[lbo-talk] Black in the USSR

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue Jun 17 08:58:21 PDT 2003


Chris:
>
> African students at Patrice Lumumba University, were
> assaulted during the
> Brezhnev era.
> ---
> A few people may have been assaulted, but I doubt seriously
> that they were
> beseiged by crowds of quasi-Nazi thugs.
>

I have to say that racist attitudes toward foreign students, especially Blacks and Arabs, were quite common in Eastern Europe, even during state socialist times. However, most of this was a "sour grapes" thing - as foreign exchange student usually had better luck with local women and generally had hard currency which was highly valued in EE. Moreover, most of it was just "locker room talk" - and the actual assaults, verbal or physical, were rare as far as I can tell.

OTOH, hooliganism was always a problem in EE, especially in small town and the country side. Groups of hoolingans would attack anyone seen as easy target, students, out-of-area visitors, passer-bys. The problem was particularly bad in the 1950s and early 1960s due to a large scale migration from the countryside to the cities. Blaming Soviet policies for recent wave of hooliganism is pure govno (bullshit) - there is plenty of literature in criminology linking violent crime to the disintegration of social cohesion, which was plentiful in EE during 1950s and 1960s (migration) and resurfaced there during the transition to a "democracy".

Wojtek



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