After the Revolution

Spend any amount of time in towns and villages in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, and you will begin to wonder something.

Where are all the young people?

I’m not talking about the children. The children are there.

But many of them live with grandparents or a neighbor. Some live alone. It is fairly normal for them to go years without seeing their older brothers, sisters or one or both parents.

That’s because in order to support their families, many able-bodied citizens must look for work abroad.

In part because many of them speak Russian, many end up in Moscow and St. Petersburg. A science teacher at the school where I worked in Moldova showed me pictures of himself and other teachers working at a construction site together in Russia. Doctors and lawyers find it more lucrative to do manual labor abroad than to work in their chosen profession at home.

The situation is hard on families, marriages and children. And recently for Kyrgyz workers in Russia, it has been deadly.

Ten Kyrgyz workers have been murdered in Russia so far this year, two of them last week, according to an article from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. A Reuters article from the St. Petersburg Times had the number at eight, but agreed that a trend has developed in the killing of immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus.

The Kyrgyz parliament passed a resolution on Feb. 22 asking Russian lawmakers to recognize that racially motivated murders of Kyrgyz nationals have become a significant problem in Russia.

The issue isn’t new. Russia’s commitment to stopping hate crimes has been questioned in the past.

According to the RFE/RL article, “Human rights groups have consistently criticized Russian prosecutors for filing many racially motivated attacks as ‘hooliganism,’ a charge which carries lighter sentences.”

That was the case in March 2006, when murder charges were dropped against a group of Russian teenagers who attacked and killed a 9-year-old Tajik girl in St. Petersburg.

Here’s the background from RFE/RL:

In February 2004, [Yunus] Sultonov, an immigrant worker from Tajikistan, his daughter Khursheva, and his 11-year-old nephew were attacked in St. Petersburg by a group of teenagers armed with baseball bats, chains, and knives.

Khursheva bled to death after being stabbed 11 times. Sultonov was badly beaten but survived, and his nephew managed to escape.
 
Roman Kazakov, who was 14 at the time of the attack and is considered a leader of the group, was handed the heaviest sentence — 5 1/2 years. Kazakov had initially been charged with racially motivated murder, but the jury reduced this charge to hooliganism, citing lack of evidence.
 
The six others defendants received prison terms ranging from 1 1/2 to three years. 

According to the article, “St. Petersburg prosecutors report that 23 people died in racially motivated attacks in 2004, and 34 in 2005. According to police estimates, there are some 20,000 skinheads in the St. Petersburg region alone.”