6/21/19
Dmitry, his wife, their five children and his elderly mother spent last weekend hiding in the woods just outside Penza, a city 650 kilometers southeast of Moscow. Whenever they needed food or water, Dmitry drove to the nearest store, bought rations and, after briefly charging his phone, hurried back to his family. “I didn’t sleep the entire time. We wore the same clothes we left in, and I now have 500 rubles ($7.81) left in my pocket,” Dmitry, 35, said by phone on Wednesday afternoon from the neighboring region of Ulyanovsk, where the family is now staying with relatives. “I won’t take my family home until there is no longer a threat to our lives,” he added, noting he had thought the danger would subside sooner. “But all I want to do is go home.” The case is the latest in a recent spate of ethnic flare-ups across Russia that witnesses have compared to anti-Jewish pogroms at the turn of the twentieth century. This is the second time since the eve of Vladimir Putin’s inauguration last May as Russia's president for a fourth term that violence has broken out between ethnic Russians and Russia’s Roma minority. And it’s the second time this year that a huge public fight has erupted over accusations a member of a minority group has sexually harassed a member of the local majority.
In the conflict’s aftermath, the Chemodamovka and Lopatka Roma people left behind 90 empty homes, along with contradicting claims as to how they departed. Speaking to a local gathering on Monday, the Russian head of the village council Sergei Fadeyev said that about 900 Roma people had been removed forcibly and taken by bus to the Volgograd region to the south. He retracted those comments a few hours later. The Penza governor’s spokesperson said an estimated 650 Roma had left voluntarily. Dmitry called Fadeyev’s initial comments “lies,” saying that the Roma had fled rather than having been escorted out by the authorities. “The Russians warned one of our elders on Friday that they would come back that evening and kill all of our men. In that way we were forced to leave.” Last year, the independent Levada Center pollster found that xenophobia in Russia was growing, and that the largest portion of it was directed toward the Roma. Of those polled, 43 percent said they wouldn’t let Roma people into the country. “We have real apartheid with Roma people in Russian schools,” Roma expert Abramenko said. “Because of this, parents take kids out of school early, thinking, ‘What’s the point?’ So the kids are handed the traditional Roma fate — early pregnancies and poverty. This cycle needs to be broken, but the authorities don’t care and deal with the problem in the language of repression.” “The one thousand Russian people that came out, they weren’t just tired of Roma people, they were tired of a lot of things,” Kireyev said. “Life today isn’t easy and I think this conflict is like the pre-revolutionary pogroms when people attacked Jews in the same way. I think people are angry and have found a minority to blame.” “But will their lives get better? Will they be happier? Will they have more jobs?” Kireyev added. “No.”
