Moscow — Every day a familiar scene is played out on the streets of Moscow. Policemen sporting berets, bullet-proof vests and Kalashnikov assault rifles stop a man and ask for his documents. The man, easily recognizable by his dark features and five o'clock shadow as a native of the Caucasus, hands over his red Soviet passport with a shrug and stands silently while the cops look it over.
Depending on his nationality, Chechens are especially out of favor these days, and whether his passport is stamped with a Moscow "propiska" or residence permit, he could be beaten, jailed, deported or simply let go after some minor harassment. Police brutality is a constant threat to the Caucasians living in this metropolis of more than 10 million, including thousands of Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan.
"These things happen very often, and they end very sadly," says Vadim Khatchaturyan, a 28-year-old activist for the approximately 4,000 registered Armenian refugees in Moscow. Usually, Khatchaturyan says, the "representatives of law and order" are bribed 30,000 to 60,000 rubles (six to 22 dollars) to let you go, but can jail you for days.
"If you are allowed to make a phone call, that means one of the policemen is a very decent person," he says. "My brother was beaten because they didn't like his face, and he didn't have any money."
The beating, which happened on the street and included two enthusiastic passersby who joined the police in kicking the Armenian in the face and body, put Khatchaturyan's brother in a hospital. When their mother went to the precinct to complain, the local police chief told her point blank: You can't prove anything, so drop this.
A 1994 report headed by Soviet-era dissident Sergei Kovalev said that in four years of post-communist rule, "human rights have shown no tendency toward improvement" in Russia. Kovalev, President Boris Yeltsin's human rights commissioner who has been criticized for his outspoken criticism of Moscow's war in Chechnya, said the police remained largely unreformed from Soviet times. "Law enforcement is a misnomer for these agencies," Kovalev said after presenting his report. "They have kept the traits of repressive organs."
Now, official calls for human rights usually limit themselves to the protection of Russians, mainly the estimated 25 million ethnic Russians living in the former Soviet republics. Theoretically, anyone can be thrown out of Moscow for not having a residence permit in accordance with old Soviet laws intended to restrict access to large cities, coveted for their wider selection of food and consumer goods and better opportunities for professional and social advancement.
But police never stop ordinary Russians on the street for document checks and searches for illegal residents are limited to hotels or buildings inhabited by Caucasians. "Anyone can be charged with violating the propiska rule, but in our opinion, it is used indiscriminately against people of color," says Erika Dailey of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki, who spent May and June in Moscow documenting cases of discrimination.
According to the human rights organization, Moscow's propiska rule violates international agreements signed by Russia on internal freedom of movement. Considering Russian laws that — again in contradiction to international norms — let police jail suspects up to 30 days without even charging them with a crime, going out on the street becomes a risky venture for many Caucasians, whether or not they are illegal residents.
This combination of police and legal brutality is "literally causing people to restrict their movements because they are afraid of retribution," Dailey says. "Clearly these are racist attacks. Sadly, the laws that are in place are being used to vent that racism,” she says.
"People who are dark-skinned are stopped. Sometimes there seems to be a connection between the darkness of their skin and the number of times they're harassed or the degree to which they're harassed." Africans are as likely to be hassled as Caucasians, Dailey says, while discrimination also extends to Central Asians and Vietnamese.
Under Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow has been called the country's "leader in human rights violations," by Russian activists. Luzhkov used the tumultuous events of October 1993, when troops loyal to President Boris Yeltsin stormed the Parliament building, for a general crackdown on crime in Moscow that included deporting thousands of ordinary Caucasians from the city. Many Muscovites vocally supported the Mayor's decision.
The minority rights situation is so bad that the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination was scheduled to review Russia on an emergency basis.
Caucasians occupy a special place in the Russian psyche as scapegoats and objects of prejudice, and Christian Armenians are seen no different from Muslim Chechens and Azerbaijanis. "They don't distinguish between us, we're all blacks to them," says Khatchaturyan, using a typical Russian derogatory term for Caucasians. "Armenia and Russia are officially the best of allies, but unfortunately that doesn't trickle down to the day-to-day level," he says.
And thanks to the still functioning Soviet passport system, even Armenians with Russian features cannot hide their nationality, although they're less likely to be stopped on the street. In contrast to multiethnic Western countries, Russian passports indicate the citizen's nationality as Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Chechen Georgian, or whatever.
This leftover of what one Western diplomat calls the "goddamn Soviet nationality policy," makes racial discrimination, or favoritism, as easy as opening a document. Russians generally condemn Caucasians as lazy, shiftless, and prone to committing crimes instead of earning an honest living; and simultaneously gripe about their hustle and business sense and how they dominate Moscow produce markets.
Caucasians are also seen as Russia's Sicilians, the source of most of the country's organized crime, although experts say Russia's infamous "Mafiosi" are mainly Russian. Racism against Caucasians can be traced through Russian literature, where they are usually portrayed as backward savages, thieves or simple no-goods. The greatest Russian writers of the 19th century, Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoi, recorded attitudes similar to those of frontier America towards Native Americans.
While in the U.S., bias against American Indians is mainly a thing of the past, many Russians have retained their forefathers' prejudices against the Caucasians. Lately, the war in Chechnya has made a bad situation worse.
All over Russia, both in and out of the separatist region, Russians have pounded on this new "proof" of Chechen "bloodthirstiness" and "inhumanity" to release their own aggressions, often avenging themselves against non- Chechen Caucasians.
Aside from direct violence, being Armenian — and for that matter of Caucasian origin in general — makes life difficult in other fundamental ways, like getting into institutes of higher education or finding jobs, says Khatchaturyan. "Caucasians need not apply," is a common qualifier in the classified ad section for jobs and housing in Moscow newspapers.
For Khatchaturyan, a native Russian speaker from Baku who speaks no Armenian, this is especially painful. "From our upbringing, we were closer to being Russian, but by our looks and passports we're Armenians," he says. "It's very bitter. It is difficult for us in Armenia, and here I'm also a stranger."
Not only a stranger, but one that must face the authorities every November to have his refugee status renewed, or risk losing his only flimsy defense before the law for staying here. "Every year we have a war with the Moscow authorities who want to throw us out," says Khatchaturyan, adding that now having refugee status "unties the police's hands to do whatever they want, and I think that suits the city leadership just fine."
The Moscow authorities have several times proposed moving the refugees to distant towns — pitching the Chernobyl region as an attractive area — some so deep in the hinterland that no city dweller could tolerate them.
Khatchaturyan says he has written letters to each of the towns to confirm Moscow's assurances that basics such as housing and jobs were available there. But without exception, the answers trickled in, basically saying: housing shortages here are worse than in the capital, no jobs either and we don't want you anyway.
If the Moscow authorities do kick them out, the refugees are certain that this will be used to justify the decision by showing that Armenians stubbornly refused all offers to move them from the capital in a civilized way.
"We were naive and thought we'd find justice here. Now we've lost that naivete," says Khatchaturyan, referring back to the lost hopes that accompanied his family's flight from Azerbaijan in 1989. Now, he says, the only answer is to find a home abroad, preferably in America. "The chance we will ever be accepted here is about zero."
