Ethnic conflicts in Russia become larger and bloodier with every year

Ethnic conflicts have become a common event in present-day Russia. The bloodiest clashes between ethnic Russians and so-called individuals of Caucasian nationalities occur in March-April and August-September. As a rule, such conflicts start with one single murder, which triggers massive pogroms against Russian Caucasians.

Photo: Ethnic conflicts in Russia become larger and bloodier with every year

A young Russian man was killed in a night club in the town of Kletskaya (the Volgograd region of Russia) in August of 2000. His funeral service quickly turned into a mass meeting of local citizens who demanded all Chechens be expelled from the town. The funeral ended with spontaneous arsons of houses where people of Chechen nationality lived.

Cossacks caused serious damage to Chechen property in Russia’s Rostov region in March 2001 after a massive fight in the village of Bogoroditskoye.

About 200 people participated in a pogrom at a Moscow market on April 21, 2001. Ten people suffered various injuries as a result of the attack; most of them were vendors from Azerbaijan.

The next massacre took place on October 30 2001. A crowd of 300 young men wielding metal bars attacked street vendors of Caucasian origin at three markets in Moscow. Four were killed in the attack, over 80 were injured.

Ethnic conflicts continued to intensify in 2002. A massive fight between Russians and Chechens with the participation of about 400 men took place in May of that year in the town of Chastozerye, the Kurgan region. Another conflict took place in the town of Uglich, the Yaroslav region, after Chechens killed a Russian teenager at a local dance party. In the Moscow region, young men attacked several Armenian families and asked the local authorities to clean the town of non-Russians after an elderly Armenian man stabbed a 26-year-old Igor Samolyuk in a bar.

Two massive fights took place in the city of Nalchik in September 2003. The local population fought with Chechen students. Over 50 were injured in the fight of 200-300 people. Everything started with a dispute in a local bus, when several Chechens brutally beat a local Russian resident.

About 200 Cossacks smashed several shops and cafes owned by natives of Armenia in the city of Novorossiisk in March 2005.

The year 2006 marked the crucial point in the history of ethnic conflicts in Russia. About 540 people suffered as a result of ethnic strife and national hostility; 54 of them were killed, official statistics says. National diasporas in Russia have their own information. According to the Migration Service of Tajikistan, 206 natives of the republic were killed in Russia in 2006.

Young nationalists blew up a bomb on Moscow’s largest market on August 21, 2006 killing 13 people. Another large-scale ethnic conflict took place in the town of Kondopoga the Karelia Republic, when local residents attacked Caucasian town-fellows.

Specialists analyzing the recurrence of ethnic clashes in Russia came to conclusion that most of the conflicts occur at the end of summer and in the beginning of autumn.