The attack on the “Crocus City Hall“ in a suburb of Moscow, which claimed nearly 150 victims, again unleashed anti-immigrant sentiment in the Russian Federation and was used to cast blame on the “Nazi regime in Kiev“ and the West. This came at a time when non-Slavic peoples in the vast country had just honored the victims of their deportation to Central Asia ordered by Stalin 80 years ago – punishment for aiding the fascists.
In the past week, many migrants in Russia, originally from Central Asia, have faced increased xenophobia after the attack on the concert hall in Krasnogorsk, and some Russian politicians have called for restrictions on immigration from the former Soviet republics, reported Radio „Deutsche Welle“ (DW). The attack, carried out by men in camouflage clothing, took the lives of rock concertgoers who were either shot or suffocated in thick smoke after the attackers set the hall on fire.
The nationalities of the detained suspects – seven of them of Tajik origin, sparked a heated debate among Russian lawmakers about tightening migration laws, as well as outbursts of intolerance towards communities of Central Asians living and working in Russia.
According to publications on the Russian website “Baza“ immediately after the attack, the Tajik community in Russia was warned by compatriots not to leave their homes at night. Moreover, some Central Asian countries, such as Kyrgyzstan, advised their citizens not to travel to Russia unless absolutely necessary. And while xenophobia has long been a major threat to Central Asian communities in Russia, many Tajiks with whom DW spoke fear that things will now get even worse.
DW notes that some far-right Russians and channels on the “Telegram“ that support the war in Ukraine are flooding the online space with messages inciting violence against migrants and suggesting that Central Asians and their entire families be deported.
Furthermore, the harassment of people from Central Asia is not just verbal. In the city of Blagoveshchensk in the Russian Far East, for example, a Tajik restaurant was set on fire. And in another incident in Kaluga, about 200 kilometers from Moscow, three Tajiks were beaten by unknown persons. Control of newly arriving migrants at Russian airports has also been tightened, the Russian agency RIA Novosti reported.
As Edward Lemon, an expert on Central Asia and researcher at the University of Texas, told DW, ordinary Russians consider the post-Soviet Central Asian region to be backward, despite efforts made during Soviet and Russian times to "civilize" it. Lemon emphasizes that the media and nationalist influencers portray Central Asians as "ignorant, potential criminals and terrorists. They face marginalization and racism in their everyday lives." Moreover, Central Asians also suffer ethnic discrimination from Russian authorities, and not just at the social and domestic level. The Russian independent media outlet MediaZona reported that human rights groups had received over 2,500 complaints from Central Asian migrants about arbitrary police checks and unlawful detention in the first two days after the attack at Crocus. MediaZona reported that dozens of these people had been subjected to physical harassment or illegal deportation. After the mass shooting, there was talk of restrictions on entry into Russia, as well as digital control of migrants, writes DW.
Sergey Aksyonov – head of the Crimean peninsula annexed by Ukraine, wrote on Sunday in “Telegram“ that almost every day information about crimes committed by migrants appears in the media.
As Temur Umarov – researcher at the “Carnegie Russia-Eurasia“ Center, noted to DW, Moscow on the one hand wants to maintain good relations with its long-time ally Tajikistan, but on the other hand cannot ignore public sentiment in Russia. “That is why (Russian President Vladimir) Putin emphasizes that terrorists have no nationality. However, this does not mean that the same attitude exists in society.
The Russian authorities must show that they are dealing with this problem, but some people will not distinguish between radical Islamists and labor migrants and therefore put pressure on the authorities to reduce the number of these migrants, summarizes the analyst Umarov.
Most Central Asian arrivals come to work in Russia as taxi drivers, cleaners or construction workers. According to the Institute for Demographic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in 2023 there were over 3 million Tajik migrants living in Russia.
