To Russia With Hate—Mass Immigration is Destroying Russia, Too

[James Fulford writes: Not every crime listed below has hyperlinks and citations I usually add. The source for most of them is a book called Non-Tajik Girls. Non-Chechen Boys (which can be read online, supposing you read Russian)by unimpeachably mainstream Russian journalist Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich,of Isvestia, who notes himself that many of these crimes aren't even widely reported in Russia, let alone in the international English news. By comparison, the "the murder of a Tajik girl and an attack on the teenage son of a Chechen singer" were easy to find. Internationally famous, in fact.]

Recent events have shown that Russia too is being torn apart by the effects of mass immigration—and this uncontrolled influx is jeopardizing Russia's chances for social and economic renewal.

In December 2010, a group of Muslim immigrants from the North Caucasus region murdered young Russian engineer Yegor Sviridov.  Sviridov could have been quickly forgotten, like countless victims of other such attacks. However, he was a dedicated member of the Moscow professional soccer team Spartak's fan club. Tens of thousands of Spartak fans across Russia held memorial events. One of them culminated into an ugly brawl with riot police in the center of Moscow followed by a trashing of a subway station and attacks on people who did not look Slavic.

In late January of this year, a suicide bomber from the Muslim North Caucasus detonated himself in the crowded arrivals area of Moscow's Domodedovo airport. At the time of writing, 35 people have died. This was the latest in a series of suicide attacks by Islamic terrorists from the North Caucasus, who have waged jihad since the early 1990s aiming to establish an Islamic caliphate in that region. (It includes Chechnya, Dagestan, and other similarly volatile republics, but is still part of the Russian Federation). The fact that thousands of Chechens and other North Caucasus immigrants live in Moscow makes it possible for the terrorists to easily obtain material support and allows them to blend into the Chechen diaspora in Moscow.

Almost all of the immigrants into Russia come from what Russians call the "near abroad" – the former Soviet Republics that broke away when the U.S.S.R collapsed. Most of the "migrants", as they are known in Russia, are natives of the independent Muslim republics of Central Asia—Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. But others come from the Muslim North Caucasus (just as Puerto Rico produces Hispanic immigrants although it is legally affiliated with the U.S.).There is also significant influx from the now-independent mostly Christian republics of Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia. In addition, there are thousands of foreign students from Arab and African countries who come to Russia for a cheap and high quality college education, a carryover from the Soviet era, when it was easier for a Syrian or a Cuban to get a college degree in the USSR than a native-born Soviet citizen. A large number of these students end up staying in Russia, oftentimes marrying Russian women.

In 2007, Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich, a leading journalist at the mainstream Izvestia newspaper, wrote an explosive book about the deleterious impact of mass immigration on Russian society, especially the disproportionate crime rate of the "migrants" and their ethnically-based attacks on Russians. The book's provocative title, Ne Tadjikskie Devochki , Ne Chechenskie Malchiki – Non-Tajik Girls. Non-Chechen Boys,[Read online] refers to the fact that while attacks on non-Russian immigrants by Russians such as the murder of a Tajik girl and an attack on the teenage son of a Chechen singer result in the media's attention and condemnation while the much more numerous attacks by the migrants against Russians receive little attention in Russia and none abroad.

This of course should come as no surprise to VDARE.com readers. After all, the Main Stream Media is committed to the myth of the innocent immigrant who is making an essential contribution, and must be protected from those evil and intolerant people whose country he blesses with his presence.

I have not been able to find a single article in the Western MainStream Media about attacks by migrants against Russians. But I read dozens of accounts of migrants and foreign students being attacked by Russians (usually characterized as "skinheads").

Sokolov-Mitrich's book reads like a Russian version of Michelle Malkin's Invasion  or Thilo Sarrazin's Germany Abolishes Itself, with its brutally honest exposure of the ill effects of mass immigration. The author starts off with several statistics. In 2005, 121 rape cases were filed in Moscow courts. In 79 (65%) of the cases, the suspects are illegal immigrants from other former Soviet republics. Similarly, 65% of Moscow region's vori-v-zakone (criminal bosses akin to the heads of Mafia families) hail from the Caucasus region.

