Now, the amount of violence, mostly by skinheads, directed against immigrants in European Russia's big cities can be roughly quantified as a hell of a lot. For instance in Yekaterinburg a gang was busted recently that claims to have murdered 37 people. Nice fellows.
Anyway, I heard the interesting assertion recently that this is a repetition on a much greater scale of what happened when Moscow and Leningrad experienced an immigration boom from the provinces 30-40 years ago, followed by the (empirically unsupported) speculation that the people doing the violence are to a large extent the children of that first wave of immigration, meting out what they experienced on a new mave of newcomers. I don't know if this is true -- but can anybody tell me if it matches similar phenomena elsewhere?
PS. here are stats on a group of skinheads arrested in Moscow (taken from the very nice blog Moscow Through Brown Eyes, translating from the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda): http://moscowthroughbrowneyes.blogspot.com/):
"Number of Skinheads Detained in Moscow"
"There are 29 skinheads altogether on this list. Of them, nine are university students, 3 are high school students, 6 attend vocational schools and 11 are unemployed. Twenty-three grew up in families without a father, 6 were from normal, well-off families, and one has a psychiatric record. They have murdered 46 people. The maximum number of injuries to one victim is 91. The average number of injuries per victim is 40."
Mataiotes mataioteton, eipen ho Ekklasiastes, mataiotes mataioteton, ta panta mataiotes.
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