Russian Nationalism and Ethnic Violence

Symbolic Violence, Lynching, Pogrom and Massacre

Richard Arnold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317209461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Social Sciences

Nationalism is now the dominant narrative in Russian politics, and one with genuine popularity in society. Russian Nationalism and Ethnic Violence is a theoretical and empirical study which seeks to break the concept of "ethnic violence" into distinguishable types, examining the key question of why violence within the same conflict takes different forms at certain times and providing empirical insight into the politics of one of the most important countries in the world today.

Theoretically, the work promises to bring the content of ethnic identity back into explanations of ethnic violence, with concepts from social theory, and empirical and qualitative analysis of databases, newspaper reports, human rights reports, social media, and ethnographic interviews. It sets out a new typology of ethnic violence, studied against examples of neo-Nazi attacks, Cossack violence against Meskhetian Turks, and Russian race riots.

Russian Nationalism and Ethnic Violence brings hate crimes in Russia into the study of ethnic violence and examines the social undercurrents that have led to Putin's embrace of nationalism. It adds to the growing body of English language scholarship on Russia's nationalist turn in the post-Cold War era, and will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only why different forms of ethnic violence occur, but also the potential trajectory of Russian politics in the next 20 years.

1 Skinhead ethnic violence in the Russian Federation

On January 11, 2006 Aleksander Koptsev, a troubled youth suffering from an illness that would lead to blindness and mental distress, burst into a Hassid synagogue on Bolshaya Bronnaya Street in the heart of Moscow. The security cameras at the synagogue captured the entire incident.¹ After entering the synagogue, 21-year-old Koptsev pulled out a knife and shouted “I will kill Jews!” He proceeded to stab nine parishioners before being wrestled to the ground by the Rabbi (see Bigotry Monitor, 2006: 6: 3). The ensuing police investigation found anti-Semitic literature at Koptsev’s apartment and purported links between him and the international racist skinhead group Combat-18: Blood and Honour. At his trial, Koptsev said that he had gone into the synagogue to “kill as many Jews as possible.” The court sentenced Koptsev to 16 years in prison for attempted murder “motivated by ethnic hatred” but did not charge him with inciting religious or ethnic enmity (see Bigotry Monitor, 2006: 6: 13). Koptsev took his own life less than a year later.²

Most people in Russia expressed revulsion at the events, as indeed they would do anywhere. Yet some actually tried to invert the meaning of this event and present Russians as the victims. Russian State Duma deputy speaker Sergei Baburin from the Rodina (Motherland) bloc voiced such sentiment when he charged that many of the accusations made against Koptsev were “Russophobic in essence,” implying that the media only cares about crimes committed against Jews (see Bigotry Monitor, 2006: 6: 3). Likewise former Motherland leader Dmitrii Rogozin blamed violent video games and pornography, claiming that the attack received extra attention due to the Jewish nature of the victims: “Obviously, the murder of a Russian is seen in Russia as an ordinary crime, while the murder of a minority is practically a crime against humanity” (Zavtra, January 19, 2006 in Bigotry Monitor, 2006: 6: 5). At the time of writing, Rogozin was Russia’s ambassador to NATO. Albeit not quite support for Koptsev, statements of this nature from officials of such high ranking in the machinery of the state are reflective of popular xenophobic sentiment in the Russian Federation.

Another incident of ethnic violence came in January 2005, when in the Novosibirsk Oblast town of Iskitim armed men expelled a settlement of 400 Roma, claiming that if the Roma would not leave voluntarily then they would have drugs or weapons planted on the Roma to frame them. Local media reportedly praised the men for “finally putting an end to inter-ethnic conflict” (see Bigotry Monitor, 2005: 5: 8). Later in January, arsonists burned down five occupied Roma houses and two more in April. In blog posts on the website of a local newspaper, residents praised the inhabitants of Iskitim for ridding themselves of “drug dealers” and called for Roma to be forcibly addicted to heroin so they could not reproduce (see Bigotry Monitor, 2005: 5: 15). Later that same year, someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of a Roma house, causing third-degree burns to an 8-year-old girl (see Bigotry Monitor, 2005: 5: 45). The anti-Roma arsonists were not prosecuted by the Russian state authorities, presumably due at least in part to the popular support their actions enjoyed.

These events are but two of hundreds of cases of low-level ethnic violence that has gone mostly unnoticed by Western publics but not by international organizations. Indeed, the United Nations special rapporteur for racism Doudou Diène visited Russia in 2006 to investigate and found that, while there was no state policy of racial discrimination, “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). At the same time, there is significant variation in how skinheads attack ethnic minorities. Such events are not just acts of ethnic violence, but particular acts—or forms—of ethnic violence. Is there a way to compare events of this nature to each other? How can we understand these events theoretically? Why are there different forms of ethnic violence in the Russian Federation? What can they tell us about the future of that troubled country?

