News » November 15, 2006

Ethnic Cleansing in Russia

Putin stokes the flames of xenophobia by targeting non-Slavs in Georgia.

By Fred Weir

Russian right-wing protesters from Russia's Liberal-Democratic Party stand in front of the Georgian embassy in Moscow.

It started out as geopolitical bullying, with the Kremlin applying an economic headlock to pressure an obstreperous little neighbor, Georgia, to return to Moscow’s fold. But a related campaign against “Georgian interests” in Russia, involving mass arrests of alleged illegal immigrants and a crackdown on Georgian-owned businesses, has dangerously fuelled xenophobia in Russia’s streets and buoyed the country’s rising neo-fascist movement.

President Vladimir Putin personally triggered the anti-Georgian frenzy by complaining, in a televised meeting, that non-Slavs from the Caucasus region dominate farmer’s markets in most cities, incurring the wrath of native Russians.

“The indignation of citizens is right,” Putin said. “(We must) protect the interests of Russian manufacturers and Russia’s native population.” Putin may have been trying to gather support for his tough policy against Georgia, which includes a complete cutoff of trade, transport and even postal links. But in targeting Georgian businesses, he handed a gift to the outright racist Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), which calls for expelling all non-Slavs from Russian cities, whether they are Russian citizens or not.

Though Slavs make up about 80 percent of the population, there are millions of darker-skinned citizens from Russia’s north Caucasus, Volga regions and Siberia. Added to that are an estimated 10 million “guest workers” from former Soviet central Asia and Caucasus countries. There are about 1 million Georgians working in Russia, sending home some $2 billion annually, a major component of Georgia’s GDP.

Hatred of non-Slavs is a combustible political issue in Russia. “Russians are the most discriminated-against group in Russia, and we help them to find their voice,” says Alexander Belov, chief ideologue of DPNI, Russia’s fastest-growing grassroots organization. Lately many Russians have been mobilizing, with Belov’s encouragement.

Six days of rioting in the northern town of Kondopoga in late August left at least three people dead and forced hundreds of Caucasians to flee. “The local people want them to go back where they came from,” says Belov. “That’s democracy. The rights of the majority should be respected.” Similar upheavals have been reported over the past six months, hitting far-flung Russian towns in Saratov, Chita, Rostov, Astrakhan and Irkutsk regions. A September poll conducted by the independent Levada Center found that 57 percent of Russians thought Kondopoga-style violence could break out in their town, while 52 percent said they agreed with DPNI’s main slogan: “Russia for the Russians.”

Within days of Putin’s remarks, police descended on markets around the country, rounding up thousands of Caucasians—not only Georgians—whose documents showed any discrepancies. (Endemic corruption virtually ensures discrepancies in peoples’ official documents.) Moscow schools were ordered to report children with Georgian-sounding names to police, so their parents could be investigated. By late October, about 100 Georgian “illegal immigrants” were being deported to Tbilisi on special daily military flights.

Dozens of Georgian-owned companies have been closed down, on pretexts ranging from sanitary violations to tax evasion. The campaign even reached prominent Russians of Georgian heritage. Sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, creator of several well-known Moscow monuments, found himself accused of “misappropriating” 2.1 million rubles (about $80,000) from the Russian Arts Academy that he heads. Georgian-born Grigory Chkhartishvili, who writes some of Russia’s most beloved detective fiction under the pen name Boris Akunin, was targeted by the tax police.

“It is no longer safe to be a dark-haired person in Russia,” says Chkhartishvili. “What’s happening to Georgians today is ethnic cleansing. The Russian state is sick with the virus of xenophobia.”

Georgia has been the scene of intense rivalry between Russia and the West since it broke from the USSR in 1991. Seeking levers of influence, Moscow backed successful early ’90s rebellions in two ethnically different Georgian territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, whose de facto independence is protected by Russian peacekeeping troops to this day. Washington scored points by persuading Georgia to host the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which opened this year, to carry newly-flowing Caspian crude to Western markets, bypassing Russia’s pipeline network. Russo-Georgian relations went into total freefall after the 2003 “Rose Revolution” ousted the cautious ex-Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze and brought a young U.S.-trained lawyer and fiery Georgian nationalist, Mikhael Saakashvili, to power in Tbilisi. Saakashvili has vowed to re-unite his fractured country and lead it into NATO before his term of office expires in 2009. In early October, NATO agreed to enter into an “intensified dialogue” with Georgia about membership.

