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English Language Page Though this characterization might be reflective of the way things really are in Russian law enforcement agencies, the matter is by far not that simple. Indeed, members of the local law enforcement structures have never lived in isolation from local communities. And inasmuch as nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Caucasian sentiments have been on the rise in Russian society, one can hardly expect that MVD members and prosecutors would not be influenced by these attitudes. However, it is precisely the domestic law enforcers that have most often been used as the tool to have these deplorable attitudes translated into discriminatory and arbitrary actions. One may point out that the mythology about excessive and inborn criminality (and the danger for the general public) of this or that ethnic minority also derives from police reports about the crimes committed by the “aliens” (like some elements from the Caucasus) and the stories being spread by mass media. Surprisingly, local law enforcers have begun to view one’s affiliation with any of these ethnic communities as sufficient grounds for suspicion and in-depth checks. As a result, at least two vicious cycles appear to exist. First, society’s xenophobic attitudes have been variously embraced by the local law enforcers. As they perform their daily functions, they mostly focus on the targeted ethnic minorities and find evidence to confirm their views. Keeping in mind these influences, they release their reports on specific felonies and crime in general. Then, those revelations get picturesque coverage by mass media, with the public’s xenophobic sentiments being either confirmed or inflamed. The second vicious cycle is somewhat more sophisticated. It is known that ethnic minorities have been targeted by society and law enforcement bodies. Given this situation, the existing ethnic communities tend to become increasingly cautious towards law-enforcement. Clearly, the current circumstances prevent them from enjoying normal living conditions, with the more disadvantaged ethnic communities actually becoming impoverished within Russian society. Understandably, such communities can be fruitful recruiting grounds for crime gangs, and some crime gangs are ethnically based. More importantly, ethnic crime ganges always seek to maintain links with their ethnic communities, and they pose as advocates of their communities’ interests and portray isolated criminal cases as examples of the war that federal law enforcers are waging against given ethnic communities. All this usually results in ethnic minorities’ refusal to cooperate with the police when the police investigate crimes. This circumstance merely makes the domestic law enforcers and society even less tolerant of those communities. While ending the first vicious cycle appears, in principle, to be possible within a relatively short period of time (given the right amount of political will and a proactive awareness drive in society and in the law enforcement bodies), the second vicious cycle can only be ended if the social conditions for Russia’s ethnic minorities radically improve. The comparison noted above between MVD, the prosecutor’s office officials, and the society as a whole has yet another perspective. Just as in society, law enforcers are not one single mass with the same views. Besides the always existing inter- and intra-departmental distinctions, today social stratification deeply divides the members of those agencies. Inadequate social protection for the majority of Russian law enforcers along with their meager compensation packages is visibly at odds with the growing well-being of government officials, including those from MVD and prosecutor’s offices. Many rank-and-file members empathize with the opposition organizations that demand that the “national wealth should be distributed more fairly.” They empathize with groups such as the Russian National Unity (RNE) and several Cossack organizations in the south of Russia. Obviously, nationalistic feelings and ethnic biases also derive from the rather low educational levels of most MVD members, ranging from the lower ranks to the senior ranks. As a matter of fact, over the past few decades the country’s law enforcement jobs have been filled by members of the very same social groups that have been supplying replacements for organized crime mobs. For example, the prosecutors’ offices in the past selected employees — often descendents of the intelligentsia — with a high level of education. Today, the prosecutors’ offices are rapidly losing that advantage. The prohibitively low social status of Russian law enforcers, the poor paychecks, the excessive corruption rates, the ongoing lack of training, and the never-ending flight of the brighter minds to the private sector clearly suggest that there is a risk that things will get even worse and that the law enforcement sector will be further criminalized. The ethnic biases of law enforcers are not the same, and the motives on which the activities of law enforcement officials are based can differ. A Moscow-based police sergeant who extorts a kickback from a visiting Azeri, whose residence registration happened to have expired, might be inclined to believe that he is just expropriating a part of the revenue that was unlawfully secured