An article in the September 19, 2008 edition of the mainstream Moscow newspaper "Vechernyaya Moskva" evokes the Jim Crow South in its portrayal of ethnic minority men as hyper-sexual predators, and advocates confining migrants to defined neighborhoods of Moscow. Entitled "It's Becoming Scary on the Street Because of the Large Number of Gasterbeiters" [German for "guest workers"], the article's author Elena Sidorenko touches on the widespread problem of sexual violence against women in Russia, beginning with a story about how the author herself was nearly assaulted on the street. At the same time, however, Ms. Sidorenko relies exclusively on anecdotal information to prove her thesis that male migrants pose a major threat to Russian women. She presents no statistics, and doesn't even bother mentioning that some ethnic Russian men engage in rape and other forms of sexual violence. Instead, story after story features male migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia going after Russian women. The stories are terrible, but without statistics, there is no way of understanding the scale of the problem.

The article begins with her personal story. Two "dark-skinned" men followed her one night and tried to drag her off, before being scared away by her neighbor. She adds an anecdote about a rape in Moscow earlier this summer, and the experience that a friend of hers had in a provincial city when "some kind of Tajik" harassed her while she was pushing a stroller in the park. "There are hundreds of similar stories in Moscow," she writes, adding that recently raised proposals to confine migrants to defined ares of the city are "debatable, but perhaps not so eccentric after all." Otherwise, she concludes, neo-Nazi violence will worsen. Whether intentionally or not, her story seems likely to inspire rather than prevent further racist violence.

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