People's Friendship University

I started my new job at The Moscow Times yesterday: good bye copy desk, hello City Wise, a lifestyle-type pullout. My first piece is a vox pop featuring foreign -- meaning dark-skinned -- students at Moscow's People's Friendship University, which since Soviet times has hosted students from poor, non-U.S.-aligned countries like Angola, China, Vietnam, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Ivory Coast. Skin color matters because there has been a slew of murders of African, Indian and South American students in recent months. A creeping, insidious racism lies just below the surface here, and it was reported Friday that Putin, usually so good at letting underlings make the ugly comments on NGOs and immigration for him, had called for the "ethnic hue" at neighborhood markets to be squeezed out, referring to workers from the Caucasus and Central Asia.

I hung out by the dormitories in the south of the city, careful to look as conspicuously like a harmless journalist as I could. People are nervous, I was told.

Adu from Cote D’Ivoire pointed to a gash by his lip where he was slashed with a broken bottle. Malaysian girls said they’d had their headscarves pulled off. Ved has been punched in the metro and shoved to the ground in a supermarket.

A woman from Kenya, Gladys, said she was staying in a renovated dorm that was gutted by fire in 2003, killing around 40 foreign students. I read the articles online later: Their building has no fire alarms, two of three emergency exits were locked, and according to some reports, firefighters transported white-skinned students to hospital first. (Read this from The New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/18/international/europe/18MOSC.html?ex=1387170000&en=c8463bdf6126d033&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND).

She once offered an elderly lady a seat on the metro, she said, to be told that the lady wouldn’t sit where a nigger had.

Only after the meetings on Friday, and hearing of Moscow police phoning schools to ask for lists of children with Georgian surnames, presumably for intimidation purposes (a teacher reported it to the press – and said she’d actually complied!), have I begun to reconsider Russia. I see evidence of the nastiness here every day as I leave home, with swastikas spray painted on bins in the park next door, and dripping Nazi SS slogans in black and red on garages.

The country seems as far from democracy as it did during Soviet times, and I can only laugh with other copy editors at the absurdity of the articles we read sometimes, listing the latest measure to ensure the authoritarian grip of Putin’s party on power.