Such questions are important both from an empirical and theoretical point of view. Empirically, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused of constructing a neo-authoritarian (or even fascist) regime, yet it has been one that so far has managed to operate without widely noted political violence. Because of their seemingly random nature, individual incidences of ethnic violence or “hate crime” (Arnold, 2015a) have not been connected to broader social discourse, although such connections are indeed present. Indeed, “since the start of the 2000s, the state-controlled mass media have disseminated the idea of the cultural or civilizational predetermination of a ‘special path’ for Russia with particular fervor” (Verkhovsky and Pain, 2012: 56). Notions of civilizational exceptionalism and inter-ethnic relations have also played out on Russian television and in the media, which is not as orchestrated by the regime as many observers believe (Hutchings and Tolz, 2015). Enhancing our understanding of why there is so much social anger in Russia which the regime can exploit (in, for instance, the annexation of Crimea) is a worthy enterprise. Such questions offer insights into why the “Weimar Russia” scenario (a term first used by Russian journalist Aleksei Yanov in 1995; see also Brubaker, 1996; Luks, 2008; Umland, 2012) manifested itself not in the economically disastrous 1990s but the relatively prosperous early years of the new millennium.

Similarly, understanding hate crime or ethnic conflict in Russia is itself a worthy enterprise. The ultra-right in Russia have become a focus of attention (Arnold, 2009, 2010a, 2010b; Foxall, 2012) in recent times and especially in advance of the 2018 World Cup. Some of these ultra-right activists have participated as volunteers in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine (Arnold, 2014a). As global events like the Olympics and the World Cup are staged in less stable countries outside of the traditional West, the activities and opinions of extremist groups will be a subject of intense interest. As a chance to glimpse into the psychology and rationales of people inside such hate groups, these questions are important for those concerned with the prevention of ethnic and racial violence throughout the globe.

At the same time and somewhat paradoxically, the main hope for change in the case of Russia also seems to come from the right. The protests which filled Moscow’s streets as well as those of numerous other Russian cities saw an alliance of liberals and nationalists, personified in the form of Alexei Navalny (Arnold, 2014c; Hutchings and Tolz, 2015: 185–91). At the time of writing—and despite Putin’s best efforts to commandeer the nationalist movement with foreign policy adventurism—some nationalists remain fervently opposed to the Kremlin as not sufficiently radical. Some thinkers on the Russian far right hold out hopes of Russia becoming the “White World’s Future” (Arnold and Romanova, 2013), reflecting the structure of Russian society that has served to keep whole communities intact and ethnically homogenous (Arnold, 2015a). The emergence of an oppositional and extremist right-wing movement should be concerning to anyone interested in Russian politics today.

Moreover, these questions also offer insight into theoretical debates in political science. The case of Russian neo-Nazi violence is interesting precisely because it offers insights into why political-ethnic violence takes more or less extreme forms and, concomitantly, the process of violence escalation. Past explanations of political-ethnic violence have regarded the phenomenon as an outcome of structural conditions (see Tilly, 2003). Yet in a situation where perpetrators are almost completely free to choose how they attack ethnic others, why do they choose particular forms instead of others? What are the conditions under which violence escalates? Comparing forms of violence within the same conflict offers us insights into the violence-generating process by holding many conditions relevant to violence constant. Indeed, work that compares civil/ethnic wars against one another “cannot answer questions regarding why violence varies temporally and spatially within a conflict, and therefore cannot be used to examine many aspects of conflict dynamics. Such aspects are better studied within the context of single-case microstudies of violence” (Eck, 2009: 386). The case of Russian neo-Nazi violence constitutes such a single-case microstudy of ethnic violence. Uncovering why neo-Nazis use different forms of violence promises insights into the process of escalation in political and ethnic violence.

Also, using a low-level but persistent ethnic conflict, like Russian neo-Nazi groups’ targeting of ethnic minorities, holds the prospect of making another contribution to theory on ethnic violence. Hitherto scholars have tried to explain why violence occurred in particular situations, ignoring the form it took as unimportant. Indeed, “one of the most interesting yet infrequently asked questions about nationalist violence is why it assumes the forms it does” (Beissinger, 2002: 306). The relatively low level of violence in Russia offers a chance to answer just this question, which promises insights into larger cases. After all, if the processes that lead to minor incidences of violence are the same as those that lead to the major incidences, then those interested in explaining ethnic violence have an immediate interest in explaining just those processes. As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (1996) argued in his seminal work on the Holocaust, understanding how often offers insights into why. Explaining how ethnic and political violence takes different forms has implications for the larger question of why ethnic violence occurs at all.

