Russian Youth Group With a Mission: Sniffing Out Illegal Migrants
By ANDREW ROTH
MOSCOW — As dusk fell, nine young men gathered on a leafy street in
Chertanova, a bedroom community on the outskirts of Moscow. Their hair
cropped short, some put on surgical masks and thick work gloves. Aleksei
Khudyakov, their leader, issued final instructions like a platoon
leader briefing his soldiers for a raid.
“The dorms where they live are on the other side of the building,” Mr.
Khudyakov, 25, explained as his cadre shuffled with anticipation.
“They” are the latest target of political and popular outrage here:
unregistered immigrant workers, especially those from former Soviet
republics like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. And Mr. Khudyakov’s team
intended to catch them where they slept.
“We’re going to go in,” he told the group, half warning and half
pleading with them to refrain from violence or even foul language, “but
we’re not going to be rude. I don’t want to see aggression.”
They call themselves Moscow Shield, a self-described “rights”
organization that, like dozens of others here, is attracting young men
and women, some out of zeal and others out of boredom, a search for
purpose or a sense of belonging.
The group breaks into cramped basements and other crowded living spaces
identified through anonymous tips from residents, and then tries to hold
immigrants there until the police arrive. In an online tally, Moscow
Shield claims to have “discovered” more than 600 illegal migrants, seven
of whom have been deported, since its creation in March.
Even as Russia has cracked down on many nongovernmental organizations,
especially those perceived to challenge the authority of President
Vladimir V. Putin, loosely organized groups like these appear to be
thriving, particularly those adhering to an increasingly conservative
public agenda.
Like Cossack patrols
in southern Russia or improvised neighborhood watch programs fighting
drug dealers, Moscow Shield has been given unusual latitude by the
police — and at times tacit assistance — as its members sometimes have
pursued aggressive, even illegal, tactics.
The group, like other nationalist and patriotic youth organizations, is
giving auxiliary support to Russia’s on-again, off-again crackdown on
immigrant workers, which intensified last month when the police interned
about 1,500 migrants in an outdoor detention camp.
“They’ve found themselves a safe niche,” Alexander Verkhovsky, the head of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis,
which monitors extremism in Russia, said of the anti-immigrant groups.
Disenchanted with big politics, younger groups have opted for more
direct action in the past two years, he added.
“In the end, it is just fun for them,” he said. “To go in, push people around. They’re young, after all.”
Moscow Shield, the creation of Mr. Khudyakov, a six-year veteran of a
pro-Kremlin youth group called Young Russia, has held more than 50
“raids” — surprise inspections of the basements and street-level
workers’ quarters that house some of Moscow’s estimated two million
illegal migrants.
“They think that we are Nazis,” said Anton Zharkov, 20, a buzz-cut,
blue-eyed university student who takes part in the group’s raids with
his girlfriend. “But we’re not there to beat them or punish them. We are
there to achieve justice.”
Mr. Khudyakov, a graduate of the elite Bauman Moscow State Technical
University, began providing tips on illegal migrant communes to Russia’s
Federal Migration Service as part of Young Russia in 2009.
In 2011, he joined the Youth Anti-Narcotics Spetsnaz, a group that
violently ambushed sellers of a synthetic drug called “spice.” Its
members often came armed with sledgehammers, to smash through front
doors and disable getaway cars, and with crimson spray paint, to color
the hair of their targets as others held them down.
Now, Mr. Khudyakov says he has parted ways with his past groups to work on social causes.
“Yes, we break a few locks because otherwise it is not possible to do
what we do,” Mr. Khudyakov said in an interview. “But we’re ready to pay
the fine for that.”
Critics, like Mr. Verkhovsky, say they are vigilantes.
“They are acting as they believe that Russia’s police should, and that
more or less means that they are taking the law onto themselves,” he
said.
Some other movements have drawn news media attention and investigations
by the police in recent weeks. Occupy Pedophilia, a movement championed
by a prominent nationalist, Maksim Martsinkevich, has violently harassed
and ambushed gay teenagers by luring them into meetings through
VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook.
The group, which claims it focuses on pedophiles, has spread to cities
across Russia, where local affiliates carry out their own attacks, and
then upload the videos to the Internet.
Mr. Martsinkevich, who goes by the nickname Hatchet, spent three years
in prison for inciting ethnic hatred after he staged a mock execution of
a Tajik drug trafficker and uploaded the film to YouTube.
Last month, the police announced that they had raided the homes of
members of Occupy Pedophilia. As a result, Mr. Martsinkevich asked his
followers to keep the violence off-camera.
By contrast, groups like Moscow Shield seem to have found common cause
with the police. In certain districts, members say they have even been
used as support in some large operations.
In one raid last month, five organizations — including Moscow Shield and
two others known as Light Russia and Attack — claimed to have caught
more than a hundred illegal migrants while the police supervised the
operation. Video of the raid showed muscle-bound young people wrestling
migrant workers in the stalls of a market.
A spokesman for the district police said its officers do not hold joint
raids with activists. But organizers for several of the groups said that
about 40 members of law enforcement, including local police and
immigration officers, attended the raid. Photo and video reports
uploaded to social networking sites showed officers and group members
making arrests side by side, and the police marching detainees to buses.
“We create a perimeter; the police check documents,” said Igor
Mangushev, the head of Light Russia, which has been holding raids for
two years and asserts that it has had more than 1,000 migrant workers
deported.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Mangushev said that his group had
cooperated with the police in joint raids in three city districts. Last
month’s operation also served as a training exercise for newer
organizations, he added.
“Moscow Shield came along as sort of master class,” Mr. Mangushev said.
“They have a lot of young people, and they don’t always work properly.”
At the apartment building in Chertanova, the young men of Moscow Shield
did not need to break in; the door was unlocked. The group entered an
apartment with five men inside and beds for 12. A dozen pairs of
slippers lay on the floor. The smell of a plov, a Central Asian rice
dish, wafted through the house.
A resident who gave only his first name, Numon, and his age, 23, said
that the others had locked themselves in a back room when they saw the
intruders.
Mr. Khudyakov’s team called the police. As two officers checked the
men’s documents, Yunus Z. Daminov, 24, one of a dozen men from
Uzbekistan who live in the apartment and carry trash for buildings in
the neighborhood, said it was not the first time that strangers had
broken in. There had been other intrusions, and attacks on the street
outside of the apartment.
“There were two of them, twice my size,” said Mr. Daminov, a
broad-chested man who sat hunched over on a bunk bed as he recalled a
previous episode. “They didn’t say anything. They pointed at me, and
that was that. They started kicking and punching me. I lost
consciousness.”
He did not file a police report, and the attackers were never found, he said.
In the apartment hallway, a police officer approached Mr. Khudyakov and
said that everyone living in the house, Mr. Daminov included, was
registered.
“We understand what you’re doing,” the police officer said to Mr.
Khudyakov. “Have you had any other complaints in the neighborhood?”
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