- starts with a focus on anti-Black words and actions but builds upon this to explore the broader xenophobia and inter-ethnic hostility you're describing.
--- I haven't listened to it because my computer doesn't have audio. However I assume that it wad one by a Brit for a British audience using British terminology and appealing to their worldview, e.g. it starts off with relations with Blacks as if that were cenral to ethnic relations in Russia (there are almost no blacks here).
BTW I haven't followed the story closely but last time I checked was that the fire at People's Friendship University had been traced to a second-story room inside the building, making it unluckly hat it was arson, although those students do get threatened all the time. The people the skins really don't like are Caucasians, but since Caucasians tend to have large groups of people supporting them and have a reputation for going around armed, they target African students and refugees, who are perceived as defenseless. The fire did not kill just African students by the way; there were quite a few Latin American and Asian students slain as well. People's Friendshup University (formerly known as Patrice Lumumba Friendship University) caters to students from the Third World who want to get a good education at low cost.
---
I was particularly fascinated by the statements of several Russians (the Dean of the Moscow college where a suspicious fire claimed the lives of approx. 41 African students, a police officer, etc.) who clearly linked this problem to the deteriorated material and social conditions of the post-Soviet era.
One interviewee (the Dean I believe) even went so far as to blame the elevation of competition - for jobs, social status and so on - as the natural mode of life for these conflicts.
---
Oh yeah. Things are about 100 times worse than they were in the Soviet era. For one thing, there was no competition for jobs in the Soviet era and no immigration lowering the average wage, since the wage was fixed by teh state. Ethnic relations are also fluid; e.g., in the Soviet era, Caucasians were perceived largely as intellectual bohemians, b/c that was how they were portrayed in the media. Today, they are perceived as a threat in the job market and ofte as linked with criminality. Ukrainians are today negatively perceived because TV portrays Russians in western Ukraine as being discriminated agaibnst and because there are so many Ukrainian illegal immigrants in Russia. If you hire a construction team in Moscow, the workers will almost certainly be Ukrainians, Moldovans or Tajiks. Tajik immigrant workers (which are 1/7 of Tajik citizens!) stand alongside the road and wait for someone to stop to hire them to lift boxes or do similar shitwork. In the Far East, say in Buryatia around Lake Baikal, you have Chinese immigrant laborers who work for a fraction of what Buryat or Russian workers will work for.
Russian xenophobia also plays a part. (Africans are targeted not for "racial" reasons but because they are sort of the ultimate foreigner. Actually I personally could be a target if skinheads if they heard my accent.) This is part of the Russian inferiority/messia complex vis-a-vis the outside world that goes back to Peter the Great. In addition, locality is very important in Russian culture -- maybe because of the peasant heritage? -- and outsiders are unwelcome in Moscow. Moscow is prectically a city state, and you need special permission to live there. A common topic of conversation for Muscovites is "those damn provincials and immigrants who come here and take over 'our' city." My girlfriend is an ethnic Russian from Kazakhstan, and she doesn't like to admit to Muscovites where she is from because they will automatically look down on her.
Russian history, as that of a people that spread out over a huge landmass, is in some ways similar to that of the US, but with major differences that had a huge effect on ethnic relations. Get a map of North America showing the ethnic makeup of the continent around 1800. Now, draw an area abut the size of France around Washington (i.e. about the size of Russia during Ivan the Terrible). Now, imagine that, rather than being decimated and then stuck on reservations, those indigenous ethnic groups were conquered or swore fealty to Washington for other reasons, such as to obtain protection from other groups. Now, instead of California, Georgia, etc., you have Cherokeestan, Apachhia, and the Hopi Autonomous Distict. (Now, look at a map of Russia, which is 2.5 times as large as the continental US.) This is the ethnic situation in Russia. There are lerge Russian administrative districts in which ethnic Russians are a minority -- Dagestan, Tatarstan and Bashkiria at least, possibly more. Further imagine that the Americans never imported slaves, because they already had their own, hence no need for development of a racist ideology. That is modern Russia.