Category Archives: Immigration

I’m normally not a big fan of the Guardian‘s Luke Harding, but I think he deserves kudos for his latest article, “Putin’s Worst Nightmare.” Harding opens with the chilling and brutal murder of Karen Abramian, who was stabbed 56 times by two skinheads named Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, both 17, as he returned from visiting his parents.

Abramian’s murder was one in the string of 20 murders committed by the racist duo in a nine month period in 2006-2007.  They also racked up about 16 attacks in their stabbing spree. Most importantly, as Harding stresses, the two youths “were proud” of their killings.  After all, they are part of a “holy war” to rid Russia of racial others. “As they saw it,” Harding writes, “Abramian’s violent death was part of a national liberation movement – an ambitious, quasi-mystical struggle to get rid of Russia’s foreigners, in which they played the ..read more

Russia and Israel have a rather interesting relationship.  Political relations between the countries have been cool for decades, but the increase of Russian immigration and travel to the Jewish nation has inevitably complicated the two nation’s cultural and social ties.  It’s estimated that well over a million Russians have immigrated to Israel since the collapse of Communism.  The reasons have been economic and cultural.  Many Russian Jews fled the collapsing economy of the 1990s.  Some were pulled to Israel out of Zionist dreams. Fewer left Russia out of fear of antisemitism.  Many more were pulled by Israeli policies that expanded the Right of Return, a move from the Israeli perspective was a means to offset the its demographic imbalance with the Palestinians as well as replace Arab cheap labor with Russian immigrant cheap labor.

However, the Russian diaspora in Israel has increasingly found it difficult to integrate into Israeli society.  They ..read more

I’m lovin’ the direction Moscow Through Brown Eyes is taking. Especially with Buster PhD’s meditations on race, immigration, and nationalism in Russia. I love how figures like W. E. B. Du Bois are drawn into the discussion to help us think about how race and racism are now calculated in post-Soviet spaces. On that note, I highly recommend the post “Brown Reconstruction in Moscow?” There, Buster tries to get past the “sensationalism without sense” that inhabits most reporting on race and racial violence in the Russian and Western medias. To get beyond this reductionism, Buster revisits the analytical power of Du Bois’s presentation of the “problem of blackness” in Black Reconstruction.

Buster writes:

How might Du Bois’s vision help us think about present-day Moscow and dislodge the current construction of the problem of the guest-worker? How might we recognize “that dark and vast sea of human labor” ..read more

“Only by uniting our efforts can we achieve results in developing our country and ensure that it take an appropriate place in the world,” Putin said in reference to National Unity Day. “That is why, the idea that inspired this holiday seems to be very important to me and deserves support.”

By all accounts, on this National Unity Day is an empty holiday created by the Kremlin to replace Revolution Day on November 7. Even more a sign of desperation, is the fact that the historical event chosen to mark said unity is Russia “liberation” from the Poles in 1612. If you have to look back four centuries to find national unity, then you know you are in trouble.

But everyone knows that the historical reasons for National Unity Day are a sham, and to emphasize that again really isn’t the point. The point is that the celebration ..read more

A street brawl broke out near Slavyanskaya Ploshchad in Moscow on Friday night when Russian nationalist youth “armed with metal poles and broken bottles” attacked Caucasians reports the Moscow Times. One Armenian youth was hospitalized with stab wounds and 42 persons were arrested. Estimates suggest that 50 Russian nationalists, some of which are members of Alexandr Belov’s Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) participated in the fight. In a statement Belov denied that DPNI did not have any kind of relations with organizers of the brawl. Further, Belov was quoted in the Moscow Times that DPNI members were there “peacefully guarding Moscow from gay prostitutes when groups of people from the Caucasus approached and provoked a reaction.”

The DPNI TV (which I must say is disturbing in and of itself) has posted footage of the incident on its website. Click here to view: Part 1, ..read more

Aleksandr Potkin, 30, changed his name a few years ago. The name change had a double effect. It was at once an gesture to distance himself from his past and an act of rebirth for the future. You see, until 2002, Potkin was a member of a little known nationalist group in Moscow named Pamyat (Memory). Its roots date back to the 1970s but was founded in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time where Russian nationalism was emerging from the ideological blanket of Communism. Pamyat, however, collapsed in the late 1990s after several of its leaders were jailed for anti-Semitic activities. Not wasting much time on finding another group to devote his nationalist energies to, Potkin decided to establish his own.

Most now know Alexandr Potkin as Alexandr Belov. His new name, which means “white” is well suited. It is unknown ..read more