But Umarov predicts that the case in Krasnogorsk will certainly affect the legislation and the daily lives of these expatriates. However, the Russian state can hardly afford to cut off the migrant flows, since the Russian economy is heavily dependent on labor coming from Central Asia. “I don't think the situation is likely to change, because there are not enough Russians of a certain age available to replace 5-6 million migrants a year, given that the demographic situation is deteriorating. It would be a miracle if Russia were able to throw out the migrants and replace them with Russians“ Umarov concluded to DW.
“Because I am not Russian, I felt hatred even before (the attack on) “Crocus City Hall“, but now they hate migrants even more“, a taxi driver who came to Moscow from Kyrgyzstan's second largest city, Osh, in search of a permanent job, told the “Moscow Times“ (MT). The Kyrgyz man explains that the attackers in Krasnogorsk turned out to be Tajiks, but Russians do not distinguish between Kyrgyz and Tajik. To them, we look the same, the driver summarizes, adding that he is afraid and no longer takes night shifts.
MT also draws attention to the fact that these migrants, mainly from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, are also subject to increased pressure from military recruiters to sign contracts and fight on Russia's side in Ukraine. In addition, after the attack near Moscow, special units were created to check documents in hostels where migrants live and on major roads. This was reported on Sunday by “Baza“, a channel on “Telegram“, associated with security forces.
Five days after the attack, Russian police and national guardsmen from the Rosgvardia carried out an operation in the Moscow region at a warehouse of Russia's largest online retailer “Wildberries“. The documents of at least 5,000 male workers were checked, and some were taken to recruitment centers, “Telegram“ reported the Mash channel, quoted by MT.
Valentina Chupik, who offers free legal protection to migrants in Russia, told MT that in the first 72 hours after the attack on Crocus, she had received 3,200 requests for support. Many of the cases involved people arbitrarily accused of administrative offenses or illegally deported. Chupik reported 118 people who were beaten by police and over 400 who were placed in conditions tantamount to torture in detention centers: kept outside for hours or in crowded cells where they could not even sit on the floor, without water, food or a toilet.
In the northwestern Russian city of Novgorod, authorities have banned most migrants from working as taxi drivers or on public transport.
Alexander Verkhovsky of the SOVA Information and Analysis Center – Russia's largest think tank, which documents manifestations of nationalism, xenophobia and racism, says that if federal and local authorities believe that such measures will calm the population, they will start implementing them, mostly in a chaotic manner, to show that they are responding promptly to the "migrant threat".
Mikhail Sheremet - a deputy from Moscow-annexed Crimea - even proposed "limited admission of migrants until the end of the war in Ukraine." The second day after the attack, Sheremet told state media that foreigners "who cross the border are a threat: first of all to themselves, because they become an object of interest for Western intelligence services (who hope to use them) to commit terrorist acts".
According to Verkhovsky, however, the number of attacks on migrant workers had begun to grow even before the attack in Krasnogorsk. He explains that many perpetrators of racist attacks in Russia are associated with criminal gangs, consisting mainly of minors. They imitate the skinhead groups that were active in Russia at the beginning of the 21st century and imitate both the tactics and the appearance of the “shaven heads“.
Regardless of everything, for most labor migrants in Russia this is the only way to earn money. High unemployment in their countries and low wages there do not allow these people to support themselves and feed their families, analyst Umarov notes for MT. According to him, the situation is under control for now and there are no mass pogroms like what happened in October last year at the airport in the North Caucasus city of Makhachkala. Then, after the start of the war in Gaza, an angry crowd stormed the runway in an attempt to deal with the passengers of a plane arriving from Israel.
Bektur Iskender, a writer for MT, originally from the capital of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, warns, however, that things remain unclear. He recalls that after the 2013 St. Petersburg metro bombing, racism against Central Asian migrants has increased sharply. Therefore, the attack at Crocus City Hall has the potential to exacerbate the already hostile environment and spark new waves of violence.
