Vandalism

In May 2015, vandals desecrated a mosque in Berezniki, Perm Krai (region).

In 2015, 93 cases of xenophobic graffiti, vandalism and threats have been recorded. 14 cases were anti-Muslim; 11 – anti-Semitic; 12 – anti-Christian, 8 – anti-Tatar, 3 – anti-Russian, 1 – anti-Pagan. Monuments to Lenin were desecrated six times, five times - monuments to the victims of the Great Patriotic War. The exact orientation of 37 cases could not be established. In 2014, 106 such cases were noted. As we can see, there is also a trend in reducing the number of xenophobic manifestations. Here are some of these cases:

ANTI-MUSLIM MANIFESTATIONS:

• On January 8, 2015, unknown persons destroyed the tomb of Seid Mir-Gafar agi in Derbent, which caused protests from the Azerbaijanis residing in the city.
• On January 12, vandals desecrated a Memorial Mosque on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow.
• On April 20 in Vologda, unknown persons left extremist inscriptions and drawing swastikas on the fence of the mosque.
• On the night of April 25 to 26, unknown persons tried to set fire to the mosque in the village of Skalistaya, Bakhchisaray district. Several glass bottles with incendiary mixtures were thrown into the mosque building. Fortunately, the mosque was not significantly damaged.
• On May 10, unknown people painted crosses on the mosque in Berezniki.
• On July 5, man of non-Slavic appearance in shorts burst into one of the auxiliary premises of the cathedral mosque in Perm, and with a cry of “Allah is Great!” Began to rip off his clothes. Then he broke two doors, a mirror, scared the women. The man jumped out the window into the street, where he was caught by police.
• On July 31, it became known that in Ulyanovsk during the construction of a dwelling house to fill the reservoir, the land was brought from the ancient Tatar cemetery.
• August 7 in the town of Talitsa, Pervouralsk, Sverdlovsk region, a young man broke windows in a mosque.
• On October 19, a desecration of the local Muslim cemetery occurred in the city of Tuymazy. Dozens of graves were destroyed, including veterans of the Great Patriotic War and child gravestones.
• October 28, in Uzlovaya, Tula region, a Muslim prayer house was set on fire.
• On the night of November 28, unknown people tried to set fire to a mosque under construction in the village of Bolshaya Nagatkino, Ulyanovsk region. Attackers also wrote on the fence of the future Muslim temple “No to Wahabism!”
• On November 6, unidentified people broke open the door and staged a pogrom in the premises of a mosque in the Zhigulin Grove suburb of Simferopol.
• On November 13, the mosque of Zavet-Leninsky village of Dzhankoysky district of Crimea was attacked by unknown persons who threw stones and bricks at it.
• On December 24, an attempt was made to set fire to a Muslim prayer house in the village of Zhelyabovka, Nizhnegorsk District, Crimea.

ANTI-SEMITIC MANIFESTATIONS:

• On March 7, anti-Semitic graffiti appeared on the Battery Hill in Chita.
• On March 23, in Volgograd, a sworn stone was decorated with a memorial stone in memory of the execution of Jews.

• On the night of April 8, unidentified people fired a synagogue in Arkhangelsk from a pneumatic weapon, knocked out nine panes and left anti-Semitic inscriptions on the building.
• On the night of June 1, the windows of the Jewish kindergarten “Gan Geula” were broken in Volgograd.
• August 3 in Kazan were found inscriptions “Death to the Jews and Russians, the glory of the Bulgarian spring!”
• On 22 October and 4 November, a monument to the victims of the Holocaust in Bely (Tver Region) was desecrated.
• On December 7 in Bryansk, the Vandals desecrated Hanukkah, installed in the square next to Partizan Square.
• On December 12, anti-Semitic graffiti was staged on the apartment door in Moscow, where the Jew lives.
• On December 29, at the Sukharevskaya metro station in Moscow, anti-Semitic graffiti was discovered, “Satanic Jews are robbing Russia”.

