May 06, 2006

Racism in Russia: My Experience

I had was always very sympathetic to charges of racism in my youth. But after I lived in Moscow for a year, I realized that minorities in the U.S. have no idea what the hell they are talking about when they talk about America being a racist country--as if it was somehow unique or worse here than in other parts of the world.

In Moscow, for instance, people who were from Africa or the Caucuses were always stopped by the police. Yes, I used the word always on purpose, because every time I got on the subway the police would be shaking down a person of color.

You never heard the word Chechen without a scowl--but Chechen was used to describe anybody who looked like they were from the Caucuses. Chechens, every one would tell you, ran the mafia.

Africans? Drug dealers. Not all of them, you know because every one had at least one African friend they could vouch for, just most of them.

Lowest on the racial totem pole were the Romani---they gypsies. No one could just say gypsy without using the modifier filthy.

Karol at Alarming News notes that racial tensions seem to be mounting in Russia, but according to this AP report everything was much better under Communism. Of course, what the article fails to mention is that under the Soviet System citizens were required to carry identity cards listing their race.

And "Jew" was a "race" according to the Communists.

Posted by: Rusty at 10:25 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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1 I counted four factual mistakes in your short piece. First, not 'identity cards' but internal passports. Second, under USSR citizens were not required to carry internal passports. Third, there was no such clause like 'race' in these documents. Concerning racial problems - not all muslims terrorist, but all terrorists are muslim. There is nothing strange in 'profiling' you described if you consider that Russia is still in the state of civil war in Northern Caucasia.

Posted by: Mazur at May 06, 2006 07:29 PM (z1yNw)

2 Why is it that racism only exists in "white" countries, but not the rest of the world? A non-white person can go into any white-majority country without fear of violence, but the same can't be said about the obverse; white people who travel to "brown" countries are only about a million times more likely to be raped, robbed, or murdered than a brown person in a white country.
Why is this? Is it because of skin color? Colonialism? Imperialism? No, it's a little thing we call civilization, which exists almost solely in the Western hemisphere and East Asia, to varying degrees from place to place. According to the liberals' unwritten manifesto, Africa should be the safest place on the planet, because there are very few white people there, and those are mostly powerless now, but the facts prove otherwise. For example, no aboriginal sub-Saharan African group has ever produced a civilization in the Western sense, though many did manage to build fairly prosperous cultures, such as the Zulu, who built a society strikingly similar to what the Spartans had over two millenia ago, but that was a socialist military culture, and not real civilization in the Athenian sense.
Now I'm not picking on Africans in particular, because there are even parts of Europe where civilized notions never really took hold, at least not without soldiers from civilized cultures enforcing good behavior at gunpoint; my point is that some people adapt to the customs of civilization better than others, regardless of the reason, and it's nothing but hypocritical to only point out the shortcomings of light-skinned people while totally disregarding the behavior of all others.

Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at May 07, 2006 07:34 AM (0yYS2)

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