‘Kondopoga’ – Ethnic/Social Tension in Putin’s Russia

The end of Putin’s presidency – or at least what one could regard as the end of his presidency – was marked by several major riots between ethnic Russians and people from the Caucasus of various ethnic and religious backgrounds. ‘Caucasians’ are usually seen as awry by the majority of Russians. Chechens are often singled out as the symbol of all the negative effects that the presence of ‘Caucasians’ and, in fact, all minorities, brings with it: domination of the market, crime, and changes in the demographic/cultural balance of the country. In more general terms, ‘Caucasians,’ especially Chechens, have coalesced in the minds of many Russians as responsible for all the ills of the post-Soviet era and which have continued through Putin’s tenure. There is increasing social as well as regional division. In fact, the gap between prosperous Moscow and a few other big cities and the small towns and cities and rural areas of the Russian heartland continues to be quite wide. All of this social and social/regional tension has manifested itself not so much in social/class animus, as was the case at the beginning of the 20th century, but in increasing ethnic tension. This has led to several major ethnic riots in the last years of Putin’s tenure, with those in Kondopoga, a small city in Karelia in the northern part of European Russia, as the best known. These riots, in which hundreds of people were involved, left several dead, and many injured. They received much coverage in the Russian press and stuck in the mind of the public as few events in recent Russian history have done. While, in themselves, the Kondopoga events have not led to any major upheaval, their occurrence indicates the serious tension in Russian society, which plays an important role in the case of major crises. The Kondopoga violence also indicates that Russia has the same problems as most countries of the West, which recently have experienced changes in demographic and social/cultural composition due to waves of immigrants, mostly from non-European countries.