A Year After Crocus: Racism and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in Russia

Did the Moscow terrorist attack trigger a new wave of racism, or did it merely deepen existing prejudices?

Editor’s Note:

Hello there! It’s Aron, DOXA’s weekly English newsletter editor, here to bring you all things Russian—in English.

Today marks one year since the devastating terrorist attack at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, which claimed 145 lives. The Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility, and the suspects apprehended by Russian authorities held Tajik passports.

In the aftermath, the Kremlin’s response has largely targeted migrants, fueling a surge in state-backed xenophobia. Raids, deportations, and job bans have intensified, with Central Asian workers bearing the brunt of the crackdown.

Russia has long been a vast, multiethnic state, home not only to ethnic Russians but also to dozens of indigenous peoples across Siberia, the North Caucasus, and the Volga region. The Soviet Union officially promoted a “friendship of peoples,” yet ethnic hierarchies persisted—through Russification policies, Stalin-era mass deportations, and systemic discrimination against non-Slavic minorities.

After the USSR’s collapse, millions of Central Asians and Caucasians migrated to Russia for work, only to be scapegoated for crime and economic instability—especially during the years defined by the global war on terror.

Now, racism is flaring up again. Some officials claim—despite government statistics—that migrant crime is rising, fueling anti-migrant rhetoric. But much of the violence isn’t coming from the state alone. Far-right groups have mobilized, harassing and attacking not only migrants but also indigenous peoples who don’t fit their vision of a “pure” Russia.

In this week’s piece, freelance contributor Nicholas Castillo examines whether the attack has ignited racial tensions or merely brought preexisting prejudices to the surface.

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By Nicholas Castillo

A masked man douses two others with pepper spray, kicks them as they writhe on the pavement, then dashes off—pausing only to snap into a Nazi salute. Elsewhere, a lone figure curls into a fetal position in a public park, shielding himself as a circle of young Russians pummel him with fists and boots.

“Show your face,” one demands, calling him a “Tajik,” proclaiming the attack “for all the Russians.” He brandishes a neo-Nazi “Zarnitsa” bracelet and a Wagner paramilitary hand gesture for the camera.

On another day, in another corner of the country, a group of men in camouflage pants and Carhartt jackets set upon a cyclist, swinging a chain, shouting “Glory to our kin.”

These three incidents, filmed and uploaded within days of each other in October 2024, were not just acts of brutality but performances—hate crimes against ethnic minorities and migrants in Russia, committed for the camera.

Self-documented videos of hate crimes against migrants and visibly non-Slavic individuals are not a rare phenomenon in Russia. Databases tracking these racist incidents go back years, recording dozens of racist incidents—many violent—each month.

But reported incidents of anti-Central Asian hate crimes spiked dramatically in 2024 in the aftermath of the March 2024 terror attack on the Crocus City Hall in Moscow.

After the terror attack, which resulted in the death of 145, Russian authorities arrested a group of Tajik migrants who were allegedly working under the directives of the Islamic State (IS).

Following the arrests, conditions for Central Asian migrants in Russia, who number in the millions, deteriorated sharply. In the weeks and months that followed, reports of hate crimes surged, and government detentions became increasingly common.

For some observers, the attacks and their aftermath brought the issue of anti-Central Asian racism in Russia to the fore. By September 2024, the governments of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, both major sources of migrant labor, had warned their citizens against traveling to Russia.

A year later, anti-migrant and anti-Central Asian racism became even more entrenched in Russian public discourse. The country’s non-Slavic communities—including not just migrants but also indigenous groups—continue to bear the brunt of an increasingly hostile climate. Yet a broader question remains: Did the events of March 2024 ignite a new wave of racism, or did they merely deepen a long-standing trend?

Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric from the Elites

Although Russian propaganda frequently touts the country’s multiculturalism, the aftermath of the Crocus City Hall attack told a different story. In the days and weeks following the attack, Russian elites openly embraced anti-migrant rhetoric, fueling a crackdown that disproportionately targeted Central Asian communities.

Police raids and deportations of migrants surged, and companies relying on migrant labor imposed new restrictions on the duration of stay.

Only four days after the attack, Russia’s Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov argued that crime committed by migrants had increased by 75 percent the previous year, despite government statistics displaying that the crime rate committed by migrants has actually dropped in recent years.

