Causes of Xenophobia in Russia Analyzed

Dec. 27, 2005

Causes of Xenophobia in Russia Analyzed (translation courtesy of JRL)
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
http://mk.ru
May 25, 2010
Article by Valeriy Fedorov, general director of All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center: The Distinctive Features of Our National Xenophobia. Why Some People Living in Russia Do Not Like Other People Living in Russia and Foreigners

A mixture of races, cultures, and languages is common in today's world. Globalization has left its mark not only on the megalopolises, but also on the dacha zones and even the most remote oblasts and rayons. The Chinese and Koreans are not a problem on Sakhalin Island, but the uncontrollable stream of immigrants from Central Asia is arousing concern. Black-skinned waiters in cafes in Voronezh, the capital of the chernozem zone, have ceased to be unusual and are now a common sight. A former student from Africa who has settled down in Volgograd Oblast almost became the head of a rayon in last year's election. And no one is surprised anymore by the Armenian or Azerbaijani cafes that have become centers of gravity for their respective emigre communities in Pereslavl-Zalesskiy, a city which has been Russian since time immemorial.

Cultural and ethnic diversity, according to social scientists, facilitates the circulation of information and the exchange of innovations, encourages more rational behavior by individuals, and leads to the development and increasing complexity of the society as a whole. Life in a multi-ethnic society raises so many more issues than life in a mono-ethnic society, after all, and obliges people to be more considerate of one another and more circumspect and prudent in communication with people who do not resemble themselves. This life is extraordinary, diverse, and rich, but it is also less predictable and often entails more risks. These risks are diverse and there are numerous reasons why people of some races and nationalities are suspicious, dismissive, and afraid of others. And the ones who are afraid or dismissive are many in number: When VTsIOM (All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center) asked respondents to name "the nationalities and ethnic groups arousing irritation or hostility in you," only 56 percent replied there were none, while 35 percent named those ethnic groups.

What are the reasons and motives for inter-ethnic tension, irritation, and hostility? A few years ago, economic factors were the most common explanations in public opinion polls: Respondents would say that people of other nationalities (primarily immigrants, but also people from the Russian North Caucasus) were taking jobs away from the native residents. Today this is a much less common reason, however. Many people evidently have realized that the new arrivals are doing the kind of work for the kind of salary the native resident would never want. The ban instituted a few years ago to keep non-citizens of Russia from working in retail trade also had an impact, eliminating what had been one of the most irritating factors in inter-ethnic relations since the final years of the USSR.

There is another economic reason, but it is also partly social: the prevalence of certain ethnic communities in specific fields of business, the monopolization of these fields by associations formed on ethnic grounds. It is actually impossible for an "outsider" to break into these fields. In contrast to the former reason, this one still exists and still bothers people.

In this context, it is worth remembering that our society as a whole has acquired so many internal divisions in recent years that some researchers are already calling them classes: the lawyer class, the law enforcement class, and the deputy class.... Each of these classes lives by its own private rules, firmly supports "its own people" in their conflicts with "outsiders," and is highly selective in its acceptance of people from outside the class. When this kind of social division is supplemented with linguistic or family divisions, it can close off the entire field of activity to people wishing to enter the field or even to look into the field from outside. We know that the most bloody and brutal practices in our army usually can be found in units where "hazing" has been replaced with "ethnic affiliations."

In spite of this, the cultural factor still generates more inter-ethnic tension than socioeconomic factors: distinct differences in the appearance and behavior of members of other nationalities. Some are set apart by their inability to speak Russian well, others wear unusual clothing, and still others (these make up the largest group) behave in ways that seem odd in our society. This is most conspicuous in the "packs" of young people who amuse themselves by shooting into the air, for example, or by engaging in amateur car racing on the city streets. The "alien" stereotypes therefore are constantly reinforced by the inappropriate behavior of these "aliens" instead of gradually disappearing as people gain personal experience in communicating with representatives of other cultures. When people hear about examples of this behavior in the media or simply "through the grapevine," they are seriously exaggerated and make a profound impression because they fit so well into the traditional matrix of perceptions: "Others are aliens, and aliens are dangerous." That is how these negative attitudes take root in people's minds.

Respondents also voice another complaint in the polls: "These people usually lack even the rudiments of culture and do not know the right way to act." It is true that a new arrival, especially one from a small town or a rural community, has trouble getting used to urban life and it can take a long time for yesterday's peasant to stop keeping chickens or a sheep on his balcony. Many jokes were made about this even in the Soviet era. We can only rely on time and the education of the next generation -- the children of the new arrivals, who will act and feel like genuine urbanites -- to eliminate this problem.

