COLUMN ONE : In Russia, Fertile Soil for Racism : Harassment of people from the Caucasus region has intensified with the Chechnya war. Dark hair and eyes invite suspicion, perhaps detention, by Moscow police. Few seem alarmed at the abuses.

Shock troops stormed into a Moscow marketplace last month, rounded up all the dark-skinned males and herded them onto a bus, using rubber truncheons to silence anyone who complained.

In a raid-and-plunder operation that has now become a routine part of Russia’s purported war on organized crime, the despised riot police tossed the produce peddlers onto the floor of the bus. They piled one person on top of another “like sacks,” said Fazil Rustamov, 21, who like most of the vendors comes from the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

The officers searched every merchant, checking the registration papers that non-Muscovites are now required to carry and cleaning out all the cash in their pockets, Rustamov said.

When the merchants were released and returned to their stalls at Dorogomilovskaya market, they discovered that all of their fruit and vegetables had been carted away.

The police gave no explanation, and none was required. Longstanding harassment of people from the roiling Caucasus Mountains region, the southern underbelly of the former Soviet Union, has intensified since Russia began its war to subdue the separatist republic of Chechnya.

“Russians now hate the Caucasians,” Rustamov said. “And not just Caucasians--any other nationality, as long as your hair is black.”

President Boris N. Yeltsin has said that all of Russia’s problems are reflected in the Chechnya crisis “as in a droplet of water.”

War has certainly magnified racial hostility. It has become fashionable to compare today’s Russia, with its feeble democracy, sickly economy and profound sense of insecurity, to Germany on the eve of Hitler’s rise. Yet few seem alarmed by another striking similarity: the stereotyping, scapegoating and harassment of a “dark” people, the Caucasians.

Racism ran beneath the surface of the Soviet Union. Dictator Josef Stalin mercilessly deported entire ethnic groups, including Chechens, for alleged disloyalties that were never proven. Propaganda about socialist brotherhood among Soviet peoples never eliminated the reality that Russia often behaved as a patronizing “big brother” that bullied smaller ethnic groups.

But overt discrimination--except against Jews--was not tolerated. Ethnic minorities were encouraged to seek higher education and to join the Communist Party. Racism was viewed as a capitalist evil.

Many Caucasians say they never felt animosity from Russians, or heard a racial slur, until the Soviet Union began collapsing in 1990. Five years of political upheaval, economic collapse and ethnic strife have made nationality a potent and explosive issue.

Refugees from the old empire’s new ethnic conflicts are no longer welcomed in Moscow. On an icy morning last month, a dozen Moscow police officers brandishing automatic rifles and clad in flak jackets rousted seven Caucasian refugee families from a condemned apartment building where they had taken shelter after fleeing the Azerbaijani capital, Baku.

“We’re just ‘blacks’ to them,” said Alla Melikbashayeva, an ethnic Armenian, using the ugliest of Russian racial epithets. “We speak their language and read their literature, and they still regard us as savages from the south.”

The women, children and elderly people waved a court order allowing them to stay in the derelict building a bit longer, but the police did not even bother to read it, insisting that they had orders to evict.

“They say we are lazy, that we steal, that we are parasites on the backs of Moscow,” said Rosa Sumbatova, 71, a retired trading company worker. “For 45 years I slaved for this country, and now, because I’m from the Caucasus, I’m treated like a human being of the lowest sort.”

It has been open season on Chechens since rebel President Dzhokar M. Dudayev threatened to send terrorist squads to attack Russian cities in retaliation for the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Chechnya.

Day in and day out, police have been stopping Chechens on the street, plucking them off the subway, pulling over their cars, searching their homes without warrants, detaining them for hours in police stations, sometimes beating them and almost always confiscating their money, according to community leaders and victims.

But one need not be a Chechen--or an Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Dagestani, Ingushetian or other Caucasian--to run into trouble on Moscow’s mean streets.

To the police, who cannot distinguish among ethnic groups without checking identity papers, anybody with dark hair or eyes is now automatically an object of suspicion. An Israeli businessman and an American aid worker of partly Arab heritage complain that they too are constantly pulled over by Moscow traffic police hunting for “dangerous” Caucasians.