In June 2024, Chairman of the Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin stated at a legal forum that migration writ-large should be halted for national security reasons, and went on to endorse the use of the death penalty for those accused of perpetrating the Crocus City attack.

Over three million Central Asian migrants are believed to be in Russia. State statistics do not back the idea of a surge in migrant crime. Russia’s Interior Ministry's statistics note a 9 percent drop in crimes committed by foreigners in 2023, followed by a reported 8 percent decrease in 2024. With Russia facing a serious demographic crisis, migrants are critical to numerous sectors, such as construction and the service sector.

Elite-driven anti-migrant narratives have left a clear mark on Russia’s public discourse. Analysis by Alexander Verkhovsky of the SOVA Center—an independent think tank that monitors nationalism and xenophobia in Russia—shows that national media mentions of “migrants” and Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin surged from 200–600 per month before March 2024 to more than 1,500 by July.

Polling by the Levada Center in April captured a sharp rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, reversing a downward trend seen in 2022. By August, Russians ranked migration as the country’s second most pressing issue.

Street Violence and Social Media

As the Kremlin escalates its rhetoric and policies against migrants, hostility on the streets has followed suit. A Russia-based lawyer and migrant rights advocate reported receiving 2,500 reports of “acts of aggression” in just two days after the attack.

Since the ISKP attack, ultra-nationalist street groups and far-right influencers have expanded their online presence, capitalizing on the surge in anti-migrant sentiment. Organizations like the “Russian Community,” “Northern Man,” and “Imperial Legion”—which brand themselves as patriotic fitness clubs and self-styled defenders of the homeland—quickly seized on the Crocus City Hall attack to justify their rhetoric.

After the attack, Vladislav Pozdnyakov, a prominent nationalist blogger, posted videos of the suspected terrorists, celebrating their brutal treatment at the hands of authorities. Meanwhile, smaller and more explicitly neo-Nazi Telegram channels issued calls for revenge attacks against those believed to be Central Asian migrants.

The audience for these extremist channels swelled throughout 2024, with spikes following the Crocus City Hall attack. By December, the Telegram channel of the “Russian Community” had quadrupled its subscriber base, jumping from 166,000 to 644,000, while Vladislav Pozdnyakov’s following grew from 450,000 to 688,000—an alarming rise that underscores the growing reach of nationalist rhetoric in Russia.

For these groups, anti-immigrant sentiment and racism against Russia’s minority ethnicities are two sides of the same coin. Self-styled nationalist vigilantes routinely film themselves accompanying authorities on deportation raids or assaulting migrants at random. Migrants report a widespread fear of violent attacks, to the point that some are wary of all groups of young men when outside. But street nationalists’ targets extend beyond migrants.

Indigenous non-Slavic Russian citizens—those who are visibly non-Slavic—are also harassed and, at times, attacked, with vigilantes demanding they leave the country. “Northern Man,” one such group operating in 45 cities, frames its mission as reviving the “values, traditions, and culture of Russian and other Slavic peoples” and promoting the “consolidation of citizens on the basis of the Slavic ethnic group”—rhetoric that blurs the line between anti-migrant hostility and a broader ethno-nationalist agenda.

Was March 2024 a Turning Point?

While the Crocus City Hall attack has undeniably worsened the climate for migrants and non-Slavs in Russia, experts who track the issue caution against viewing it as a decisive turning point. Rather than a rupture, they argue, the attack accelerated long-standing trends of xenophobia and state-driven nationalist rhetoric that were already deeply embedded in Russian society.

Indeed, the head of the SOVA research center traces the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment back to 2021, when anti-migrant rhetoric and policies began to intensify. The Nazi Video Monitoring Project (NVMP) has concluded that street violence by Russian nationalist clubs has been on a steady rise since late 2022.

“This is not a new phenomenon,” Dr Elena Borisova, a University of Sussex social anthropologist working on migration in post-Soviet Eurasia, told DOXA in an interview when describing anti-migrant racism and attacks. “Racism and xenophobic attitudes reflected in the mechanisms of migration governance have a long history in Russia and elsewhere,and this theme has always been ‘topical’ for those who study migrations in Russia.”

