vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #567 / Vladivostok by Braille / Reading article...

While Russia prepares to celebrate its victory over the Nazi regime in World War II on May 9, known as the Great Patriotic War which claimed some 20 million Soviet citizen’s lives, neo-Nazi extremist groups escalated hate crimes in observance of the birthday of Adolph Hitler in late April.

Foreign students of Vladivostok’s Far Eastern National University were subtly urged to remain indoors through the week of April 20 for their own protection. Hitler’s birthday is marked throughout Russia by the ever increasing Neo-Nazi factions with an increase in race related threats and violence.

Over the week of April 20 a young South Korean student of FENU was assaulted by a group of seven young Russian men in one of the central Vladivostok’s streets. The victim, who preferred not to have his name revealed, said he was returning in the evening to the dormitory after a workout at a local gym.

The group approached him on an unlit sidewalk and began throwing punches. The assailants then fled on foot. “I think I am lucky,” the student stated when recalling the attack, “They didn’t have a knife.”

He reported the incident to Vladivostok police who patrolled the area in an attempt to catch the perpetrators but the effort was unsuccessful. Detectives followed up with the student for details, and revealed that several such incidents had taken place in that same area over that same week.

The student revealed that the attack has not changed his determination to pursue his future goals in Russia. He stated that he believed that the problem may stem partly from how the current economic situation in Russia is shaping its young men. “I can understand them I think,” he said. “They look at foreigners and feel that they don’t have money like them and they do not have opportunities like them and as a result they lash out, “he reflected.

Both anti-Semitism and racial intolerance can be seen in the Russian Far East. In the months of September and October of last year both the Nakhodka and Vladivostok Jewish synagogues experienced separate acts of vandalism, including rocks thrown through windows and anti-Semitic graffiti. In mid December the Vladivostok News reported on an incident involving four teenagers that assaulted two North Korean nationals, one of which later died from his injuries.

As of 2005 the total number of skinheads in Russia, as reported by the Moscow Human Rights centre, amounted to a staggering 50,000 members, with active cells operating in at least 85 cities including Vladivostok.

This amount is nearly half of the world’s total registered population of skinheads, making Russia the hotbed of Neo-Nazi activism worldwide. In 2004 the Moscow Bureau on Human Right’s reported that 20 to 30 victims a year die from skinhead assaults, which are increasing at an annual rate of 30 percent.

As Vladivostok prepares to fill its city streets with a promenade of celebrants in observance of the defeat of Nazi fascism, and as it begins its preparations for hosting the international guests of the 2012 APEC Summit, many foreigners take stock of what it means to invest in the future of Russia.

“I could live here five years, learn to speak the language, open a business, and one day, one Russian man could decide to kill me because I am foreign. Everything: my dreams, my family, my life, would be gone,” the assaulted Vladivostok student stated, “This is Russia.” At least in this day and age.

For the record:

• In April 2006 a group of militant skinheads launched firebombs at the dormitory of the Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy, shouting Nazi slogans. This year on Hitler’s birthday the university issued an emergency lockdown for all international students. Foreign students of the university were required to buy supplies to last for the three days of the lockdown and to not leave the building, the Moscow Times reported.
  
• An attack on a Congolese student in St. Petersburg in 2005, leading to the student’s death, resulted in a protest march of 800 Asian and African students to the city’s administration building. One of the placards carried in the march questioned, 'An Arab student was killed the day before yesterday, a Vietnamese student was killed yesterday, and an African student has been killed now. Who will be killed tomorrow?' the Network for Education and Academic Rights reported.
  
• Gabriel Anicet Kotchofa, head of the Foreign Students' Association in Russia and a professor at Moscow's Gubkin Oil and Gas University told BBC that this is a situation which did not exist when he first traveled to Moscow over twenty five years ago from Benin. “No Soviet citizen would have dared raise their hand against a foreigner,” Kotchofa recalled. In stark contrast to Kotchofa’s positive view of a foreigner’s place during Soviet times, one skinhead summed up current neo-Nazi sentiments. "[We are] a white man's al-Qaeda,” the young man stated, “We don't care how many [ethnic minorities] end up dead. The more the better. The time of our jihad has come." Yuri Zarakhovich for Time Magazine reported.