A Tajik poet beaten by police is now afraid to go out at night. So is Yassir Obeid, who was born in Moscow 19 years ago to a Russian mother and a Sudanese father. The computer systems student spent a month in the hospital after a January attack by a group of thugs who appeared to take an instant dislike to his non-Russian looks.

“People really don’t accept anyone who’s different,” Obeid said. “It’s getting worse. People are more aggressive now.”

Some Russians blame race-baiting politicians, such as ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky and populist Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov, for inflaming ethnic hatreds that had lain mostly dormant for decades.

Others say the racial climate in Russia has been soured by the spectacle of more than a million penniless Russian refugees streaming home from such ethnic caldrons as Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and the Baltics bearing tales of discrimination at the hands of the non-Russian majority populations.

Jealousy, poverty and fear have created fertile soil for hatred. Russian shoppers in threadbare clothing are now confronted everywhere with a cornucopia of beautiful produce they cannot afford: luscious grapes in winter, oranges year-round, tropical orchids, even kiwis sold on snowy street corners.

Most of the vendors of these exotic fruits are exotic-looking southern people, in whose native region such foods grow year-round and can be brought to colder Moscow for sale. They demand prices that make even Western Europeans flinch. Some have grown rich in business and cruise around town in Mercedes-Benzes.

Resentful Russians trying to feed a family on the average wage of $80 per month, and accustomed to equal-opportunity socialist misery, view these Caucasians as upstarts, speculators and gangsters.

“The image among the Russian people was that these were rich people, and because they were rich, they were arrogant,” said anthropologist Sergei A. Arutiunov, an expert on the Caucasus. “They could come on to Russian women. They could buy things Russians could not afford. This prepared the ground for today’s developments.”

Only about 150,000 Caucasians live in Moscow, a city of 9 million. Yet to hear taxi drivers and babushkas tell it, the Caucasians have bought up Moscow’s best real estate, own all the stores and flout the law because they are rich enough to buy off top officials.

Reprisals began as early as 1991, when police rounded up some Azerbaijani traders, put them in buses, drove them out to a forest and beat them up, said Eldar A. Agakishiev, acting consul at the Azerbaijani Embassy in Moscow.

A second wave of harassment followed the October, 1993, rebellion by hard-liners in Parliament. At least 14,000 non-Muscovites were detained during the state of emergency imposed in Moscow while the shell-punctured Parliament building smoldered, and more than 4,000 undocumented residents were deported, according to government figures.

The Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani embassies complained of mistreatment of their citizens. Human rights groups said Tajiks and Uzbeks were also being abused. The Moscow Times obtained a copy of an order instructing traffic police to target cars driven by “persons of Caucasian nationality.”

Moscow’s overflowing produce markets quickly emptied as the Caucasians who were left in the city grew afraid to go outside.

Mayor Luzhkov defended the crackdown in a now-famous “let them eat cabbage” remark. He admitted that supplies of “exotic fruit” had dried up but promised that “honest traders” from Russian cities and towns “will arrive with good products and will sell traditional Russian food.”

Many Muscovites welcomed the 1993 crackdown, saying they felt safer without so many Caucasians on the streets. Extensive media coverage of hijackings and bombings committed by Caucasians had reinforced the popular perception that Caucasians were to blame for the explosion of crime and lawlessness in Russia.

Last summer, a presidential commission that regulates the Russian media chided them for their coverage.

“The excessive attempt to blame ‘aliens’ for the growth in crime is in fact using media coverage to fan ethnic strife,” the report concluded.

Meanwhile, Luzhkov had introduced a system of special residency permits that all visitors to Moscow had to obtain from their local police stations. For Caucasians, this usually meant paying a big bribe.

Farkhun Atachiyev, a 24-year-old Azerbaijani, said a 45-day permit to live in Moscow should cost about $19 but that he had to keep shoving money across the desk until the police finally agreed to register him--for $50.

Although in theory the registration requirement applies equally to all non-residents, in application it “ends up creating a system that in no way differs from apartheid,” scholar Arutiunov said. “The daily racism is just like in South Africa.”