Dr. Borisova characterized Russia’s relationship with migrants as a constant push and pull between economic necessity and social exclusion “On the one hand,” she explained, “the [state] needs migrant workers to meet the needs of growing economies and ageing populations. On the other hand, they do not want to include these people [into Russian society] or grant them citizenship rights. Migrants, in effect, became a workforce that was essential but unwelcome.”

The state, she noted, deliberately keeps migrants in precarious situations. “This is not just Russia’s relationship,” Borisova added, “this is not very different from what other countries do apart from the fact that in Russia there’s more raw and open violence.”

In 2024, however, the Russian government has taken an even harder line, introducing laws that restrict foreign employment and doubling deportations compared to the previous year.

Still, not all observers view the Crocus City Hall attack as a turning point. Instead, they see it as a reflection of deeper, long-standing sentiments in Russia.

“I think we tend to pin the conversation around xenophobic attacks on major events,” said Leyla Latypova, a special correspondent with The Moscow Times who covers Russia's Indigenous communities. But, she argued, “Russia is a country where racism and xenophobia are unfortunately ingrained in the fabric of society… There was definitely a spike in [xenophobia] around Crocus, but I don’t think it dramatically altered the situation.”

While SOVA’s database shows that xenophobic attacks surged in 2023 and 2024, earlier periods—particularly the 2000s—saw even worse waves of violence against minority groups. Meanwhile, figures like Alexander Bastrykin, who built their personal brands around xenophobia, had been targeting migrants long before the Crocus City Hall attack.

In May 2023, Bastrykin made public remarks in which he claimed that “While Russians are at the front, migrants are attacking our rear… if [migrants] don’t go to the front, if you don’t perform your civic duty, then go back to your country.”

Reports from the frontlines paint a different picture. Over the course of the war in Ukraine, Russia has coercively conscripted Central Asian migrants into the military, possibly in the thousands.

After an Uzbek official cautioned migrants against joining Russia’s army, one Duma member and head of the “Just Russia – For Truth” party posted on X: “Why didn’t they call on them not to receive maternity capital? Not to use other benefits? This is possible! But defending the country that feeds you is not allowed,” echoing the now recurring trope of migrants not contributing sufficiently to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Some Russian policymakers frame their xenophobia through cultural differences, making claims about “different civilizational codes.” Echoing familiar anti-migrant narratives seen worldwide, former President Dmitry Medvedev lamented that Russian schools were being filled with children who did not speak Russian.

In December 2024, this rhetoric culminated in a Duma bill in December requiring foreign students to prove legal residency and pass a Russian language exam—a measure reinforcing the state’s growing emphasis on assimilation and exclusion.

Russian policymakers regularly embolden the depiction of migrants as disrespectful and ungrateful guests. In June 2024, one high ranking security official stated that migrants “do not want to comply with local laws and norms of behavior, demonstratively bring in their own culture, and disrespect the local population.”

Researchers and analysts have drawn differing conclusions about the roots of Russia’s rising anti-migrant sentiment. Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the SOVA Center, attributed the surge in anti-Central Asian racism to the Kremlin’s increasingly identity-driven and anti-foreign ideology. Investigative journalist Leyla Latypova told DOXA that she sees a more complex picture—while the war in Ukraine has intensified nationalist rhetoric, she noted that the Kremlin is also actively courting Muslim nations and the Global South.

A 2024 analytical paper published by RE:Russia argues that “the year 2024 marked a kind of renaissance for nationalist movements in Russia,” highlighting a shift from previous years when the government was more inclined to suppress them.

In her comments to DOXA, migration scholar Dr. Borisova argued that while the attack sharpened public focus on the idea of the migrant as a terrorist, the shift has been “quantitative, not qualitative.” In her view, the crackdown and rhetoric simply recycle “the same old tropes well exploited by migration regimes previously in Russia and elsewhere.”

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Nicholas Castillo is a DC based international relations writer and researcher specializing in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. He is a program officer and researcher at the Caspian Policy Center, a think tank focusing on the South Caucasus and Central Asia. In 2024, he earned his B.A. at George Washington University and will begin a Master of Arts program in Russian, East European and Central Asian studies at Harvard University this coming fall.