ANTI-ORTHODOX MANIFESTATIONS:

• On January 13 in Volgorechensk, a woman in the temple of St. Tikhon Luhovsky, deliberately pushed a stone carved cross mounted on a pedestal, which was damaged.
• On January 26, the building of the Orthodox Sunday school was burned in Berezovsky.
• April 21, in Krasnodar, tried to set fire to the church of St. Spyridon of Trimifuntsky.
• On the night of June 30, as of July 1, a wooden room was set on fire for changing on a holy spring at the Holy Dormition Monastery in Lipetsk.
• On the night of August 8, unidentified people threw a combustible mixture of the Nativity Cathedral in Khabarovsk.
• On September 29, a cemetery chapel burned in the village of Uni in the Kirov region.
• On October 5, it became known about the destruction of a worship cross, installed in the area of the railway station Loparskoye (Murmansk region ).
• On October 13, unknown vandals in Petrozavodsk disfigured the walls of the Sretenskaya church in Solomennoye.
• On October 18, unknown persons in the chapel of the “Uryupin Icon of the Mother of God” in Volgograd, destroyed a memorial cross “To Orthodox soldiers who gave their lives for faith and the Fatherland in peacetime”.
• In the Leninsky district of Saratov on the night of October 24, unknown persons desecrated the church of St. George the Victorious, located on Dnepropetrovskaya Street.
• On the night of August 28-29, unknown intruders broke a part of the fence around the Iveron Synodal Church of the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church (ROAC) in Suzdal

OTHER MANIFESTATIONS OF VANDALISM:

• On April 27, xenophobic graffiti was painted on the building of Jehovah's Witnesses in Kurgan.
• April 29, it became known that in the Crimea began to set fire to commercial objects belonging to the Crimean Tatars. In particular, 7 private commercial objects were set on fire in the village of Rybachye (Alushta): a hotel, an Ai-Petri cafe, a cafe Uyut, a shopping pavilion, retail outlets and four cars owned by entrepreneurs - Crimean Tatars.
• On May 23, at the foot of Eklizi-Burun (the top of the Chatyr Dag plateau), vandals defeated a monument to the victims of the deportation of Crimean Tatars.
• At the end of June, unknown persons sealed the road sign to the pagan shrine of the Yaroslavl Region to the Blue Stone.
• In March, in the underground passage at the metro station Kremlyovskaya in Kazan, there appeared inscriptions “Down with the Moscow-Chekist junta!”, “Death to the invaders!”, “Freedom to the Tatar people!” and “Freedom for Rafis Kashapov!*”
• In early April 2015 in Kazan were found inscriptions: “Freedom for Kashapov and Savchenko! Putin - in The Hague! “, In the middle of the month on the building of the KFU was found the inscription” Russian pigs, leave! “
• On June 8, Russophobic inscriptions with appeals to violence were found in Volkhov.
• On July 10 at the Lenin dam near the walls of the Kazan Kremlin an inscription was found inscribed: “Glory to Ukraine! To the heroes of glory! “
• On July 17 in Kazan inscriptions were found: “Freedom for Rafis Kashapov!”. “Putin - to The Hague!”
• Monuments of military glory were desecrated in Krasnoyarsk (January 9), in the village of Anastasievskaya Slaviansky district (on January 24, the inscriptions were of anti-Semitic nature), in the village. Legostayevo (Novosibirsk region, April 10), in the village of Novopokrovka, Varna district (June 24), Chelyabinsk (August 15), Dzerzhinsk (September 26), monuments to Lenin in Novosibirsk (January 11), Togliatti (February 20), Chelyabinsk (6 April), Syktyvkar (April 22), the village of Moryakovskiy Zaton of Tomsk district (May 13), Yeniseysk (August 27).
• On May 9 or 10, in the Bitsevsky Park in Moscow, three members of the neo-Nazi movement Misanthropic Division set fire to the Victory Banner, peed on it, and afterwards posted a video on their activities on the Internet.
• On January 20, it became known about the swastika painted on the facade of one of the houses in Magnitogorsk.
• In Tsimlyansk on January 26, the whole street was painted with a swastika, the memo of neo-Nazis and the word “kindle”.
• On January 26 in the village. Leo Tolstoy in one of the buildings unknown malefactors portrayed Nazi symbols.
• On February 22, graffiti in the form of a swastika appeared on a tram in Samara.
• On March 24, swastika images were marked on the facades of six houses in Samara.
• On March 28, the Youth Leisure Center in the Kirov district of Novosibirsk was painted with Nazi symbols.
• In March 2015 in with. Sergievo (Samara region) were pasted Caucasian and Asiaphobic stickers.
• On April 1, members of the Orthodox public movement “God's Will” laid on the porch of the Moscow Art Theater. Chekhov's pig's head, thus expressing a protest against Konstantin Bogomolov's staging of “The Ideal Husband” and “Inaction of the Authorities”.
• On April 7, a resident of Magnitogorsk attached a sticker with a swastika to the City Hall building.
• On May 8 it became known that a swastika was depicted on one of the houses in the village of Harp.
• On June 23, it became known that on the facade of one of Novokuibyshevsk's houses there is an inscription “14/88”, which is a cryptogram of radical nationalistic character.
• On June 23 it became known that there is a swastika picture on the store building of one of the shops in Penza.
• In early July, Nazi graffiti appeared on the Monument to the People's Will in the city park of Lipetsk.
• On August 26 in St. Petersburg, near the Orthodox activists, a bas-relief with the image of Mephistopheles was damaged on the facade of the monument “House of Alexander Lvovich Lishnevsky”.
• On September 15, in Zheleznogorsk, the nationalists, using aerosol paint, printed inscriptions and Nazi symbols on the shopping pavilion and the facade of several houses.
• In mid-September on the monument of the former head of the investigation department at the local department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the city of Korkino, Chelyabinsk region. unknown persons have painted a swastika.
• September 21, it became known about the discovery of swastikas on the facade of one of the Samara houses.
• At the end of September, a Nazi swastika was found on the facade of the building of school No. 112 in Samara.
• On October 12, unknown persons painted the Novosiltsevskaya battery in Vladivostok, depicting on it a crooked star with a swastika, and writing with errors the Nazi salute.
• In early November, on the doors of the military-patriotic club “Ratnik”, which is based in school number 40, in Nizhny Tagil unknown people drew a swastika.
• On November 28 xenophobic inscriptions were found in Kazan.
• December 8, it became known that on the bridge across the river. Klyazma in Vladimir were found graffiti: “From Maidan to Azov Heroes of Glory, Popeye Mosh Crew, Shche did not die Ukraine” with the image of Chevron Battalion “Azov”, consisting of the inscription “AZOV”, the sign “Wolf Hook”, white sign “black sun “, White sign” wolfsangel “.
• On December 6, it became known that an image of a swastika appeared on one of the houses in Otradny.
• On August 14, the leader of the Orthodox public movement “God's Will” Dmitry Tsorionov, nicknamed Enteau, together with his supporters, defeated the sculptures of V. Siduran at the exhibition in the Manege “Sculptures, which we do not see,” believing that they offend the believers' feelings. On August 26, around-Orthodox activists tried to damage another Siddur's work.
• In St. Petersburg on August 26, unknown persons shot down the figure of the demon from the facade of the monument building on Lakhtinskaya Street, 24.
• On November 25, unknown persons threw stones and doused the Turkish embassy in Moscow.

