Russia Responds to Anti-Migrant Riots by Arresting Migrants

There was no easy way for the mayor of Moscow to respond to this weekend’s race riots. On Sunday night, a violent mob clashed with police in the south of the city, hurling bottles, destroying property and screaming for a purge of minorities from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Their leaders claimed it was revenge for the unsolved murder last week of a Russian man at the hands of a dark-skinned migrant worker. But while Mayor Sergei Sobyanin was quick to condemn the tactics of the mob, he found it hard to distance himself from its logic. Just this summer, during the city’s mayoral race, Sobyanin was the one who brought xenophobia into the political mainstream. Now he was forced to reap what he’d sown.

So his reaction to the violence, bizarre as it seems, was understandable on Monday morning, when he briefed President Vladimir Putin on the incident. Instead of pledging to rebuild or at least protect the vegetable warehouse that the racist mob had ransacked, Sobyanin ordered it to close down for using migrant labor. And, instead of trying to calm the immigrants who were the targets of the violence, he ordered raids on street markets to arrest more than a thousand migrants at random. “We are carrying out a series of inspections not only at the [damaged] warehouse but other markets in Moscow in order to establish order,” the mayor told Putin. Almost as an afterthought, he mentioned that police had arrested the organizers of the riot and charged them with “hooliganism.”

>>>The article suggests that they are former Soviet citizens, now migrants, from several of the now independent Soviet Republics.

It is a little known fact that part of the reason the Soviet Union collapsed was the ethnic stresses between the Russians and the outlaying Republics.<<<

A little dirty secret of the Soviet collapse is that Russia was a source of food stamps and other aid to a majority savage population of the rest of the Soviet Union and about a half of the third world.
“Migrants” from Russia also provided labor and enterprise in most of these hellholes.
As soon as socialism has crippled them too much they couldn’t afford to feed so many ethnic freeloaders but those refused to understand and developed a theory of “Russian occupants” looting their nations. It made some sort of sense in Eastern Europe (thus East Germany and some other places were still a 100% Russian supported welfare states) but was a total nonsense in Central Asia, elevated from the 7th century by the Soviets. Saudis were there to push their propaganda and soon Muslims who lost their free money turned to loot property of Russians living there, to rape and kill them.
Needless to say, Russians went to Russia, and Stans returned back to a 7th century after the last Russian leaving has turned the light off.

Russia, Estonia and to some degree a tolerant Kazakhstan were a few winners of a Soviet collapse. The rest are crawling over the border in hopes to collect some sort of free or easy money from their former “occupants”. And it’s no surprise that these former “occupants” who once lost everything don’t want them there.

There are certain analogy with a present United States to draw but the problem is savages and freeloaders aren’t somewhere on the edges of the country but within.

Good analysis and explanation. I was fortunate to stand a classified briefing predicting the dissolution of the Soviet Union, among other things, a few years ahead of the event. Around the same time, my uncle, the Colonel, came to my Grandmother’s house wearing a Soviet Army fur hat with the Red Star. As a younger enlisted airman, I was shocked. He told me they were selling them on the street in Berlin and he bought it as a trophy for winning the Cold War. Sure enough, a few years later it unfolded on TV.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.