Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Foreigners live in fear of Russian skinheads / Reuters14 Feb 2006

http://digbig.com/4ghed
Oliver Bullough
"A series of random racist murders, and muirders of foreign students in Moscow and elsewhere, have forced the issue into the headlines. Last month, a man shouting 'Heil Hitler' wounded eight people in a knife attack on a Moscow synagogue, and attacks on immigrants are so common that they rarely make the press. President Vladimir Putin has responded by calling racism an 'infection' and ordered police to take steps to crush it. But experts say its roots are deep in demoralised post-Soviet society and will not be easy to pull out. The skinheads, they say, are like a mixture of neo-Nazis and soccer hooligans grafted onto the casual racism that the Soviet Union concealed under its communist rhetoric."