The cases include murders, rapes, and beatings. A listing of some examples shows how mass immigration is tearing Russia apart:

• On New Year's night of 2005, migrants from the North Caucasus stabbed to death a Russian Olympic gold medalist, the track cyclist Dmitri Nelyubin, in St. Petersburg. He went outside with a group of friends to set off fireworks and was accosted by the killers (who came to St. Petersburg to attend medical school).[VDARE.com note: If that sounds different from the kind of immigrant who stabs people to death  in the US, it is. These are Caucasian Muslim immigrants—stupidity is not the problem here. Compare the various Muslim doctors who are terrorists in the West.] When they were arrested years later, in their native republics whence they fled right after the murder, one of them told police that he stabbed the victim simply because he "looked like a skinhead". Nelyubin left behind a two-month old son.[Four suspects arrested in killing of former Olympic cyclist, AP, December 8, 2008, "Ubiystvo chempiona peredano v sud". gazeta.ru, May 8, 2005.(Google Translate).]

• In 2002, a gang of gypsies—"Roma" in PC-speak, the European Union's favorite oppressed minority—was arrested for killing and robbing elderly villagers in the Rostov region. The criminals used gypsy women with children to scout out their victims by going house to house and asking for charity. The men then broke into the houses and tortured the elderly inhabitants to force them to disclose where they kept their savings. One elderly woman was burned with an iron and later died and another was beaten to death with a fireplace poker.

Of course you won't see this kind of news in MSM sob stories about gypsies in Europe.

• In 2004, an Azeri immigrant (Azeris are from Azerbaijan) was arrested for robbing women at the train station in the central Russian city of Kostroma. Three of the victims were bludgeoned to death with a metal rod. Another Azeri immigrant was charged with assisting the killer but fled the city before he could be apprehended.

• An especially grotesque crime took place in the city of Vladivostok. Chechen immigrant Ahmed Hadisov ("hadis" is the Chechen equivalent of the Koranic "hadith") was a successful local businessman. He owned a café, a movie theater, and several car service companies. Ahmed drove a Japanese SUV and bought one for his young Russian girlfriend Tanya. But even though he took her out to restaurants and showered her with gifts, Hadisov refused to marry Tanya and forced her to have two abortions because his Chechen family would not accept her. When she refused to abort their third child after the doctors warned her she would be infertile (abortion-caused infertility is a major cause of Russia's demographic collapse), Hadisov's sister repeatedly warned Tanya not to give birth or otherwise, Ahmed's family would abduct the baby and take it to Chechnya. The local police did nothing when Tanya's complained about the Chechens' threatening behavior. Ahmed then hired a local thug to kill her and their unborn baby. Tanya was stabbed in the abdomen but survived. The baby died a day later because of the mother's blood loss. Before receiving just seven years for the crime, Ahmed Hadisov flew back home and brought back a Chechen bride approved by his family.

• A quiet village in Russia's Tver region was the scene of a horrific crime reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Six Muscovites (four adults and two children) were found hacked to death with an axe in a car parked outside their vacation home in the village. The Raskolnikov copycat turned out to be the house's caretaker, a twenty-year illegal immigrant from Uzbekistan who quickly confessed to the crime. As the case with other such crimes, this outrage was only reported in the local news.

• As also was the attack by three Azeris on a Russian Orthodox priest in Moscow. Father Aleksandr Arsenyev was on the way to the grocery store in his cassock when he was accosted and severely beaten by the Azeris one whom yelled "I'm an Azeri! I'm a Muslim!"

• Years later, in late 2009, Father Daniil Sysoyev was shot to death inside his church, the Church of the Apostle Foma (Thomas) in Moscow. The son of a Russian father who was also a priest and a Tatar mother who converted from Islam, Fr. Sysoyev was dedicated to spreading Christianity among Muslim immigrants to Moscow and warned Russian women against intermarriage with Muslims. He received numerous death threats as well as criticism both from Russian Islamic leaders and pro-Muslim Russian Orthodox clergy.

