Racism and Xenophobia in May 2013

May 2013 saw no fewer than ten people in Russia targeted in racist and neo-Nazi attacks, with one of them being killed. (Vladislav Tornovoy was brutally murdered on the night of May 9-10 over his sexual orientation.) Incidents were reported in St. Petersburg (2 injured), the Volgograd region (1 killed, 1 injured), Stavropol Region (1 injured), Perm (3 injured), the Komi Republic (1 injured) and the Ryazan region (1 injured). The victims this month were those traditionally targeted by Russia’s ultra-right: natives of Central Asia (2 injured) and the Caucasus (1 injured), members of informal and leftist youth groups (3 injured), people of “non-Slavic appearance” (1 injured) , religious groups (2 injured) and LGBT people (1 killed).

In total, according to our preliminary data, four people have been killed and at least 71 were injured in 17 regions of Russia in the first five months of 2013. At least two people received serious death threats.

In May we recorded at least two acts of vandalism that could be seen as motivated by hatred or neo-Nazi ideology. A memorial cross in Birobidzhan, in the Jewish Autonomous region, was targeted; as was a monument to military pilots in the Leningrad region.

Since the beginning of 2013, we have registered at least 21 such acts of vandalism in 16 regions of the country.

Traditionally, the most important day in May for the average Russian ultra-right activist has been the Russian May Day (in Russian, “Russian May First”). Two marches organized by extreme right-wing organizations and parties were held for the occasion in Moscow. The first was a mass procession (including, we estimate, about 500 people) starting from the Oktyabrskoe Polye Metro stop and moving towards the Schukinskaya Metro stop down Marshall Biriuzov and Marshall Vasilievsky streets. The second action, which was in Lublino and called the “Russian Spring,” was organized by a coalition of right-wing activists led by the party project Great Russia and the so-called Minin-Pozharsky people’s militia. That march attracted only about 150 people. Though more of these ultra-right May Day marches have begun popping up across the country, nationalists failed to increase the number of activists involved outside the capital cities.

Nationalists participated in general opposition marches on May 5 (organized by the Opposition Expert Council (ESO)) and May 6 (organized by the Opposition Coordination Council (KSO)). The May 5 demonstration, called the Spring Freedom March, gathered around 500 people with roughly half of those being nationalists. Of the nationalists, the vast majority were national-Stalinists from the group leading the initiative for the referendum “For Responsible Power” (that is former Army of the People’s Will). Nationalists were much less noticeable at the KSO-organized march For Freedom on May 6.

There were no fewer than three convictions in cases of hate-motivated racist violence in May 2013. The trials, which saw six individuals sentenced, were read in Moscow, the Stavropol Krai and the Ulyanovsk region. Three Ulyanovsk neo-Nazi skinheads, members of the group Simbirsk White Power, were penalized for a series of racist attacks, while Daria Botvinskaya was tried for an attack on Dagestanis on a Moscow region commuter train. In the latter case, the sentence (five years in prison) will be deferred until Botvinskaya’s two-month-old son turns 14.

In total there have been no fewer than 15 such rulings against 24 individuals in 12 regions of Russia so far this year.

The most notable event this month actually came as a pair: the detention in Serbia of former Russian Image leader Ilya Goryachev and the detention in Ukraine of former member of the skinhead group OB-88 Mikhail Volkov. The federal Investigative Committee claims that the two nationalists were put on an international wanted list related to a case against the Militant Organization of Russian Nationalists (BORN), and that they are suspected of involvement in a number of high-profile murders in Russia including those of Moscow City Court judge Eduard Chuvashov and human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov.

May 2013 saw only a single sentence for xenophobic vandalism, delivered in the Orel region. As such there have been three convictions of this type since the beginning of the year in Moscow and the Orel and Chelyabinsk regions.

In cases of xenophobic vandalism, there were no fewer than six sentences this month, in the Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Tyumen, Ulyanovsk and Chelyabinsk regions. Six individuals were convicted.

Since there beginning of the year, 34 people have been convicted in as many cases of xenophobic propaganda in 25 regions of Russia.

In May 2013 the Federal List of Extremist Materials was updated four times: on May 7, 14, 17 and 27. Entries 1803-1914 were added. Some of the items added to the list include: Islamist articles, videos and status updates posted to Russian social network Odnoklassniki; an article from English-language al-Qaeda magazine Inspire; yet another book by Said Nursi; xenophobic videos posted to VKontakte social network; a Russian National Socialist Party website; calls to “street violence” on the site Heroes of Freedom; a flyer for the Will party; a collection of “Forbidden Poems;” a Handbook of the Russian Person by radical neo-pagan Aleksei Ivanov; an article from the magazine Russian Life; materials from the newspaper Amadou Altai; and a the book Adiveda by Neo-pagan “magus” Yuri Gomonov.