In Russia, concern over hate crimes grows

A recent attack by a knife-wielding attacker shouting, "I will kill Jews," is prompting an anxious debate over the rising tide of xenophobic violence in Russia and what to do about it.

The assault in Moscow's downtown Chabad Synagogue, which wounded eight people, was carried out by an alienated young loner, Alexander Koptsev, who police said was heavily under the influence of neo-Nazi books and Internet sites. Russian press reports suggest he had recently played a violent computer game in which a postman goes berserk and attacks everyone in sight. Mr. Koptsev has been charged with attempted murder aimed at "humiliating national or religious groups," a serious crime under Russian law.

It was one of a string of racially motivated attacks that human rights groups say have killed more than 40 people in the past year alone.

Spokespeople for minority groups complain that Russian police often seem reluctant to prosecute probable racist crimes, such as a street assault on two Moscow rabbis earlier this month, and instead classify them as "hooliganism," a term for general disorderliness.

"All too often, crimes of hate get dismissed as hooliganism," says Sol Butingolts, vice president of the Russian Jewish Congress. "People must recognize that incidents like [the synagogue attack] threaten to undermine the basis of Russia as a multiethnic state."

Some experts see Russia's emerging ultra-nationalist fringe, which includes an estimated 50,000 violence-prone skinheads and several neo-Nazi groups, as a predictable - if nasty - growing pain for a society that has been wrenched from its communist-era cocoon and hurled into the conflicting currents of global culture in the past decade and a half. They suggest the solutions lie in better education as well as tougher legislative curbs on fascist literature, Internet hatemongering, and violent computer games.

"In western Europe they brought in [anti-hate] laws after World War II, but we thought our victory over Naziism immunized us from that threat," says Pavel Krasheninnikov, a parliamentary deputy of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party. "We need to work out better laws."

But others speak darkly of "Weimar Russia" and warn that, while skinhead violence grabs headlines, the real danger is a new tone of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia creeping into the mainstream media and official discourse.

"Any authoritarian regime, having suppressed normal political conditions, will find itself in need of internal and external enemies, someone to blame for peoples' misfortunes," says Yevgenia Albats, a political scientist at the state-run Higher School of Economics in Moscow. "This is exactly the position Vladimir Putin is in, having straitjacketed the media, marginalized the opposition, and eliminated elections for regional governors. The search for enemies is on."

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