A report from Sergey Sokolov in Russia
The special military operation in Ukraine has forced our regime to play with Russian nationalism. Failures at the front, when it fails to defeat the armed “external enemy”, have caused a witch hunt and a search for defenceless “enemies” inside the country. The authorities have declared public figures foreign agents, issued widespread arrests and fines for falsehoods and “discrediting the army”, and conducted a vile media campaign to harass migrants.
Every local administration has a network of district internet media outlets, where bots and trolls support every decision of the local authorities, for example, when Muscovites fume when the city authority re-paves perfectly good roads in order to provide juicy contracts to the mayor’s friends and about the inconvenience and fraud that such roadworks involve. These networks also promote the candidates of United Russia, the ruling party, at elections. But every month these same networks also fan a campaign of hatred against newcomers and support the authorities.
A typical publication in the group “Podslushano Chertanovo” (“Overheard Chertanovo”) – local news resource in the south of Moscow claimed that crimes by migrants are allegedly on the rise (see image).
Misconceptions
The main argument of the nationalists is the allegedly high crime rate among newcomers. This misconception is based only on loud headlines in social media, where they write only about crimes involving non-Russians. Here is a comment under the earlier mentioned post, where a local resident disputes the veracity and honesty of the publication (see image).
Let us, as the commentator points out, turn to the statistics. And as we can see, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the number of crimes committed by foreigners is not only merely 4%, but is also falling!
by ‘foreigner’s falling
Nor should we trust the statements of the head of the Investigative Committee, Bastrykin. This is not the first time he has made nationalist statements; Novaya Gazeta quoted his statements about “Asians and Tajiks” earlier. Bastrykin also reopened the Kirovles case against Alexei Navalny (regarded as an extremist). He is an absolutely political figure. To show his professional competence, let us quote a passage from a recent publication:
“At the same time, the head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation emphasised that the real crime rate among foreign citizens is much higher than the official figures.” –
How can the head of the IC know this, if all crimes are registered and recorded in statistics?
However, in a more detailed interview for Interfax, where it is necessary not just to throw slogans but to answer questions thoroughly, Bastrykin was forced to point out: “In general, crimes committed by migrants do not have any specific features. Among the factors that provoke a newcomer to unlawful behaviour are inability to adapt, being away from their family for a long time, domestic insecurity, financial difficulties and, as a consequence, social insecurity.”
Unskilled and badly paid
Further, the cause of crime by migrants was also indicated: “One of the circumstances contributing to the commission of crimes by migrant workers is their low standard of living due to their involvement in unskilled and badly paid labour, often without formal terms and conditions, especially in the case of illegal migrants who are paid much less than originally agreed upon for work.”
Thus, crime among migrants is not caused by specific cultural and ethnic problems, but only by the desire of capitalists to use cheap disenfranchised workers’ labour. Almost every migrant wants to work legally, with a full set of necessary documents and a clear labour contract, but the government and business do not allow this to happen.
Paying lip service to the desire for profit as the source of the problems, law enforcement agencies put pressure on newcomers, depriving them of their labour rights and harassing local residents. Bots and “activists” from pro-governmental structures attack migrants on the Internet and also protect the authorities from the criticism of nationalists that they allow too many migrants to come to Russia.
The same kind of harassment is being stirred up in Novosibirsk, with posters appearing on the streets of the city, urging people to leave: (see image below)
Nationalist fantasy
urging migrants to leave
National discord grows out of the structure of Russia’s capitalist economy. Due to low living standards and high housing prices, the country is facing a demographic crisis and labour shortage. There is thus a need for an influx of labour from abroad. Therefore, all the statements of nationalists about getting rid of newcomers are merely a fantasy that will never come true.
The Russian economy does not create a great need for highly skilled labour. New enterprises appear very rarely. Due to this, those workers from Central Asia and Caucasus do not integrate in society and receive a profession. They are thrown out on its outskirts on low-skilled and poorly paid work. In Soviet times, however, Russians themselves travelled to the outskirts to set up large enterprises, and people from the outskirts moved to Russia, becoming engineers, doctors, and teachers.
Bitterness
The problems of migrants are the problems of the poorest workers. The poorer the social group, the higher its domestic violence, drug addiction, alcoholism, crime and other social problems. It is not surprising that when a person is cheated on wages, cheated on working conditions, cheated on paperwork, cheated on housing – all this can lead to great bitterness and the wrong but easy path of crime
The police are only adding fuel to the fire. Bastrykin complains that attacks on police officers by migrants are becoming more frequent. But what was the reason? For example, in Moscow, in ’22, a police detachment was placed at every metro station to check the documents of every migrant, and in a number of other major cities as well. Before that, all migrants not working under an employment contract but under a state employment contract were removed from the database, as well as those who lived in illegally registered hostels which were organised by Russian rentiers with the participation of high-ranking officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, as Bastrykin also mentioned in his interview with Interfax.
Every migrant who had problems with documents artificially created by the authorities was fined, expelled or forced to pay a bribe of about 5,000 rubles, the standard rate demanded by the police. Of course, fear and disenfranchisement in front of the police caused outbursts of anger and violence. Every such migrant has statistically become a criminal. There was also a police raid on a mosque in Dzerzhinsk, near Moscow, during namaz (prayer-time). No wonder it incited national discord.
Workers’ unity
In order to eliminate the social ghetto which migrants now find themselves in, it is necessary to fight not migrant crime, but crime against migrants in the first place.
- simplify registration
- ensure control over businesses that hire migrant workers so that they do not violate the Labour Code
- ban self-employment and outsourcing instead of providing proper employment contracts
- nationalise the construction business in major cities, which not only violates the rights of its workers but also causes a lot of inconvenience to local residents by lobbying for deforestation and destruction of parks
A recent strike of couriers organised by the RPRiU trade union last December provided a positive example of the way forward when Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Russians all went on strike in a united front against the conditions of Yandex Food.
The task of communists and labour activists is to defend the rights of migrants and to build solidarity between migrant and local workers, regardless of nationality, religion or anything else!