In late September, Georgian police arrested four Russian officers and charged them with spying. After a furious reaction from the Kremlin, the men were released to European mediators, but the die was already cast in Moscow. Putin launched a full economic embargo, ordered the Russian Black Sea Fleet to hold war games off Georgia’s coast and authorized the domestic crackdown against resident Georgians.

Georgia’s two breakaway statelets, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, have used the crisis to appeal to Moscow to unilaterally recognize their independence, a move that Georgians fear could lead to the irreversible division of their country.

“This is the biggest fear in Tbilisi today, that Russia will formalize those (statelets) by making them Russian protectorates with permanent Russian military bases,” says Archil Gegeshidze, an expert with the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies in Tbilisi. Russia insists it has no such intentions, but Putin has repeatedly warned that this could change if the West recognizes the independence of Kosovo, the Albanian-populated Serbian province seized by NATO in a 1999 war.

Meanwhile, the escalating campaign against Georgians is driving internal Russian politics down dark and uncharted avenues. “The Kremlin is appealing to Russian society’s nationalistic moods, and that’s very dangerous,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the foreign policy journal Russia in Global Affairs. “This kind of device is easy to use, but very hard to control.”

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• Reader Comments

  The Russians involved in xenophobic nationalism is bad.
  The Russians involved in spreading communist revolution is good.

  These small nuances escape me. How would the two be different?

  Posted by texasindependent on Nov 16, 2006 at 1:51 AM

  A lot escapes you, Tex. When were the Russkies last involved in spreading Communist revolution ? Not since Stalin iced Trotsky
  before WW2. The Soviet takeover of eastern Europe was the natural
  military result of defeating Germany & its satellites in WW2.
  Ergo for Red China in eastern Asia after Japan’s defeat in WW2.
  But then they don’t go in for that book larning in Texass, do they ?

  Posted by blondemike on Nov 16, 2006 at 6:14 PM

  Putin clearly feels his back is against a wall. He’s trying to get some irrational energy going that will somehow bolster his position. And unfortunately, drawing the xenophobe card (whether phrased in nationalist or racist terms, or both) is a sure-fire way to garner more local support for the leadership’s agenda, not just in Russia but nearly everywhere.

  Dismaying that it works so easily and consistently around the world, but there ya go.

  Perhaps Putin thinks he can somehow control the more radical elements he has activated to help him achieve some important agenda, like feeding Russian antipathy against Chechens and other rebellious groups in the Caucasus region. However, he should take a page from Pakistani history. The Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), in which Gen. Musharraf had a formerly powerful role, fostered radical Islamist groups in-country in hopes they would attack and help loosen India’s grip on Kashmir. They also thought they could control the radicals to serve their own ends. However, those same groups are now the primary thorn in now-President Musharraf’s side, having tried to disrupt his rule, overturn his foreign policy, and also to kill him on several occasions.

  Some genii don’t go back into their bottles quite so easily, Mr Putin.

  Posted by Kuya on Nov 17, 2006 at 8:15 AM

  I believe the Russians are still suffering from the diminishing “greatness” of the empire called Soviet Union. The originally vast union has had taken pieces out of it; counties like Ukraine, Usbekistan, Turkmenistan or giant Kasachstan.
  And now, after having the west take great influence on the recent elections in Ukraine, the baltic states joining the EU, the seperatist war in Chechnya, another former part of the once proud soviet union is supposedly being “lost” to the west.
  It seems like an inferiority complex, to now have the hatred against everything non-russian unleashed and reminds me of developments in my country in the 20’s and 30’s of the last century. Then, after the lost WWI and the harsh Versaille treaty, the inferiority complex of a nation lead to the most terrible outcome there could have been. Scapegoats are being looked for in situations like these, as it is the easiest answer and tends to motivate the mindless masses. Good for politicians trying to stay in power.
  This strategy is being used all over to some extent. The unquestionable patriotism in the US during the beginning of GulfWar II, during which not even the media dared to be critical was a symptom of the same thing. The scapegoat here was everybody wearing a turban. Fortunately the tide has changed, and everything balanced itself somewhat.
  Maybe, if a fairer distribution of the energy created wealth can be achieved, we can hope for the same in Russia.

  Nic

  Posted by admiral346 on Nov 17, 2006 at 1:26 PM

  If you polish a turd and wrap it in a bow is it still a turd? Socialist dogma aside, totalitarianism is the same no matter what pleasant name you give it.

  If the Soviets enslavement of millions was the natural military result of WWII then perhaps you can explain the difference in the situation in Israel today vs Eastern Europe 1945? Does communism give a country legitimacy in keeping the spoils of war?

  Posted by texasindependent on Nov 18, 2006 at 5:54 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 10 posts.

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