Iskender believes that even if the attackers in Krasnogorsk were not from Central Asia, what happened would still have ignited hatred. He emphasizes that any person of a different skin color from Central Asia, the Caucasus or an ethnic Russian republic, regardless of whether their guilt is proven, can become a scapegoat to justify aggressive actions against a wide category of people whom Russians label as "non-Russians", i.e. non-Russians.
The MT author comments that Russia's policy towards migration from Central Asia is full of contradictions. Although citizens of Central Asian republics can easily move to Russia, the Russian state consistently reduces them to a second-class status through systematic discrimination and racial profiling.
After the events of last Friday, the Russian authorities are also relying on loyal public figures in the country who are of non-Russian origin. TASS quoted a statement on March 28 by the chief adviser on domestic policy in the administration of the Russian president, Abdul-Hakim Sultigov. According to Sultigov, who is the executive secretary of the board of trustees of the Islamic Academy in the city of Bolgar in the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, the “terrorist attack in Krasnogorsk“ is an “inhuman crime“ that was aimed “to set the peoples of Russia against each other on religious and national grounds and to undermine the Russian state from within. This is beneficial to the Nazi junta that has taken the fraternal Ukrainian people hostage“, concludes Sultigov.
Putin himself made a statement long after the attack in Krasnogorsk and did not go to the scene of the tragedy. Instead, the president preferred to make a pre-arranged visit to a town in the Tver region, “to cover up the blunder“ related to Krasnogorsk, MT writes.
Author Pyotr Kozlov points out in a March 28 publication that five days after the deadliest attack on Russian soil since 2004 Putin has yet to visit the site of the attack or meet with the victims' families.
After repeatedly blaming Ukraine and the West for the attack, despite the fact that the "Islamic State" group claimed responsibility for it, Putin made a surprise visit to Torzhok, a town of 45,000 in the Tver region, on Wednesday, where he was greeted by a pre-prepared crowd of "adoring locals." State television footage showed about a hundred men, women and children waiting for Putin's motorcade behind police cordons. The crowd erupted in applause as the presidential limousine arrived. Putin was seen signing a book for an elderly woman with his picture on the cover, and kissing a 10-year-old boy surrounded by his security guards. A female voice can also be heard from the crowd, shouting: “I have been waiting for you for 20 years!“.
MT notes that after Krasnogorsk, Putin has resorted to his tried-and-tested damage control tactic of participating in staged “spontaneous“ meetings with ordinary people far from Moscow. A government official, who requested anonymity, admitted to the media that “the terrorist attack at “Crocus“, the queues of people for (meetings with Boris) Nadezhdin, who failed to participate in the elections, and the mountain of flowers at the grave of (Alexei) Navalny - all this shows the president in an unfavorable light“. And the visit to Torzhok comes to show that real Russians love Putin, summarizes MT's interlocutor. The local TV channel “Perviy Tverskoy“ reported that the crowd had been lined up hours before the president's arrival, and among the people were muscular men who looked like undercover security officers. Putin then visited a museum and spoke about "true patriotism." Speaking to fighter pilots in the Tver region, Putin also expressed concern over the statements of what he called "hurray patriots" that Russia was only for Russians: "190 ethnic groups live on the territory of Russia," the president noted. He concluded that the country would fall apart if such destructive ideas were implemented, Russian media reported, quoted by the Bulgarian National Radio.
The Kremlin has repeatedly prepared events to allow for informal communication with citizens, MT writes, during visits to the regions of Russia, organized after events that could provoke public anger.
In December 2022, after the failure to take Kiev, the retreat from Kherson, and reports of scores of Russian soldiers killed in the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin organized a meeting between Putin and soldiers’ mothers, who did not criticize him. Six months later, after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion triggered the worst internal security crisis in decades, Putin visited the Republic of Dagestan and was met by crowds who cheered him on and “showed him their love.”