through commercial operations at a local market for farm products. A student from the Krasnodar Institute of Law, who is helping evict a Roma family, might very well be certain that he is working to shut down another source of illegal drugs in the region. A police operative might be easily tempted to plant a grenade at a Chechen’s place in order to get the “suspect” apprehended because “all Chechens are either bandits or advocates of the bandits, and they ought to be put behind bars.” Gathering the right evidence would take too long, and the backlog of cases is too heavy. Also, there are quotas to be met, and the Chechens are still “killing our brothers (our Russian people)” in Chechnya. An investigator from a local prosecutor’s office, who has failed to put together the evidence on this or that terror act or crime, would still readily bring the matter before a court, where a judge can pass a suspended sentence (at best) or order a prison sentence that happens to be the same as the time already served in the pretrial detention facility. While explaining to his troops in Chechnya why the war still goes on, a senior commanding officer would most probably say that the “counter-terrorist operation” has to be continued because international terrorists are still very active and Chechen bandits receive handouts from Western special services, and from B. Berezovsky and V. Gusinsky — Russian citizens with non-Russian-sounding family names. Manifestations of ethnic biases can be varied, but they are not always the main reason for the violation of the rights of citizens. After all, money has been extorted for breaking the established residence registration rules from many newcomers that easily stand out in a local crowd because of their ethnic appearance. Illegal drugs and firearms can be planted on any detained person. However, it is the “visually recognizable” ethnic and racial minorities that law enforcers have linked with criminal dangers in Russia. Mention should be made of a very representative case that transpired on June 8, 2001, in Moscow. Four strangers (that subsequently turned out to be plain clothes city police agents from the City Police Department’s Drug Enforcement Office) tried to apprehend George Blema, a man of African descent residing in Moscow. The law enforcers were waiting for G. Blema on his stairway. According to one version, the police thought that he was another African suspect. According to a different version, he was seized as an accomplice. Since the attackers failed to appropriately introduce themselves and present their credentials, G. Blema just took them for bandits, broke free, and ran to his apartment. Unfortunately, he never managed to shut the door behind him. The attackers got inside and fired two shots at the desperately struggling G. Blema. One bullet penetrated his shoulder muscle, and the other one got him in the stomach, rupturing his intestines and remaining in the pelvic bone. As the policemen attacked him, they kept yelling “Kill the nigger!” Then, they set about to beat up his son, without noticing that George escaped onto the balcony and somehow descended from the seventh floor to the fourth. Making it to the balcony of an apartment in the fourth floor, he tried to come into the room and ask the dwellers to hide him. However, the kind neighbors just threw him off the balcony even though he was only begging them for safety. In the aftermath, the local police inspector expressed his regrets and condolences on behalf of his office. George Blema had to undergo a major surgery, and a part of his intestine was removed. However, the bullet in his pelvic bone could not be extracted. Surprisingly, Esipova, the deputy prosecutor for the Liublinsky district, brought criminal charges under Section 2, Article 31 of the RF Criminal Code against George Blema for resisting the attackers. Esipova took this action even though the members of the said Drug Enforcement Office (who failed to identify themselves) had absolutely no right to break into G. Blema’s apartment, especially given that by then he had committed no crime. Understandably, the ethnic prejudice underpinning the policemen’s actions failed to be viewed as sufficient grounds to warrant a special investigation into the matter. In the chapters relating to the plight of Chechens and Roma in Russia, there are dozens of cases in which either racial or ethnic affiliations were evidently used as grounds for suspicion or insults by the law enforcers. However, there are other, no less relevant, manifestations of nationalism and xenophobia in the actions of Russian law enforcers when they seek to protect the people who have committed crimes based on nationalistic or xenophobic motivations from legal prosecution. Local law enforcers would each time discount any nationalistic motives when local market pogroms or neo-Nazi attacks on foreign nationals took place. All such crimes have inevitably been prosecuted under the provisions of Article 105 and Article 213 of the RF Criminal Code (manslaughter and hooliganism). For example, in October 1998, a group of local skinheads purposefully targeted and beat the son of the Ambassador of Guinea-Bissau in Moscow. The local police passed the whole thing off as just another street fight. Since early 2000, many Russian cities have seen the emergence of Nazi-skinhead formations that are reported to have