This chapter outlines the nature of what must be explained and presents a typology of the forms of ethnic violence. The next section provides data on racist skinhead violence in the Russian Federation, showing that it reached its apogee between 2008 and 2009, although it remains a significant problem at the time of writing. The scale of Russian racist violence in the first decade of the millennium meant Russia was the most dangerous country for ethnic and racial minorities in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Section 1.2 then presents a typology of forms of ethnic violence with historical examples and applies the typology to Russian violence. Section 1.3 provides the template for the rest of the book.

1.1 Racist violence in the Russian Federation

In 2007, Russia was home to half the world’s population of skinheads—an estimated total of 50,000 (Shnirel’man, 2007: 28 cf. Tarasov). The Russian word for “skinhead,” britogolovye (literally, shaven-headed), is used to describe violent extremist youth on the far right, but the Cyrillicized version of the English word “skinhead” is more common in the Russian media. Originally used to denote a cultural style which originated in 1950s London associated with ethnic minorities, the term today has both racist and non-racist skinhead associations (for example, the organization Skinheads against Racial Prejudice (SHARP)). This is true in Russia as well, where anti-fascist groups will sometimes adopt the cultural styles of the skinhead movement. Unless otherwise indicated, however, the term “skinhead” in this book refers to solely racist skinheads. At other times, the book refers to racist skinheads as “neo-Nazis,” due primarily to the association of the term in Russia. Chapter 2 gives more background on Russian skinheads, but for the moment it will suffice to focus on their actions.

Between 2001 and 2009 skinheads in Russia used violence on an almost daily basis against those who are ethnically and racially different. Table 1.1 shows the number of skinhead attacks on members of ethnic minorities in 2001–9, which illustrates the scale of the problem. It should be said that these numbers are almost certainly conservative estimates as the government keeps no publicly available statistics on skinhead violence. The Diène report discussed above was not the only document to note this. Nikolai Butkevich, head of the Union of Councils of Former Soviet Jewry (UCSJ), complained in 2008 that “the government refuses to implement a comprehensive and transparent system for monitoring hate crimes” (see Bigotry Monitor, 2008: 8: 15 for more details). In the absence of official data, therefore, Table 1.1 shows the monitoring of skinhead ethnic violence in the first decade of the new millennium.

The data came from the publication Bigotry Monitor posted online by the Washington-based organization UCSJ. UCSJ monitors the human rights situation in Eurasia and started monitoring racist crimes in the Russian Federation when it became a notable issue. Bigotry Monitor began publication in 2000—a testament in itself to the beginning of the increase in hate crimes. The publication came to an end in 2010, when skinhead violence had passed its peak, due to the departure of its editor Nikolai Butkevich. There are other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Russia that monitor violence, primarily the Sova Center for Information and Analysis (Arnold, 2010b: the word sova means “owl” in Russian). Sova has become an authority on ethnic violence in Russia, but its statistical reports lacked the narrative detail provided in the Bigotry Monitor—data that was important for this project. Further, both organizations utilized reports from the national and regional press to record racist violence—as seen in the high correlation between Sova and Bigotry Monitor databases found by Professor Mikhail Alexseev. While presumably not so comprehensive as a state recording system, NGOs in Russia provide the best available data on the extent of skinhead violence in that country.

The data show that skinhead violence against ethnic minorities peaked in 2008 and started to decline in 2009. Data from Sova confirms that the decline lasted beyond 2009 and in 2014 there were 21 murders motivated by ethnic hatred. In any case, 2010 marked the year in which Russian skinheads started a war on state offices, including the February murder of federal judge Eduard Chuvashov for his role in sentencing a teenage skinhead gang, the White Wolves.³ With Chuvashov’s murder, the state began more rigorous enforcement of its laws against skinheads, meaning that the most intensive period of skinhead violence was captured by the data used in this project.

Table 1.1 Incidents of skinhead violence by year, 2001–9

	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
N (attacks)	37	117	75	96	132	128	140	149	91
Cumulative	37	154	229	325	457	585	625	874	965

There is good reason to believe that the monitoring which is available seriously underestimates the scale of violence. First, many people are afraid to go to the police after incidents of ethnic violence as they do not wish to make their situation worse. The police may sometimes be indifferent to the plight of a member of an ethnic minority (or worse, try to extort bribes from them as well). Specifi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Abbreviations
• 1 Skinhead ethnic violence in the Russian Federation
• 2 “There is a war on our streets!”: Cataloguing skinhead violence
• 3 The theory of ethnic vigilantism and neo-Nazi violence
• 4 Unequal treatment: Meskhetian Turks in Krasnodar Krai and Rostov Oblast
• 5 The “Kondopoga technology”: Mobilizational dynamics of pogrom
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index