Racial equality in the People’s Prison

Is there racism in Russia? Russian officialdom denies the existence of such a phenomenon completely! In a philistine, primitive consideration of the problem, it turns out that, on the one hand, there are no Afro-Russians in Russia, so the division by skin color is not striking. And on the other hand – “churki”, “narrow-eyed people” – what kind of words are these? Is it a manifestation of brotherly love and equality? It is true, these contemptuous nicknames cannot be completely identified with racial exclusion, because Russians / Great Russians have such nicknames in store for representatives of other nations – of the same race with them, but of a different culture. They even call their “brothers” Slavs in a similar contemptuous way: “khokhols”, “bulbashi”. Just as lovingly, they call all others, albeit Europeans, but not Great Russians, they name-calling – there are “mamalyzhniki”, and “hachi”, and “rodents”, and “animals”, and yids … For centuries, for example, in the Russian Empire and in the USSR, of which Putin’s Russia is the heir, there was institutionalized state anti-Semitism, when Jews could not get certain professions and freely pursue a career. And many other foreigners were assigned a decorative and representative role in governing the country; in real life, their place was, at best, among the voiceless executors of the decisions of the central Great Russian authorities.

But what can we say, the degree of racist arrogance among the Great Russians is such that even for US Americans, an offensive nickname was found – “pindos”. Well, with the Germans, of course, it came from the war that they began to be called “fritz”. Then it calmed down a little, for a period while it was possible to buy the highest German government officials with their gas and fool the Bundes Republic with “friendship”. Now that it has become fashionable to shout, “We can repeat it!”, It seems to me that some new nickname for the citizens of Deutschland is on the way.

The peculiarity of the Great Russian racial segregation is that it is an integral part of great-power Russian chauvinism, based on arrogant contempt not only for a racially different person, but also for a foreign culture, religion, way of life.

Karl Marx wrote, “Only by treating the man Paul as his own kind, the man Peter begins to treat himself as a man.” The Russians / Great Russians end up exactly with the opposite. After all, not having real constitutional rights, not believing in the possibility of influencing something in his country, changing something according to his will and vision, somehow protecting and defending this vision, a Great Russian can feel like a full-fledged personality only by humiliating someone, denying a foreigner the right to be a man. Well, what if a hard-working Tatar or Caucasian has accumulated material wealth with his labors, created coziness and prosperity around himself, lives in comfort, and a Great Russian from the outback lives in a village without running water and sewerage, heats his house with firewood, while the house itself, inherited from his grandfather with grandmother, is moribund, and in the yard there is grass knee-deep with a well-trodden path to a wooden toilet … So it turns out that some foreigner is now the master of the situation? No, brother, you’re being naughty! I, the Great Russian, am the master of the country! And you will never be equal to me, because you are a “narrow-eyed churka”, a “damn Asian”, you live on the land of Great Russia, where Russians decide everything! For such his position, the Russian / Great Russian will be ready to fight to the death, endure any hardships and restrictions. Take away his “greatness” from the Great Russian – and what will he have left? NOTHING! This Great Russian is complete insignificance without his racist-chauvinistic “greatness”.

Igor Solovey, the head of the Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, says, “Everyone who lived in the countries of the former USSR is well aware of everyday racism in Russia, where people with a different appearance are perceived with prejudice and very often aggressively.”

The racial problems manifest themselves especially brightly and distinctly in the Russian army. The ISW (Institute for the Study of War – the American analytical center founded in 2007 by Kimberly Kagan, headquartered in Washington, DC) analyzed videos posted on social media showing a Russian officer beating a Muslim soldier. This is how they punish people for the fact that the “mobilized person” tried to perform namaz at a certain time. Russian propagandists tried to deny the authenticity of the footage. However, this is not a separate case of violence based on religion or ethnicity. In particular, the ISW mentioned the shooting at the training ground in the Belgorod region on October 15, 2022. Officially, 11 dead soldiers were announced. It is true, the Telegram channels informed about at least 22 killed people. According to the official version, at first it turned out that the “volunteers” were allegedly shot by some “terrorists”. Subsequently, they assured that the shelling was allegedly carried out by “citizens of one of the CIS countries.” Interestingly, the TV propagandists then threw all the blame on guest workers from Tajikistan, who were given Russian passports and illegally mobilized into the Russian army. Probably, the newly mobilized people were humiliated, as it happened very often in the Russian army. Therefore, they could not stand it, having dealt with the offenders. Such an assumption was made by the Russian opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov on the air of Channel 24.

Igor Solovey, mentioned above, also states, “The Russian “friendship of peoples” is an invention and a lie to cover up attempts to create the new empire with its center in Moscow. This should be understood in other parts of the world when they hear the  statements of the Kremlin about friendship and the new “multipolar world” that the Kremlin is building. After all, there is a geopolitical game, and there is reality – the imperial Russian society with the disease of xenophobia. And the Russians will be able to start the process of rethinking their mentality after the defeat of their imperialist war against Ukraine.”