participated in the following three, particularly revolting, incidents: the massive attack on a police patrol in Likhobory, Moscow region; the pogrom against a Vietnamese dormitory building near the Sokol metro-station in Moscow; and the defamation of a Jewish cemetery in Nizhny Novgorod. Notably, out of the three, only the first crime was somewhat covered by the Russian media. The Jewish cemetery case was quickly hushed up, while the Vietnamese dormitory pogrom scandal largely “went unnoticed.” In 2001–2002, the number of neo-Nazi-skinhead-engineered assaults have been on the rise incrementally, with the gangs growing more and more organized and disciplined. The police have mostly paid no heed, while meaningfully responding only in isolated cases. Following the 2001 Yasenevo-market pogrom in Moscow, the Itogi magazine carried S. Krivosheev’s article entitled “Skinhead’s Birthday.” In the article, S. Krivosheev reported his conversation with a local police official. That senior police official was quoted as saying these words at one point in the interview: Should we recognize that there are Nazi groups in the city, we would be automatically compelled to admit that their operations are organized. Of course, this would mean that half the local police chiefs would have to be dismissed for failing to prevent the emergence of an organized crime gang that had not been mentioned either in progress or annual reports. On the other hand, we are not equipped to counter the skinheads as a political force. We, the police, are out of politics. We are just compelled to treat them as some regular hoodlums. The beatings of foreign students in the city of Tver, north of Moscow have acquired a high measure of notoriety. As a reminder, the initial indications of chauvinism were reported out of that city in December 1999, and that things radically turned for the worse in the summer of 2000. By the late fall of the same year, the situation was close to desperate with local police stations receiving reports of foreign student beatings nearly on a daily basis. Notably, not only young black males were subject to the attacks of the enraged teenagers; the young racists also attacked females. Following such an “encounter” with skinhead-teenagers, two female students from Sri Lanka had to be taken to a local hospital for medical treatment. Naturally, Tver-based foreign students started to pack up and go home, and the city faced a risk of losing a very meaningful source of hard currency income. That was exactly the time when the local police finally showed its mettle: the previously ignored “playful” teenagers that harassed and beat up the black foreigners were suddenly identified and detained without any problems. They were actually school kids, 15–16 years of age, and none of them could explain clearly why they attacked foreign students. Given the facts, nearly 25 criminal cases were opened to prosecute the suspects. The local officials vowed to have the culprits severely punished so that other criminals would be taught a lesson. All of those cases were taken under advisement by A. Belousov, Tver Mayor, and S. Duka, the deputy head of the regional police authority (responsible for law enforcement tasks within the city limits). A dedicated working panel was created within the Tver regional police authority under the criminal investigation office to examine the relevant materials. The path taken by the foreign students to go to and from their dormitory building to university classrooms is now safeguarded by plainclothes policemen from the local district police station (The city is already desperately short of the law enforcers due to deployment to Chechnya on a rotational basis.) What is more, security guards can now be found on the beat in the student dormitory building’s lobby at any and all hours of the day (1). Admittedly, there have been a few cases in this or other regions where the police have tried to apply some preventive measures, however, these strategies could hardly be called adequate. For example, the Moscow police keep detaining the distributors of nationalistic leaflets, while the Saratov-based law enforcers seized and manhandled V. Sosnin, an activist against global Zionism and author of the incendiary book Time to Take Up the Sword. However, the sentiments and actions of Russian nationalists have often been supported by local law enforcers. According to some statements from the skinheads themselves, the police would often release the “patriots” and advise them to “beat up the blacks.” Not much is known about how thoroughly the neo-Nazi organizations have penetrated the domestic law enforcement bodies. Such cases are completely covered up by the government and the extremists themselves. In the early 1990s, there was a good deal of talk about the local police and RNE elements joining forces to patrol the streets. However, following the October 1993 events in Moscow when RNE sided with the former Supreme Soviet that was in confrontation with President Yeltsin, those links started to be kept secret. Revealingly, the law enforcers continue to work together with the nationalistic Cossack elements that have been unlawfully performing some police functions (after receiving the relevant clearances from local officials) related to safeguarding the public order. Particularly illustrative of this connection is the incident of October 29, 