On the other hand, it is interesting that the residents of rural communities, who are less likely for many reasons to travel outside their communities and less likely to see people of other races and nationalities, are more likely to say they "do not like the appearance, behavior, and character traits" of people of other nationalities. The residents of the capital cities, who are accustomed to differences in appearance and language, criticize the "aliens" for "not caring about customs and standards of behavior."

Whereas the first case is one in which people accustomed to the traditional culture have a negative reaction when they encounter unforeseen circumstances, the second case reveals the reluctance of urbanites to accept the irritating behavior of strangers they regard as boorish.

Now we can move on to the main thing. The most common response to the question of why members of other ethnic groups arouse animosity and suspicion was this: "I avoid them because of the threat of terrorism."

The terrorist acts in Moscow revived the fears of not only terrorists in general, but also the environment and territories giving rise to them. The Caucasus is the first place meeting this description for most people in Russia. This probably is the main reason that 32 percent of the respondents who were asked to judge the state of inter-ethnic relations in our country said they had become more strained and less tolerant in the past year. Only half as many -- just 16 percent -- expressed the opposite opinion.

The results of a similar poll in 2005 actually were worse: 41 percent in contrast to 17 percent. In other words, we actually could say that inter-ethnic relations in Russia have displayed positive changes. This conclusion can only be tentative, however: There are still so many stumbling blocks and hidden obstacles in this highly sensitive area. Regrettably, this is most evident in the capital -- in Moscow: 51 percent of the Muscovites said that inter-ethnic relations in the city are strained, troubled, and even conflict-ridden.

R.I.P., Izmailovo?

Izmailovo, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

I don't want to believe this is true. I want to believe that while they may have shut down the vast Cherkizovsky market - a bureaucratic cat whose nine lives may have run out - that catered to locals right next door, they won't have the heart to permanently get rid of gingerbread-city stage set of the Izmailovskii Vernissage that reliably lured tourists and expats. Cherkizovsky was an amazing place where, shortly after arriving in Moscow in late 2001, we memorably bought a thick 2 x 3 meter carpet and a 3-liter jar of pickles and then had a hell of a time hauling both items home in one of those oversized "kitaiskie sumki." Some parts of that market were like walking into another country, complete with signage and street food from many time zones east.

It is a shame that Luzhkov and others favoring the reconfiguring of Moscow markets to exclude for'ners have failed to understand that such pockets of other-ness always added to Moscow's richness. And even operating from their xenophobic logic, it makes little sense to shut down the Vernissage, since nearly all of the vendors there were Russian, many of them artists and craftspeople selling their own work.

In any event, although we became more locals than tourists in Moscow, my more personal lament is not for Cherkizovsky but for the kitschy, tourist-oriented "Vernissage" section of the market, the one with paid admission to keep the riffraff out, the one with the mean-looking old drunk and his tragic trained bears just outside the entrance, across the walkway from the Central Asians cranking out cheese samsas using a huge iron vessel. If it's true, this means I will never be able to return to the mother lode of Russian souvenirs and flea-market-style borokhlo, or bric-a-brac.

It seems Moscow is no longer the consumer-oriented paradise of the boom years. Where will I now be able to go to buy vintage cuff links, pre-revolutionary books, fine carpets from the Caucasus, pirated DVDs, fake pashmina shawls, embroidered linen tablecloths, hand-carved chess sets, ratty (and not-so-ratty) fur hats, Soviet-era tourist maps, finely painted wooden eggs, and Chicago Cubs nesting dolls? Where will I now find the many missed opportunities of those past weekends spent at Izmailovo? I remember one in particular, an exhaustive collection of mint-condition Soviet-era bottle labels that filled five or six large albums. I couldn't bring myself even to haggle with the guy when he identified his starting price of 20,000 rubles, but now I wish I had bargained him down to 12 or so and walked away with a piece of graphic design history.

The photo above is from a happier, simpler moment - the day after Christmas, 2004, waiting to be warmed by some usually-good-but-never-great Izmailovo shashlyk. If it's true that the place is gone for good, I guess all I can say is, "Thanks for the memories."

Izmailovsky Market Closed
22 July 2009
The Moscow Times

Moscow authorities on Tuesday closed Izmailovsky Market, a magnet for tourists seeking deals on souvenirs, in a crackdown linked to the closure of nearby Cherkizovsky Market.

