Russia's racists

Up to 1,000 people were arrested in Moscow recently as nationalist youths rampaged throughout the city for the second time in a week, shouting racist slogans and calling for the death of immigrants. The protests, originally organised by Spartak's unofficial fan club, have spread to include Russia's disaffected youth, sparking fears that racial tensions may have irreparably boiled over. Racism is widespread and widely tolerated in the country, with dozens of immigrants killed and hundreds injured each year. The Moscow SOVA (Owl) Center for Information and Analysis, Russia’s leading xenophobia monitoring NGO, has been closely watching the multifarious Russian ultra-nationalist scene since the middle of this decade. According to SOVA, in 2004-2009, Russian racists killed on average between one and two persons per week – a death rate that has no equivalent anywhere in the world.

Since coming to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin’s has purposefully instrumentalised Russian imperial nostalgia, national pride, and ethnocentric thinking for the legitimisation of his authoritarian regime. These events are the repercussions of this strategy. Putin and his associates may have succeeded in consolidating their rule over the country today but ,at the same time, their manipulation of the national feelings and social anxieties of post-Soviet Russia’s crisis-stricken population has been a play with fire.

Neither the Russian nor the Western public have so far become fully aware of the magnitude of Russia’s neo-fascist subculture. The overwhelmingly ultra-nationalist Russian skinhead movement has been estimated to have between 20 and 70 thousand members – depending on the definition of such membership. In any way, this would seem to make the Russian skinheads the largest informal, clearly neo-fascist youth movement in the world.

A Fifa spokesman said. "There are eight years to go before the 2018 Fifa World Cup … In working with Fifa, we are confident that the Russian authorities will … ensure adequate security plans will be in place."