Putin Promotes Russia's Rising Racism

Markets Suffer After Russia Bans Immigrant Vendors

Russia has declared that only its citizens can sell vegetables in the markets, disqualifying many immigrants, like this Georgian woman in Moscow.

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

MOSCOW, April 13 — From a stall inside the Rizhskiy vegetable market, Rustam K. Umarov conducts an illegal trade in oregano, cinnamon sticks, peppercorns, saffron powder and shish kebab marinade.

Under a government decree that took effect April 1, Mr. Umarov, as a citizen of Uzbekistan, has been banned from working as a vendor at any of Russia’s 5,200 markets, which were a mainstay for groceries and household goods through the 1990s and that still account for a fifth of all retail trade here.

It does not matter that he is a legal immigrant. Under the decree, seen as one of the more draconian anti-immigrant measures in Europe, only Russian citizens can sell vegetables. “They are happy to buy my spices, but in the street there is hate for immigrants,” Mr. Umarov said, spooning dried mint leaves into a bag with practiced care.

While Mr. Umarov has kept a low profile and his business running, thousands of immigrant market workers have closed their stalls across Russia.

As a result, only 68 percent of the market stalls in Russia are occupied, according to government figures, while shortages and price increases are becoming acute in some regions. In one market in Chelyabinsk, in the Ural Mountains, prices for nonfood items rose 16 percent, according to the government, which surveyed 14 markets earlier this month. In Moscow, some 10,000 of the estimated 60,000 market stalls were vacant, according to the city government.

Inevitably, shoppers are starting to grumble. “They aren’t selling as many fruits and vegetables,” said Yeva Y. Terekova, a retired teacher shopping for groceries at Syestniye Ryady market in Moscow on a recent afternoon. “Prices went up, too.”

Another pensioner standing nearby, however, offered, “It’s better now without the Azeris in the market.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the vegetable markets came to be dominated by thousands of immigrants, mostly young men and women from the former Soviet states in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Like immigrants everywhere, they came to Russia for work. And as elsewhere, their presence has stirred resentment and demands that the jobs they created be given to natives.

Police teams from the Federal Migration Service have arrived in buses to enforce the new rule, arresting and deporting immigrants in a policy that polls show is popular among Russians. Notices pinned to the door of markets advertise open spaces for Russians, or “farmers from the Fatherland.”

In one poll by the independent Levada Center, 54 percent of Russians supported the statement that “Russia is for Russians,” a phrase the pollsters used to gauge the extent of anti-immigrant feeling. The survey, conducted in December, had a margin of error of 1.7 percent.

“The government is playing with the crowd in a dangerous way,” Lev D. Gudkov, the center’s director, said. “The level of xenophobia is high.” The government decree was intended, ostensibly, to ease ethnic tension after anti-immigrant rioters in the northern Russian town of Kondopoga torched market stalls owned by immigrants last autumn.

The government’s solution was to reserve market stalls for Russian farmers while cracking down on the grocery mafias that, according to popular lore and official statements, control the markets where so many Russians shop for food and household basics daily.

“This will ease tension on the labor market and make it more civilized,” President Vladimir V. Putin said in November, when the law was drafted, in remarks carried by the state news agency, RIA. The decree bans immigrants from trading, but not from jobs as porters or janitors. Critics say that plays into stereotypes of Central Asians and Caucasians as crafty, cheating on the scales or gouging elderly people on the prices.

Critics also say the decree plays into the hands of Russian nationalists who are playing an ever more prominent role in rallies and marches as presidential elections approach next year.

Galina V. Kozhevnikova, a deputy director at SOVA, an organization that monitors hate crimes, said the rule would embolden anti-immigrant groups, suggesting official sanction of their views. SOVA recorded 539 attacks on ethnic minorities in 2006, including 54 racially motivated murders. Russia’s vegetable markets operated on a network of immigrant families — principally Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks and Tajiks in the west and China in the eastern parts of Siberia — with ties to the warmer climates where the produce grows. They were bustling, crowded spaces with the feel of an eastern bazaar, selling everything from hot plates to clothes to persimmons to sides of mutton or whole hog heads. Now, some are half empty, and traders say an era is coming to a close.

Mr. Umarov must speak furtively to clients who ask how to apply his marinades, or ask for a whiff of the fresh ground pepper. At any moment, he said, he could be shut down.

Before the immigrant markets opened, in the mid 1980s, Muscovites might search for days to find fresh produce.

The city’s low regard for immigrants was baldly displayed last winter, when the snow-laden roof of a vegetable market collapsed and crushed 66 people to death, 64 of them immigrants. Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov said the victim’s families would be compensated — but only those living legally in the city, a tiny fraction of the total. The rule took effect in stages, limiting immigrant traders to 40 percent of the total in markets from Jan. 15 through April 1, and now prohibiting them entirely.

At the Dorogomilovsky Market in Moscow, a notice taped to an empty stall advertised, “Help wanted, a Russian citizen trader.” A Central Asian man leaned against a wall nearby, idly cracking sesame seeds in his teeth and spitting the husks onto the sidewalk.

At the meat counter, a young Slavic man awkwardly wielded an ax to hack ribbons of fat from mutton ribs, under the watchful eye of an Azeri butcher. Mostly, the stalls vacated by immigrants remained empty, with few Russians apparently willing to try the menial work.

The share of retail trade taking place in markets, meanwhile, has dropped from 19 percent of the total in January to about 17 percent today, according to German O. Gref, the minister of economic development and trade, who has warned that the decree might spur inflation.

So far, however, price increases have been largely offset by the seasonal drop in prices with the onset of spring, officials say. Mr. Umarov, for one, thinks the government will eventually back down and rescind the decree. “They think that they will take this work from us, that when we leave, they will have this work,” he said. “But they cannot work like us.”

Original article posted here.