The prefect for Moscow’s Eastern Administrative District, where the markets are located, ordered the closure after authorities confiscated 5,843 truckloads of merchandise from Izmailovsky between July 11 and 20 and detained 25 people, including 14 Vietnamese citizens who will be deported, police spokeswoman Zhanna Ozhimina told Interfax.

Ozhimina said more than 150 police officers have been deployed to Izmailovsky to maintain public order as the remaining merchandise is removed.

Izmailovsky, which covers 10 hectares between the towering Izmailovo hotel complex and Izmailovsky Park, has been the place to shop for souvenirs since the 1990s. Its hundreds of stands also offered trinkets, Soviet kitsch, clothing and shashlik.

The market has been the site of two fires in the past four years, including one in March 2005 that killed a woman.

Authorities closed Cherkizovsky Market, located on Izmailovsky’s border, late last month during a smuggling investigation sparked by the seizure of $2 billion in Chinese goods last fall. More than 100 Chinese and Vietnamese traders from Cherkizovsky have been deported this month.

Update July 24: It looks like I may have broken out the black mourning clothes for naught - Rubashov has helpfully commented, adding this news from yesterday's MT:

However, the famous Vernisage, where tourists have shopped for souvenirs since the 1990s, remained open Wednesday. Interfax reported Tuesday that the souvenir market, located in the middle of Izmailovsky, had been closed together with the rest of the market.

Stay tuned, I guess...

Update July 28: A very interesting NYT story on what might be behind the closing of Cherkizovsky:

The trouble in this case was that the market’s owner, Telman Ismailov, who had made billions of dollars as Cherkizovsky evolved from a mere flea market into an industrial-scale distribution hub for Chinese imports during the oil boom, had violated unwritten codes of business conduct that put him at odds with Mr. Putin, according to analysts and Russian news reports.

The market was closed with a flurry of citations of fire code and health violations not unlike the use of environmental allegations to force Royal Dutch Shell to sell a portion of its investment in a Siberian oil field two years ago, or the shutdown of the Yukos oil company with tax claims before that. [...]

“Of course, if you applied the official hygiene, fire and labor codes, it was not done the way it was written,” Arseny Popov, an authority on the Chinese diaspora in Russia with the Russian Academy of Sciences, said of the market’s operations. “But nothing was happening there that wasn’t happening for the past 15 years.”

What was new was Mr. Ismailov’s $1.4 billion investment, using proceeds from the market, into a glittering, five-star resort thousands of miles away in a seemingly unrelated world of luxury on the Turkish seaside. It was called Mardan Palace, after Mr. Ismailov’s father, with 560 rooms, 10 restaurants, 17 bars and a lake-size swimming pool.

Mr. Ismailov, an immigrant from Azerbaijan who survived the sharp-elbowed world of street capitalism in the early 1990s to create the Cherkizovsky empire, threw a lavish series of opening parties in May. Mariah Carey was hired to perform a set and sing “Dreamlover” for Mr. Ismailov and his guests. Monica Bellucci, Sharon Stone and Paris Hilton also attended, the resort’s publicist said. The mayor of Moscow, Yuri M. Luzhkov, cut the ribbon.

It is unclear what about the lavish resort may have set off the regulatory onslaught. The ostentation in time of economic crisis, the investment abroad of profits made in Russia and a move to undermine Mr. Luzhkov, a one-time rival of Mr. Putin’s, have all been suggested in the Russian press. Mr. Ismailov declined to be interviewed about his market’s closing.

But within a week of the Mardan Palace party, the case had reached the ultimate arbiter of the business affairs and lifestyle of the Russian rich: Mr. Putin.

The prime minister broached the matter at a cabinet meeting June 1, leaving little doubt what he had in mind. “The fight is on, but results are few,” Mr Putin said, referring to smuggled goods at the market, according to news reports. “The results in such cases are prison terms. Where are the prison terms?”

Meanwhile, the people likely to suffer the most serious privation as a result of the shutdown of Cherkizovsky are the tens of thousands of migrant laborers who called the place both work and home. The NYT continues:

Mostly, the laborers can do nothing. Bakhodur M. Mirzoyev, a Tajik, squatted outside the market on a recent afternoon. He has been living in Kazan Train Station. “Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, open our containers,” he said. “We want to work.”

Asked why the market closed, Mr. Mirzoyev shrugged. The owner, he said, had built a hotel in Turkey. Now he was left with nothing but “three hungry children in Dushanbe.”