The Kremlin’s war on Ukraine is becoming an additional reason for discrimination against ethnic minorities in the Russian Federation, writes Leyla Latipova in MT. While ethnic Russians are the majority in the country in absolute terms, Russia’s non-Slavic minorities and indigenous peoples have suffered disproportionately in relation to their share of the total population, an ongoing study shows. "The most dire situation is with the small indigenous peoples of the north, who should (by law) be exempt from military service altogether," notes US-based Buryat researcher Maria Vyushkova, who led the study.
“This is a terrible tragedy that no one is talking about… "In a generation, these peoples will simply disappear," Vyushkova told MT.
Minority and indigenous peoples activists have long warned that the Kremlin is deliberately using the country's non-Slavic population as cannon fodder in its protracted pursuit of Ukrainian territories.
Vyushkova explains that the excessive losses on the battlefield in Ukraine are due to a combination of factors: disproportionate military mobilization of representatives of ethnic minorities, regional inequalities, structural discrimination and the Kremlin's efforts to minimize discontent among the politically active Russian majority.
According to data from a BBC and MediaZona study, which Vyushkova is developing, at least 45,123 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine. The Buryats (a people of Mongolian origin who speak the Buryat language; the largest ethnic minority in Siberia) were the most numerous, closely followed by the Tivins, Kalmyks, Chukchi and Nenets. The Buryats accounted for 1.16% of the victims, although they constitute only 0.3% of the population of the Russian Federation. The Chukchi, together with other small indigenous peoples of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, accounted for 0.09% of the victims, but their total number is only 17,044 people - less than 0.01% of the population of the Russian Federation. At the same time, the Russians accounted for 70% of the victims, although they constitute 80% of the population of their country.
Witnesses cited by MT say that local men were taken from their homes in the middle of the night and taken to recruitment centers. According to activists, in the first 24 hours of the mobilization, 5,000 men received draft notices. Similar scenes have been seen in many other parts of the country, including in villages in Siberia and the Far East, where indigenous communities number less than 50,000. In Gyasuki - a remote village in the far-eastern Khabarovsk Krai (8,000 kilometers from Moscow) with a population of 210 - 14 men were mobilized - 11.5% of the entire male population, according to journalist and activist Dmitry Berezhkov - a member of the International Committee of Indigenous Peoples of Russia.
Vyushkova concludes that (for the Kremlin) “this is a way to minimize political risks: to wage war using groups (of the population) that the average politically active Russian would not be bothered by“. The activist draws attention to the fact that the authorities are redoubling their efforts to recruit migrants and recently naturalized citizens from Central Asia into the army, amid widespread racism and anti-immigrant attitudes, MT quotes her.
The attack in Krasnogorsk almost coincided with the 80th anniversary of the deportation of Turkic-speaking Balkars from the North Caucasus to Central Asia, which was marked on March 8. Stalin deported them as punishment for supporting the fascists, recalls the website Idel.Realities, affiliated with Radio Free Europe (RFE). Those who survived the deportation were allowed to return only in 1957.
RFE notes that in the 1940s, the Soviet government justified the deportation of various ethnic groups by saying that they were helpers of the fascist invaders.
A month before the attack in Krasnogorsk – February 23rd marks the 80th anniversary of Operation “Lechevitsa” (lentils): the deportation of Chechens and Ingush from the Chechen-Ingush ASSR on the orders of Stalin and Beria. About a third of the Chechen and Ingush population died in the operation, MT recalls. The publication also recalls that in 2004 the European Parliament recognized the deportation as genocide.
The repressions in the Russian Federation against labor migrants from Central Asia may change attitudes in today's ethnic Russian republics of Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Tatarstan, analysts believe. It is there, on the periphery, that Putin has had the greatest support so far, political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin points out in an interview with DW.
According to analyst Temur Umarov, all Central Asian countries are currently thinking about how to deal with radical extremism (at home and in Russia) in the future. Kyrgyz Bekur Iskender points out that Russia relies heavily on Central Asian migrants, who supply it with vital labor. At the same time, these immigrants increase the dependence of Central Asian countries on the Kremlin and thus facilitate Moscow's ability to strengthen its political influence throughout the region.