The number of extremist crimes recorded by Russian law enforcement agencies has risen by a factor of three since 2004, according to the first deputy head of the Interior Ministry. A January 21, 2008 report by the Interfax news agency quoted Aleksandr Chekalin saying that while in 2004 the number of such crimes was 130, 152 were recorded the following year, 262 in 2006, and a whopping 356 in 2007. These "were crimes in general committed on ethnic or religious grounds," the minister said--a valuable disaggregator, since in the past government statistics lumped in terrorist acts and other forms of violence stemming from the Chechen war with hate crimes committed by Russian extremist nationalist groups. He linked the number of hate crimes to the large number of illegal migrants present in the country.

Although not pointed out in the Interfax piece, the fact that so many of the victim of hate crimes are illegally present in the country, combined with long-standing police practices of suppressing hate crimes data and targeting certain ethnic minority groups for harsh treatment, most likely means that these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg, valuable only insofar as they show the broader trend of increasing inter-ethnic violence in Russia.

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