reveals some important differences. First, there are a number of salient legal and discursive contrasts: Russian legislation and legal practice do not treat racist violence as primarily a problem of individual rights or racist attitudes, but as an attack on state power; official and mass attitudes toward racism are highly ambivalent, with official policy incorporating some elements of exclusionary nationalism, and sometimes racism, and endorsing primordialist views of ethnic identity and suspicion of inter-cultural dialogue and coexistence; and Russian racist intellectuals enjoy a cachet and official backing they lack in the West. In addition, racist violence itself is also more widespread and severe in Russia than in the West; is less likely to result in prosecution or punishment; and is integrated into an ongoing ethnic conflict in which skinhead groups are tacitly allied with the state and broad swathes of public opinion against demonized Muslim and North Caucasian outsiders. All these components together constitute the greater ‘systematicity’ of racist violence in Russia as compared with the contemporary West.

In addition, this essay has reviewed a number of likely contributing factors to Russia’s large-scale systematic racist violence. While identifying the exact contribution of each to the observed outcomes would be difficult, any of these factors alone would promote more serious problems of racist violence and groups than we observe in western countries. Yet they are also interrelated, so that it would be difficult to combat racist violence effectively without taking aim at many, if not all, of them. For example, the widespread failure to prosecute and punish racist violence does not exist in a political vacuum, but is linked to the prevalence of official nationalism and quasi-official racism, which in turn both feeds off and stimulates corresponding attitudes in Russian society. Russia’s increasing integration into international racist networks also reflects this lack of effective law enforcement, as well as the state’s deliberate courtship of European extremists—and so forth. In short, systematic racist violence is highly embedded in Russian society and the Russian state, and its roots extend back to attitudes, policies, and ideologies that formed in the Soviet period, as well as to post-Soviet developments.

Thus, the case of Russia should stimulate reflection on the conceptual distinction between ‘hate crime’ and ‘ethnic conflict’. While on the surface the two concepts appear very similar, and may sometimes generate similar violent acts, my analysis demonstrates just how different are the phenomena they purport to describe. Racist violence is so much more intense in Russia than in other developed countries in part because it is in fact closer to ethnic conflict. As an analytical matter, the case of Russia suggests that racist violence should be conceptualized as ‘hate crime’ only when it is genuinely a form of criminal deviance, which in turn is true only when certain criteria are met:

the law and most public opinion interpret racist violence as a violation of individual rights stemming from a stigmatized racist ideology;

the national political leadership and state agencies systematically reject racism;

racist groups are clearly distinct from the state and not backed by it or by broad segments of public opinion;

investigation and prosecution of racist violence are undertaken with reasonable consistency and zeal;

and racist violence is a politically and quantitatively marginal phenomenon that does not merge with guerilla wars or ethnic insurgencies.

As I have argued, while these criteria may be met (or approximated) in contemporary industrialized democracies, they are widely violated in Russia. In consequence, despite Russia’s cultural and geographic proximity to Europe, and its role as a major world power competing for global influence with the European Union and United States, it may be more apt to analyze Russia’s systematic racist violence as ethnic conflict than as hate crime.

Russia’s systematic racist violence can be seen as a liminal case, positioned between some cases (e.g. Western Europe) where racist violence is really a subset of ‘hate crime’; and other cases (e.g. Israel/Palestine), where it is instead a subset of ethnic conflict. Such a distinction is also relevant for human rights monitors and international organizations who express concern over hate crimes in Russia. Seriously tackling this problem will likely require significant social and political transformation, and not just targeted interventions or palliative measures.

Footnotes

1.

For consistency, I use the term ‘skinhead’ to refer to racist groups throughout the article. While other names could be used (for example, neo-Nazi, racist, and hate group), the term ‘skinhead’ is the most appropriate because of the popularity of this English word in Russia. In Russia, ‘skinhead’ designates a worldview or objective more than a dress style and is more commonly used than the Russian word britogolovye (literally, ‘shaven-headed’). Most of the groups and individuals discussed in this article do, however, adhere loosely to neo-Nazi ideology (see Shnirel’man, 2007: 58–76).

2.

The Russian usage of ‘nationality’ (or ‘national’) is synonymous with ‘ethnicity’ (or ‘ethnic’) in conventional English usage.

3.

See the Russian Criminal Code (In English) available at: .

4.

See the Levada Center (2013: 114) available at: (accessed 24 June 2014).

5.

The authority of Tarasov’s estimates can be seen in the citation of his earlier data by : 186).

6.

See the report ‘Hate crimes in the OSCE region: Incidents and responses’ available at: (accessed 25 June 2014).

7.

See, for example, claims about the ‘centuries-old, total genocide of the Russian people and related nations’, available at: (accessed 21 February 2015).

8.

On Dugin, see Robert Zubrin’s article in the National Review ().

9.

For examples, see the Ateney organization (to which the prominent racist ideologue Pavel Tulaev belongs) at: www.ateney.ru; the Florian Geyer club, named after a German peasant revolt leader, at: http://www.floriangeyer.ru/; and the Isborsk club (a group of right-wing intellectuals led by Andrey Prokhanov) at: .

10.

It is more puzzling that there are also links between international left-wing movements and Russian racists, such as those between Greece’s new Syriza government and Aleksandr Dugin. See ‘Aleksandr Shekhovtsov’s Blog’, 28 January 2015, at: (accessed 23 February 2015).

Author biography

Richard Arnold is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Muskingum University, Ohio. His work concerns identity and violence in general and focuses specifically on violent Russian nationalist extremists, such as skinheads and Russian Cossacks. His articles have appeared in Post-Soviet Affairs, Problems of Post-Communism, Nationalities Papers, and Journal for the Study of Radicalism. He writes occasionally for the Jamestown Foundation and has authored chapters on Alexei Navalny for Routledge summaries of Russian politics.

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