Racist Killing Spurs Putin to Urge His Cabinet to Act

After a weekend in which Russian skinheads stabbed a Chechen man to death near the Kremlin and scores more shouting “Heil Hitler!” rampaged through a market, President Vladimir V. Putin told his Cabinet on Monday to fight ethnic and racial hatred.

Although such incidents have been a recurring problem, with violence reported near universities, churches and other sites where Africans, East Asians and other foreigners gather, Putin warned that attacks have been on the rise.

“For Russia, a multiethnic country, this is absolutely unacceptable,” he said after the attack on the Yasenovo market, which newspapers called the most vigorous observance in years by Russian skinheads of the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth, which was Friday.

Putin’s remarks follow the refusal of a group of ultranationalist and Communist deputies of the State Duma to stand for a moment of silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday. “There are so many holidays,” said Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, head of the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party. “Should the Russian parliament stand every day?”

A rights activist said he was not impressed by Putin’s comments.

“Yes, President Putin condemned the Yasenovo episode today, but these words aren’t really worth anything when they are not backed by attempts to cure this fast-spreading epidemic,” said Oleg Orlov of the group Memorial.

“Skinheads and other extremists cannot but see the inaction of the authorities, and they take it as a signal that they can commit such crimes again and again.”

The 18-year-old Chechen man stabbed to death Saturday night was accosted by several young Russians shouting ethnic slurs, police said. The assault occurred outside a popular shopping mall near the Kremlin.

Most of the vendors at the Yasenovo market in southwestern Moscow are from the Caucasus. The market reopened Monday for the first time since the rampage Saturday, when vendors described being terrorized by more than 100 black-jacketed, steel rod-wielding skinheads.

Witnesses said the skinheads jogged into the market shouting “Heil Hitler!” and attacked without warning. They circulated through the open-air and covered areas of the bazaar, overturning stalls, beating vendors and shattering glass.

The onslaught left the merchants shaken, with some staying away Monday and others considering moving for good.

“I have three children--I cannot afford to risk my life here,” said Kurban Kerimov, 44, an ethnic Azeri standing in the same booth where he was pushed down and trampled by the skinheads, mostly boys in their mid- and late teens.

They overturned his fruit and vegetable displays, grabbed some of his money and showered him with obscene racial epithets.

“And no one is held responsible. If I had been killed, no one would have been punished for it,” Kerimov said.

He said he has lived in Moscow for 25 years and that bigoted attitudes are getting more pronounced.

After being trod upon by the skinheads, he managed to crawl away with only bruises.

“It was so humiliating,” he said. “I have lived here so long that I am practically a Muscovite myself, and here I came home covered in dirt.”

The rampage lasted 20 minutes before police arrived. Some merchants complained that officers stationed at a subway stop outside the market had reacted slowly.

There was no visible extra security Monday. A gangly 16-year-old who identified himself as a skinhead was brazen enough to visit the scene and express support for the violence. Although he halfheartedly denied being in on the attack, two companions snickered as he said it.

“They should all be killed,” the youth, who gave only the first name of Nikolai, said of the vendors. Using a derogatory word for people from the Caucasus, he continued: “All people who are not Russians should be kicked out. . . . Russia should belong to Russians.”

Polls indicate that at least one-third of young Russians are receptive to such ideas, “especially now that the war in Chechnya prepares society for such attitudes,” said Alexei Grazhdankin, deputy director of the All-Russia Center for Public Opinion Research. Nevertheless, he said in a phone interview, only a few join extremist groups.

Grazhdankin blamed Russia’s prolonged economic crisis in part for such attitudes. Many young people “fail to find their niche,” then take out their disappointment and frustration on any handy target, “be it bums, old people, Communists, blacks or Caucasians.”

Orlov said the problem is aggravated by the police, many of whom, he said, acquired habits of lawlessness and ethnic hatred during military or police duty in Chechnya.

“This deadly tumor is being spread all over the country,” the rights activist said. “Every day thousands of people whose only crime was to be born in the Caucasus are stopped by police for a [document] check, which very often involves insults, humiliation, threats and eventually extortion of a bribe or even arrest.”

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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.