An opinion piece by Alexei Pankin in the MT weighs the "versii" and draws a slightly different, no less interesting, conclusion.

Druzhina

[image source]

Traffic

Graphic from the "Tu nu esti marfa" ("You are not chattel") ad campaign,
developed by IOM and sponsored by, among others, USAID

A friend emailed me this link to a rather moving slideshow with audio about women who have been trafficked into prostitution from Moldova. This made me think about doing a more comprehensive post on the subject, but what I've wound up with is more like just a collection of links.

Natalia Antonova had a post recently dealing with some of the issues surrounding trafficking and prostitution in the former Soviet space.

The movie Lilya 4-ever does not deal specifically with Moldova but is about the trafficking of women from post-Soviet countries and is so good that it's even been screened by NGOs in an effort to deter young women from naively going abroad with perfect strangers. I've seen it and can recommend it.

This page appears to summarize much of the information about trafficking and anti-trafficking activity in Moldova, though it doesn't appear to have been updated for a couple of years. In 2003, this BBC article described Moldova as "Europe's human trafficking hub," and in 2004 RFE/RL wrote about young rural women being "vulnerable to human trafficking." Organizations that work on this issue (among others) are the Polaris Project and La Strada.

The OSCE Mission to Moldova's website has a page which includes pdfs of major anti-trafficking legislation and other reports on the issue. Jonathan at The Head Heeb has also blogged about some of the legal efforts to combat trafficking. The OSCE's page on trafficking also links to the Moldovan anti-trafficking and gender network, which has a page with a number of reports on the subject and has a profile of the problem in Moldova:

Poverty, inadequate public services, high levels of unemployment, discrimination against women, and domestic violence are among the main factors making Moldova a major country of origin for trafficking in human beings. According to recent data, around 420,000 Moldovans are currently abroad, primarily prompted to leave the country due to economic decline. However, of the Moldovans living abroad, no reliable data on the total number of trafficked persons is available given the multi-faceted nature of the crime and the absence of a standard identification procedure. None the less, information from countries of destination confirms a prominent number of Moldovan citizens among the identified trafficked persons.

From January 2000 to 31 December 2004, the total number of Moldovan nationals assisted as victims of trafficking by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was 1633. Most Moldovan victims are women and children trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation, although a number of men have also been trafficked for forced labour and begging. Children are trafficked for sexual exploitation and begging.

The IOM reports that Moldovan victims have been trafficked to some 32 destination countries in Western Europe, South Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, including primarily Russia, and the United States. In 2004, the destination countries included Turkey (45%), South Eastern Europe (18%), the Middle East (15%), Russia (11%), and Western Europe (8%). Thus, the number of trafficked persons returning to Moldova, especially from the Western Balkans, is slowly declining, whilst the number of trafficked women returning from Turkey and Russia is increasing. There is also more information about trafficking from Moldova to Israel and the Middle East, as well as more evidence of children being trafficked to Russia.

Here's another older article from a Moldovan newspaper (in Russian), which purports to be based on an interview with a woman who was trafficked to Israel - the story is interesting because it goes into some detail about the long and winding path that groups of women often take to get to their destination abroad.

Blogger Mihai Moscovici wrote about the "Tu Nu Esti Marfa" anti-trafficking ad campaign in section 4.1 of his university thesis (in Romanian); the campaign was also covered by Newsweek at its peak back in 2002.

Post-colonial healthcare worker migration patterns

IWPR has a piece on the impact of labor migration on the healthcare system in Kyrgyzstan. Reading it, I couldn't help but think of the controversy caused by healthcare workers emigrating en masse from Africa to the UK. This was a much-discussed topic in a very interesting course I took last fall on "international migration and development." The reasons for migration from rural regions of Central Asia to urban areas of Kazakhstan and Russia are similar to the reasons for migration from Africa to the UK - money is the main reason, of course, and a common language smooths the path of migration, although there are some interesting wrinkles along the way. For example, according to this article on "Doctors and Soccer Players - African Professionals on the Move," in Ghana, the dearth of native professionals is made up in part by reinforcements from Cuba.

One of the things mentioned in the IWPR story is that Russians are coming down to Kyrgyzstan to recruit healthcare workers. The UK and South Africa apparently reached an agreement to reduce such "poaching" several years ago, but I doubt such agreements will be in the offing between former Soviet republics in the near future. Russia needs the professionals and can pay them, and given relatively low barriers to migration labor will flow to where it gets paid most.