After tens of millions of deaths, total control of society, decades of Marxist brotherhood, do we have reversion to E.P.?

Washington Post
December 14, 2008
In Russia, a Grisly Message Marks Rise in Hate Crimes
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service

MOS COW, Dec. 13 — The e-mail that arrived Monday night in the inboxes
of two organizations tracking hate crimes in Russia carried a disturbing
message and an even more disturbing photo — that of a man’s severed
head resting on a wooden chopping block.

“This surprise was prepared for Moscow officials by concerned Russian
people who can no longer tolerate the invasion of foreigners in their
native city,” the message declared, accusing darker-skinned migrant
workers from the Caucasus and Asia of “an unprecedented wave of
criminality that has swamped our capital.”

“If officials continue to populate Russia with foreigners, we will have
to start annihilating officials! Because there is no worse enemy than a
traitor with the authorities who has betrayed his Russian origin,” it
continued. “Officials, if you do not start evicting the blacks, we will
begin taking revenge on you for their crimes! And it will be your turn
to pay with your heads.”

The e-mail was no hoax. Earlier in the day, a street cleaner had found a
man’s head wrapped in a plastic bag on a grassy area outside a
government building in western Moscow. An autopsy confirmed it belonged
to a native of Tajikistan whose decapitated body was discovered last
week in woods south of the city.

The beheading was splashed across the front pages of newspapers Friday.
Although hate crimes, often by young neo-Nazi skinheads, are
increasingly common in Russia, analysts say this is the first racially
motivated killing to be accompanied by a political demand and a public
claim of responsibility.

The e-mail was signed by a group calling itself the Militant
Organization of Russian Nationalists, which neither police nor human
rights groups had heard of previously.

“It’s an outrageous crime and very worrying,” said Natalia Rykova,
executive director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, one of the
groups that received the e-mail. “It shows how cruel and inhuman the
neo-Nazis can be, and that their ideology is becoming more popular.”

Through the first 10 months of the year, Rykova’s group recorded 269
hate crimes in Russia involving the deaths of 114 people, more than
twice as many as last year. Most of the victims were migrant laborers
from the impoverished former Soviet republics of Central Asia, as many
as 10 million of whom work in Russia and are a critical source of cheap
labor in a country with a shrinking native workforce.

Police identified the man who was decapitated as Salahetdin Azizov, 20,
a Tajik migrant employed at a fruit-and-vegetable warehouse. He and
another Tajik worker were walking home Friday night when a group of 10
unidentified men attacked them, police said. Azizov was stabbed six
times before he was beheaded. His co-worker escaped and remains
hospitalized in critical condition.

The Tajik government has lodged a formal protest with the Kremlin over
the case and complained that police are slow to investigate hate crimes
against Tajik citizens, including 80 murders in Russia this year.

Azizov’s head was discovered near a government building in Mozhaisky
District a neighborhood that has been a focus of nationalist outrage
since the Oct. 1 rape and strangulation of a 15-year-old Russian girl
there, allegedly by a city maintenance worker from Uzbekistan.

Nationalist groups have staged angry rallies in the district, demanding
that the government “cleanse” the city of migrant workers, and racist
graffiti has proliferated in the neighborhood. On Nov. 4, the national
People’s Unity Day holiday, a man from Turkmenistan was stabbed to death
in the area, and many fearful migrants in the district have quit jobs
and moved.

Police have questioned the leaders of two nationalist groups about the
decapitation, but they denied any involvement. One of them, Alexander
Belov of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, told the Interfax
news agency that he had never heard of the organization that asserted
responsibility. But he said that government efforts to suppress groups
such as his are causing “an increase in radical tendencies.”

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has condemned racist violence but also
called for new limits on the number of work permits given to migrant
laborers — a position critics say is impractical and inflames
xenophobic sentiment [?]. Last month, a Kremlin-controlled youth group
staged a rally calling on officials to close the borders to migrants so
more jobs would be available for Russians during the economic crisis.

A police spokesman said detectives are examining “various theories” [LOL] in
Azizov’s killing and had “no proof of the suggestion that skinheads
might have been involved.”

But Rykova said the authorities were denying the obvious. She warned
that violence could get worse if the economic crisis intensifies and
politicians continue to use xenophobic rhetoric. “We’re sitting on a
mine that can blow up at any moment,” she said.