Uncontrolled reactionImmediately following the attack, it appeared that Moscow and Dushanbe would seek to depoliticize the incident and prevent it from affecting the official relationship between Russia and Tajikistan.
Dushanbe,
keen to assist Russia in the investigation, permitted Russian investigators to come to Tajikistan and question the suspects’ relatives.
Tajik President Emomali Rahmon promptly reached out to Vladimir Putin to condemn the attack,
stating, “terrorists do not have a nationality, homeland or religion.” Essentially, he gave Moscow carte blanche to deal with Tajik suspects as it saw fit.
And Moscow saw fit to arrest the suspected terrorists brutally and interrogate them publicly, with disturbing videos of the torture circulating widely on Russian Telegram channels. The well-known propagandist Margarita Simonyan, the head of the state-affiliated news network RT, considered it appropriate to
mock (the linked videos contain disturbing scenes of violence) the “Tajik accent” in a Telegram post featuring the brutal arrest.
This situation has only added fuel to the already burning fire of xenophobia among ordinary Russians. The media is rife with reported incidents, numbering in the
dozens, where Russians discriminated against migrants or even physically attacked them.
According to available data from Levada Center, a nongovernment pollster, in 2022
38% of respondents agreed that ethnic Russians should be more privileged in Russia than non-Russians, while
26% said that Russia should ban Central Asian migrants from entering the country.
The war in Ukraine has helped Russian neo-Nazis (see
Russia.Post about ultranationalism in Russia
here), pro-war journalists and Z-patriots to gain popularity, making it even more dangerous to speak out against discrimination of non-Russians. NGOs like the
Civic Assistance Committee and activists like
Manizha, a Tajik-born Russian singer, have come under
investigation for their statements on discrimination, seen by Russian authorities as “justifying terrorism.”
Russian officials have also manipulated nationalist ideas to gain political advantages. Patriarch Kirill
responded to allegations of xenophobia by stating that “Russian nationalism does not exist,” and in his view, the problem lies in the “unwillingness of some migrants to respect the culture [of Russia].” President Putin has also showed his
support for this view on several occasions,
stating that “migrants should respect the cultures and traditions of the Russian Federation” and that “the interests of Russians should be of higher priority than migration flows.”
Though this rhetoric is embraced by the nationalist-leaning segment of society, it also dangerously encourages other, ordinary Russians to discriminate against migrants, as they feel state backing for such actions. Recognizing the rising wave of xenophobia in Russian society, Moscow and Dushanbe initiated a series of visibly coordinated video addresses by prominent Tajik opinion leaders. In these videos, they publicly
apologized for the involvement of Tajik citizens in the attack. Simultaneously, singers and opinion makers from Russia posted
similar videos, emphasizing that not all Tajiks are terrorists.