White Shogun
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The title of the article makes it seem like Russians are turning on the poor. But what is really happening is that they are turning against IMMIGRANTS.
Russians turn on underclass from former Soviet empire
By Helen Womack in Moscow
(Filed: 27/08/2006)
In a gloomy Moscow underpass thousands of miles from her native Kyrgyzstan, a young mother shivers as she tries to hawk pegs, bath sponges and Rubik's Cubes. A few blocks away, a schoolteacher from Moldova sells tomatoes out of a cardboard box and tries to dodge the police, who take half her income in "fines".
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, whose Communist ideology promised a classless society and brotherhood of all races, the ethnic minorities of the former Soviet republics have become Moscow's new underclass: working like slaves, hounded by the police and unloved by the newly wealthy Muscovites whose needs they serve. Now, after last week's deadly blast at the city's Cherkizovsky market, used mostly by traders from Asia and the Causasus, the immigrants and guest workers are also grappling with a new problem: the Russian nationalist extremists who want to kill them.
telegraph.co.uk Edited by: White Shogun
Russians turn on underclass from former Soviet empire
By Helen Womack in Moscow
(Filed: 27/08/2006)
In a gloomy Moscow underpass thousands of miles from her native Kyrgyzstan, a young mother shivers as she tries to hawk pegs, bath sponges and Rubik's Cubes. A few blocks away, a schoolteacher from Moldova sells tomatoes out of a cardboard box and tries to dodge the police, who take half her income in "fines".
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, whose Communist ideology promised a classless society and brotherhood of all races, the ethnic minorities of the former Soviet republics have become Moscow's new underclass: working like slaves, hounded by the police and unloved by the newly wealthy Muscovites whose needs they serve. Now, after last week's deadly blast at the city's Cherkizovsky market, used mostly by traders from Asia and the Causasus, the immigrants and guest workers are also grappling with a new problem: the Russian nationalist extremists who want to kill them.
telegraph.co.uk Edited by: White Shogun