In 2018-20 the number of xenophobically motivated acts of vandalism gradually decreased. In 2018 there were 36 such acts, in 2019 - 31, in 2020 (in 11 months) - 24. Moreover, unlike the situation with xenophobic attacks, acts of vandalism are not concentrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg - in 2018 they were noted in 25 regions, in 2019 - in 23 regions, in 2020 - in 12 regions (this very year St. Petersburg became the place of concentration of such incidents - seven were noted there). Anti-Semitic incidents take a significant place among these (9 in 2018, 8 in 2019 and 4 in 2020). The second highest number of attacks were incidents against Orthodox churches, crosses, etc. (9 in 2018, 4 in 2019. In 2020, anti-Orthodox incidents were at the top of the list, with six. The decrease in attacks and vandalism in 2020 was largely the result of the coronavirus epidemic and the resulting travel restrictions.

As for anti-Muslim vandalism, there was one incident each in 2018 and 2019, and two incidents in 2020. One incident each in all three years occurred at Protestant-owned sites and Buddhist sites. In 2019 there was one anti-Chinese incident, one anti-Catholic incident, one incident targeting Crimean Tatars, and in 2020 there was one incident targeting pagans. Two incidents of anti-Caucasian vandalism were also reported in 2018, and another such incident was reported in 2020. Two incidents targeting Jehovah's Witnesses were reported in 2019. The direction of the remaining acts of vandalism cannot be ascertained.

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* Rafis Kashapov, a Tatar pro-Ukrainian activist, was convicted in 2014 for spreading information on the Internet aimed at inciting ethnic hatred, violating the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation and undermining the foundations of the constitutional order and the security of the state.

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