• In an incident that could be best characterized as a terrorist attack, in January 2006 a young Chechen stabbed five security guards in a Moscow shopping mall while yelling "Russian pigs!" This attack, which was (surprise!) barely reported in the Russian media and totally ignored abroad is reminiscent of Elias Abuelazam's serial stabbing attacks in the U.S. and the dozens of stabbing attacks by Palestinians in Israel.

• In St. Petersburg, a Russian college student was severely beaten by a group of Egyptian students after he tried to prevent them from abducting a young girl outside a café.

• In Moscow, three Nigerians were arrested for the rape of a local woman.

• Also in Moscow, a thirty-nine year old Lebanese was arrested for a series of rapes in the lobbies of apartment buildings. Two of the victims were underage.

The response of the Russian government was typically inadequate, even though the acute nature of the crisis became evident after last December's riots. As Wayne Allensworth writes in the latest issue of Chronicles, [Russian Migrants, February 2011]. US Vladimir Putin "reserved his harshest criticism" for critics of the government, not the real culprits.

This misdirected anger is symptomatic of many Russian nationalists' response to Islam. Instead of recognizing and confronting the jihadist and mass immigration threat, they view Islam as a religion indigenous to Russia. They are actually more sympathetic to Muslims than to Catholics and Protestants. Allensworth correctly points out "many Russians loathe and envy the West (especially the United States) more than they fear Islam". For these Russians, Islam represents a healthy, noble, and traditional society that they favorably compare to the declining West and the demographically unraveling Russia.

To be sure, the Muslim societies of North Caucasus and Central Asia are indeed virtually devoid of abortion, substance abuse, elder neglect, out-of-wedlock births, and other social pathologies of Russian and Western societies. But Russians could learn from those societies without letting its members swamp Russian cities, thereby creating violent tension and contributing to crime and corruption.

The other roadblock in the way of effective management of Russia's mass immigration problem: the rampant corruption and demoralization of the Russian police. Often, the immigrants either bribe or beat the local police into submission. In 2002, about 500 Vietnamese illegals rioted for days in a central Moscow market, after the police's more stringent measures against counterfeit goods. [Moscow's Vietnamese vendors protest against confiscation of their counterfeit wares Pravda, October 8, 2002]In the Siberian city of Irkutsk, over a hundred illegals from China rioted and threw stones at police after a cop dared to ask one of them for identification. In Moscow, police detectives conducting a drug bust at one of the city's marketplaces (notorious for widespread criminal activity) were beaten and stabbed by a group of fifteen Tajiks who tried to free a Tajik drug dealer arrested in the bust.

Further, the corrupt warlords in charge of Russia's North Caucasus republics have browbeaten the central government into submission on the immigration question. The worst of these chieftains, President Ramazan Kadyrov of Chechnya, is notorious for his arrogant manner towards Moscow. Once, he came to see Putin dressed in a warm-up suit. Another time, he threatened to send in his special forces to the north Russian region of Karelia where mass brawls had broken out between the locals and Chechen immigrants.

Ramazan Kadyrov's older brother Zelimkhan was arrested in 2004 in a hotel in the southern Russian city of Kislovodsk for attempted rape and criminal mischief. Prior to being arrested, he shot at security guards and police. Zelimkhan Kadyrov died from complications of a car accident before the case was brought to trial.

Since Russia's fragile rule in the North Caucasus depends on Kadyrov and his ilk, even Putin is wary of antagonizing them by restricting their subjects' access to Russian cities.

By closing its eyes to the problem of mass immigration, the Russian government is exacerbating the country's economic and social woes. Russia's economic growth will mean nothing if jihadists can enter Russia with impunity, Russian police can be intimidated by gangs of illegal immigrants, and corrupt chieftains can browbeat the central government.

It would greatly benefit Russia if Vladimir Putin's uncompromising defense of the Russian national interest extended to the issue of mass immigration—and he adopted the same tough approach to Ramazan Kadyrov and other "pro-Moscow" warlords that he did to the hapless Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia.

Eugene Girin [email him] immigrated legally from the Republic of Moldova in 1994 at the age of 10. He has been published by VDARE.COM, Front Page Magazine, and currently writes at Alternative Right.