Getting the registration permit affords little protection. Vendor Rustamov said police recently stopped him on the street, took his document and tore it up in his face.

“Then they arrested me, took me down to the police station and fined me for having no registration,” he said.

Police insist they do not discriminate against Caucasians on racial grounds, but bias is apparent even in their official rationalizations for targeting those who look like outsiders for routine document checks.

“The proportion of visitors, especially Caucasians, in such hideous crimes as armed robbery, rape, murder and burglaries is extremely high,” said Vladimir V. Vershkov, spokesman for the Moscow city police. “The reasons for stopping these people in the streets and asking for their documents is more than obvious--this is a category of people that is more prone to crimes than anyone else.”

He said the share of non-Muscovite crimes has grown in recent months from one out of four to every third incident. But because the lack of a Moscow residence permit is considered cause for arrest, the figures for “Caucasian crimes” is inflated.

Like the expanding ranks of Russian criminal gangs, there are Chechen mafia groups active in Moscow in bank fraud, money laundering and gun running. But those Caucasians singled out by police on the streets are more often small-time traders than underworld figures.

Harassment is reportedly much less severe in other Russian cities than in Moscow. Agakishiev believes that the worst abusers are riot troops brought to Moscow from the provinces.

“It’s expensive for them to live in Moscow,” he said. “They need to find an income. They need victims who won’t complain.”

Chechens say their troubles in Moscow are nothing compared to the slaughter and destruction in Chechnya. Yet the precedent set by their treatment is disturbing.

According to Abdulla M. Khamzayev, a prominent defense attorney and Chechen community leader, authorities have drawn up lists of all Chechen residents and are systematically raiding their apartments in the name of anti-terrorism. They pounded on the door of his apartment one night last July.

“They had no search warrant, of course,” said Khamzayev, a former prosecutor whose family was deported to Kazakhstan on Stalin’s orders when he was 6 years old. “They came only because we are Chechens.”

The police pushed inside and began ransacking the hall closets, filling Khamzayev with terror that they might plant something--narcotics, for example--in a coat pocket.

On a recent visit to the police unit fighting organized crime, Khamzayev said, he found a huge group of detained Chechens.

“The whole day, they are on their knees with their faces to the wall and their hands on the back of their heads,” the lawyer said. “If they lift their forehead, a guard slams their head into the wall.”

Nearby, the prisoners were being forcibly fingerprinted, in violation of Russian law that allows fingerprinting only of criminal suspects or those charged with a crime, Khamzayev said. “These Chechens may only be detained for two hours, but they leave behind their fingerprints,” he said.

Mayerbek Vachagayev, a graduate student in Chechen history, has been taken into custody three times. Last month, he was picked up at a subway station at 10 a.m. by police who demanded identity papers from “everyone with a non-Russian face.”

“They stopped me and saw in my passport that I’m a Chechen, which means they take me,” he said. “I was there for five hours, in the company of drunks, criminals. . . . They specifically wanted to insult me.”

Three other Chechens were being held at the police station in a similar predicament, Vachagayev said. One had been there for three days.

“If the police stop you at the Metro station, you have to pay 10,000 or 15,000 rubles ($2 or $3),” he said. “If it’s the OMON (riot police), it’s 50,000 ($10). If they take you to jail, the more people who question you the more you have to pay. If you have no money, you have to call someone to get them to bring some.”

Inexplicably, the Kremlin seems to be creating the very ethnic hatred it most fears.

It insists that Chechnya is part of Russia and that to let it secede would encourage separatists elsewhere; then it bombs and shells civilians it claims are Russian citizens, sending a message to other minority groups that Moscow may do the same to them.

It insists that Chechens will live better in a law-abiding Russia than under Dudayev’s outlaw regime; then it appears to sanction racism, police brutality and extortion on the streets of the capital.

It fears sabotage or terrorism by Caucasians in Moscow; yet it embitters them, increasing the risk that they might one day contemplate retaliation.

After Chechnya declared independence from Russia in 1991, “it seemed to Chechens living in Moscow that they would want to make friends with us,” Khamzayev said. “Instead they made us enemies.”

Times staff writer Carol J. Williams contributed to this report.