Hate crimes in Russia: Citizens of former Soviet republics fear Russia’s streets. Part 1

Naziq Eygesheva is slight at only 58 centimeters with a scratch across her nose. She’s sitting in the thick of a large armchair staring at me frighteningly. There’s another scar on her temple, 6 more on her hands and one more on her left breast. The doctors say she was lucky. The knife got stuck in her jacket and missed her heart by half a centimeter. Naziq is a 20-year-old Kyrgyz girl who was attacked by skinheads in Moscow.

Naziq lived in Russia’s capital for nearly a year. Her dream was to enroll in the Medical Academy. Naziq says she didn’t used to be afraid of living in Moscow. She thought skinheads only attacked foreigners who didn’t speak Russian, or dressed like villagers. In fact, she felt right at home. Naziq had graduated from a Russian school in Bishkek with perfect grades and could recite Akhmatova and Tsetaev by heart. Her mother, Pazilat Nasibova, was a Russian citizen and gynecologist with a 30-year history in the profession. Pazilat had always told her daughter: “We need to learn from the Russians! How they walk, dress, study and live. You can only expect kindness from them!”

Naziq knew something awful was going to happen on that fateful day in late January 2008, although she had never been the victim of an ethnic conflict before. She stood inside the entrance of the Kitay-Gorod metro station and waited. She desperately didn’t want to walk home alone. Naziq sent text messages to all her friends, asking if they could escort her home. Everyone was busy except Marat Akmatov. He probably had a bit of a crush on Naziq, even though they had only met once before. It took them nearly half an hour to make the 7-minute walk home. They talked about how Marat, who was 21, missed his mother who he hadn’t seen in almost a year. He said he planned on visiting her soon.

It was still early evening – around 20:30. All the sudden, a group of skinheads appeared out of nowhere with knives. Naziq fell to the ground almost immediately. Meanwhile, they dragged Marat into the bushes. He had no chance to survive. They cut his throat and stabbed him 62 times. Naziq lay there in the snow, closed her eyes and wondered why this was happening.

“Are you dead yet, bitch?” she heard one of the skinheads say. And the gang disappeared as quietly as they had arrived.

“Not all Russians are like this!” a friend of Naziq’s mother told her in the ambulance, crying and laying her coat beneath the girl’s bloodied body. Naziq would later hear this phrase on numerous occasions – from doctors, patients at the hospital and neighbors. Shortly after the incident, someone put an envelope in her mother’s mailbox with 1,000 rubles and a note reading: “We live in a neighboring building. A policeman came by and asked us if we saw what happened the night when two people were killed near our home. We didn’t see anything, but we’d like to give you our financial support. We were told you are relatives of the deceased.”

“Maybe we weren’t even attacked by Russians,” Naziq said hopefully. Although she wants to believe this is true, I know she asked her relative to hide the kitchen knife before we met as she feared skinheads had hired me to kill her.

“I thought I’d become a doctor, start working and come home when it was still light and nothing would happen. But now they’re even killing during the day! It’s just better to go abroad where there are lots of Asians,” she said. Her mother, who has helped hundreds of Russian women give birth, froze when she heard these words. READ MORE