Nikolai Moskovchenko: Moscow globalization – there are more Azerbaijanians in Moscow than in Baku

Deputy of the Moscow City Duma Nikolai Moskovchenko comments on yesterday's disorders in Tsaritsino district of Moscow by answering the questions of our PRAVDA.Ru correspondent. Nikolai, what has happened in Tsaritsino? My words will sound frightful: that is a usual thing – a pogrom, and not the first one during this year. So, while reading in a newspaper Moscow vice-mayor Valeri Shantsev's words that they were not prepared for it and that they did not expected such a thing, I cannot restrain my indignation.

Yes, a year ago, after first pogroms in Moscow outskirts, we tried together to understand what was happening, to draw authorities and people’s attention to the issue. Society seems not to have reacted. While the authorities… Do you remember, after a pogrom in another Moscow district Tushino, the people who had organized this incident were soon released without any obvious consequences. There was even a suspicion that the disorder had been organized not without the authorities’ participation. And today, what is the authorities doing? Anything! The Moscow Duma deputy-chairman is carrying out some hearing about the most important subject for the city – about aerodynamic factors in the city planning policy of the capital. As if we do not have any other problems. And nobody is worried about we do not have any migration policy at all. Today, more Azerbaijans live in Moscow than in Azerbaijan capital, Baku. What do you think, such a demographic mistake could be sustained without consequences?

You are asking me? So I will answer, no, can not. While the fact that whole industries of the Moscow city economy belong to ethnic groups confirms that some policy does exist. Of course, such fault could not be fortuitous. Because people arriving from other republics quite easily register themselves in Moscow, find some temporary flats or even buy them, living there with big “families," without paying any attention to sanitary or social norms. Of course, corruption is the main motive power here. Though, not only bribing some functionaries solves this question. There is a notion well known from ancient times – simony, what means selling posts for money. Posts in some registration offices that have never been prestigious in soviet times are popular now are being sold for pretty good sums, and they are very profitable. Look at the ethnic structure of these institutions and compare it with ethnic structures of the respective districts. Taking into account that this tactic is not an intelligent migration policy.

After the so-called “Leningrad team” of president Putin came, everybody expected some changes, and first of all, on the Moscow level. These are not just bare words about everybody. This spring, a poll was carried out ordered by the Moscow Duma, it turned out most of people had cherished big hopes for the president’s people. Unfortunately, the president’s people did not managed really to catch the reins of government. The power still belongs to “local” corruption bosses, some of them in their time have also moved to Moscow using bribes. That should be honestly admitted. Today, you could observe ostentation yourself: in Tverskaya Street, every half an hour, a policeman drivis away cars trying to park. We are supposed to show to the whole world order is kept better in Moscow than in Genoa and Seattle. And at the same very time, while the police are diverted to the demonstration, in the Moscow outskirts, in a kind of ghetto for Moscow native citizens, a pogrom takes place with 300 people involved in it. If the Moscow police is so “cool," being able to stop the international pogrom organizers, why then it cannot suppress the local ones? And besides, nobody cannot answer in what virtue cars are being driven away from Moscow center. Do those who are intending to lead us into 21st century possess something besides arbitrary rule? For the time being, nothing can be seen except ostentation and a fight against the wind…

Anatoli Baranov PRAVDA.Ru

Read the original in Russian: http://www.pravda.ru/main/2001/10/31/33240.html