2000, involving the 25-year-old R. Gusseynov, an assistant manager of the Moscow-based Azeri Society for Humanitarian Aid who happened to be detained by a police officer on Vernadsky Prospekt, not far from his office. As the police officer did an ID check and saw that R. Gusseynov’s residence registration had expired, the police officer immediately grabbed the man and forced him into a patrol car. “As R. Gusseynov tried to protest and ask the policeman to identify himself, the latter just slugged him on the head and refused to say a word. Incidentally, under the regulations at the time, R. Gusseynov was not a law-breaker. The law read that, if a registration expired on a holiday or on a non-business day (the event actually took place on Sunday, October 29, 2000), no special registration to account for those days was required (2).” The law enforcer in question turned out to be Y. Adaniayev, a 37-year-old police sergeant from the local police precinct in the western administrative district of Moscow, who only a year and a half before was employed as police patrol car driver. Leading the patrol team was A. Evdokimov, a 43-year-old police major. They took the detained Azeri over to the police station, brought him into a briefing room, ordered him to face the wall, and launched an interrogation procedure. As the rookie Y. Adaniayev slugged the Azeri in the kidneys, liver, and legs — all the while trying not to leave any visible traces — the more experienced A. Evdokimov just looked on. Then the policemen filed a report for the detainment that said that R. Gusseynov ‘offered resistance,’ and then they submitted it to their chief. R. Gusseynov was lucky to have been allowed to make a telephone call to a friend who was a reporter. The reporter was quick to respond by getting in touch with the police and threatening to kick up a row over that matter. The law enforcers somehow got scared and let the man go. Following his hazardous ordeal, R. Gusseynov immediately headed for the Nikukino prosecutor’s office. The investigation was duly completed and the case was taken to court. Notably, the was under some pressure from RNE elements who staged rallies at the court building and backed up the local police in various ways. The defendants never pleaded guilty. They just kept saying they had “never touched the Azeri.” They further insisted that they merely carried out an ID check, detained him for a while, filed a report, and let him go. Major Evdokimov was impatient enough to point out that the ‘blacks’ deserve to be treated more roughly. The law enforcer’s racist comments ran as follows: “The blacks do have some nerve. Look, they have filled out the whole of Moscow now. We, honest cops, work like dogs, and they try to prosecute us!” Occasionally the major would use some expletives to fully express his sentiments, which nearly served to get him banned from the room for contempt of of court. Nonetheless, the policemen were eventually found guilty due to the conclusion of experts regarding the injuries on R. Gusseynov’s body, eye witness reports by a few passers-by who saw the Azeri being dragged into a police patrol car, and some other evidence. While Sergeant Adaniayev received a six-month suspended sentence for abusing his position, Major Evdokimov was sentenced to six months of corrective labor (suspended), and 10% of his salary was withheld. Clearly, the judge was too lenient in this case. But even this mild court ruling triggered the audience into yelling: “It’s a shame! Russian judges are friends of the Azeris!” As they left the court building, the convicts were welcomed as national heroes, with the skinheads forming a live corridor originating at the court building’s doors. A. Evdokimov and Y. Adaniayev appeared to be proud of that reception. The skinheads saluted the newly created role-models and shouted “Hail Hitler! Glory to Russia!” (3) Interestingly enough, in the course of the trial one of Major Evdokimov’s colleagues reportedly said that nearly 95% of the Moscow-based police force just hate the “blacks.” He proceeded to comment as follows: They have nothing to be loved for. Local crime has been produced and maintained mostly by the Caucasians. I have known Major Evdokimov for ten years now, and let me tell you: he is a good guy, very respectful, always ready to help you out with money, and he never forgets to pay his debts. Well, we never thought they had anything to do with RNE people. Generally speaking, I am no backer of that movement. This police officer, who refused to identify himself, was very precise about highlighting a current reality — Russian law enforcers do suffer from xenophobia. At the same time, as a rule, they refrain from openly supporting the domestic nationalistic organizations. However, this situation appears unlikely to remain for long. This is particularly evident in light of joint street patrolling by the police and RNE with nationalistic Cossacks noted in some regions of Russia and mentioned in other chapters of this book. (1) For details, see: I. Mandrik, “Afanassy Nikitin’s Descendants Beating Up Indian Guests.” Noviye Izvestia (January 19, ¹8). (2) Å. Moskovkina, “Slug to the Kidneys to Get the Nation Cleaner. “Fair Cops” Saluted with “Hail Hitler!” in a Court Room.” Moskovsky Komsomolets (November 16, 2001, ¹256). (3) Ibid. Back |
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