Ethnic tension concerns temper response in Russia
Moscow relies on migrants for war, economy
At a memorial service this week outside the concert hall where Islamic extremists are suspected of carrying out a deadly terrorist attack, one of Russia’s most popular proKremlin rappers warned “rightwing and far-right groups” that they must not “incite ethnic hatred.”
At a televised meeting about the attack, Russia’s top prosecutor, Igor Krasnov, pledged that his service was paying “special attention” to preventing “interethnic and interfaith conflicts.”
And when President Vladimir Putin made his first comments on the tragedy last weekend, he said he would not allow anyone to “sow the poisonous seeds of hatred, panic and discord in our multiethnic society.”
In the wake of the assault near Moscow that killed 139 people on Friday, there has been a recurring theme in the Kremlin’s response: a fear that the tragedy could spur ethnic strife inside Russia. While Putin and his security chiefs are accusing Ukraine — without evidence — of having helped organize the killing, the fact that the four detained suspects in the attack are from the predominantly Muslim Central Asian country of Tajikistan is stoking anti-migrant rhetoric online.
For Putin, the problem is magnified by the competing priorities of his war in Ukraine. Members of Muslim minority groups make up a significant share of the Russian soldiers fighting and dying. Migrants from Central Asia are providing much of the labor that keeps Russia’s economy running and its military supply chain humming.
But many of the most fervent supporters of Putin’s invasion are Russian nationalists whose popular, pro-war blogs on the Telegram messaging app have brimmed with xenophobia in the days since the attack.
“The borders have to be shut down as much as possible, if not closed,” said one. “The situation now has shown that Russian society is on the brink.”
As a result, the Kremlin is walking a fine line, trying to keep war supporters happy by promising tougher action against migrants while trying to prevent tensions from flaring across society. The potential for violence was highlighted in October, when an antisemitic mob stormed an airport in the predominantly Muslim Russian region of Dagestan to confront a passenger plane arriving from Israel.
“The authorities see this as a very big, serious threat,” Sergey Markov, a pro-Putin political analyst in Moscow and a former Kremlin adviser, said in a phone interview. “That’s why all efforts are being made now to calm down public opinion.”
Caught in the middle are millions of migrant workers and ethnic-minority Russians who are already facing an increase on city streets in the kind of racial profiling that was commonplace even before the attack. Svetlana Gannushkina, a longtime Russian human rights defender, said Tuesday that she was scrambling to try to help a Tajik man who had just been detained because the police “are looking for Tajiks” and “saw a person with such an appearance.”
“They need migrants as cannon fodder” for the Russian army “and as labor,” Gannushkina said in a phone interview from Moscow. “And when they need to fulfill the plan on fighting terrorism, they’ll also focus on this group” of Tajiks, she said.
Nearly 1 million citizens of Tajikistan, which has a population of about 10 million, were registered in Russia as migrant workers last year, according to government statistics. They are among the millions of migrant laborers in Russia from across the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, a driving force in Russia’s economy, from food delivery and construction to factory work.
A manager of a food business in Moscow that employs Tajiks said in an interview that the mood in the Russian capital reminded her of the 2000s, when Muslims from the Caucasus region faced widespread discrimination in the wake of terrorist attacks and the wars in Chechnya. Tajiks in Moscow are so apprehensive they are hardly going outside at all, she said, requesting anonymity because she feared repercussions for speaking to a Western journalist.
“There’s already no supply of labor because of the SVO,” she added, using the common Russian abbreviation for the Kremlin’s “special military operation” against Ukraine. “And now it’ll be even worse.”