Blame it on the Roma A human rights activist explains how discrimination and bigotry shape life in one of Russia’s most vulnerable communities
In October 2024, a taxi driver named Elena Manzhosova was found murdered outside Chelyabinsk in the city of Korkino. When locals learned of the crime, they marched to the suspected killer’s home, began breaking windows, and set fire to several nearby houses. The riot quickly escalated into an indiscriminate attack on the murder suspect’s entire community: the Roma population living on Korkino’s outskirts. In the aftermath of Manzhosova’s tragic killing, city residents have demanded the illegal deportation of Roma community members, and state officials have partly obliged these bigotries by intensifying police raids on Roma settlements in the Chelyabinsk region and beyond.
To learn about the origins of negative stereotypes against Russia’s Romanis, why members of this community often live in isolation, and why Russians often view them as illegal immigrants, Cherta Media recently spoke to Stefania Kulayeva, an expert at Memorial’s Anti-Discrimination Center, who has spent more than 30 years advocating for the rights of the Roma population in Russia. Meduza summarizes Kulayeva’s comments.
“At first, we gathered information about violations of Roma rights directly from the affected individuals,” Kulayeva told Cherta Media, explaining how she once worked on a research project that brought her to more than 100 clustered Roma settlements. “I’d just walk up to people and say, ‘Hello, tell me what’s wrong here,’” she recalled. Through these interactions, Kulayeva learned firsthand accounts of failing education programs, police abuse, murder, and torture.
Later, she got involved in legal assistance to Roma communities, litigating to prevent the demolition of homes, helping people register their properties, and sometimes even arranging defense attorneys for Roma members falsely accused of crimes.
How Russia’s education system fails the Roma community
Kulayeva has worked extensively with grade schools across Russia to find better accommodations for Roma students. “Children from [Roma] settlements often attend segregated classes with shockingly poor teaching quality and degrading conditions: tiny rooms, staggered schedules, and no sanitation or sports facilities,” Kulayeva told Cherta Media. “And everything missing is readily available in classrooms next door where the ‘white kids’ study. It’s like an apartheid system.”
According to Kulayeva, schools exploit a loophole in Russia’s regulations to separate Roma students like this, classifying their lessons as “special education.” In theory, isolating Roma children is meant to give them the extra attention they need to “catch up” with their peers in Russian language proficiency. In practice, however, these students are denied a proper education in anything, ensuring their inability to matriculate at higher grade levels and raising the likelihood that they’ll become dropouts at ages as young as 10.
Kulayeva recalled a visit to one “jaw-dropping” school in the Tambov region that claimed to provide nine years of education for Roma children:
It was a complete sham. The students were taught in a shack with two rooms and a wood-burning stove. The furnace operator taught algebra, geometry, physics, chemistry, geography, and English, while the janitor handled the other subjects.
When Russia’s education system fails Roma children, it cultivates future parents who will question the utility of school for their kids, Kulayeva told Cherta Media: “Making education a priority should be the responsibility of the state. The state must understand that it is imperative for all children to attend school.”
Asked about developing Roma students’ Russian language fluency, Kulayeva reasoned that Roma children in elementary school should be taught in their native language, though she also urged educators to work toward integrating these students. “We explained […] why segregation is harmful and why it’s important to try, in any way possible, to include the children in activities,” Kulayeva said, describing her work with teachers at “roundtable” events organized to coordinate education efforts related to Roma students.
Racism and job discrimination
Kulayeva also criticized outsiders for failing to recognize the diversity of Russia’s Roma communities. “Journalists often illustrate stories about one Roma group with photos of another,” she complained, accusing reporters of “textbook racism” when they conflate groups who often adhere to very different lifestyles (for example, regarding community rules on drug use).
The discrimination Russia’s Roma members face today resembles past pogroms against Jews, said Kulayeva. This is especially true, she explained, when it comes to stereotypes about drug crimes:
Where there is demand, there will be suppliers, and such niches are often filled by those who, like Jews under the Tsar, were barred from working in other sectors. It’s the same here: the majority of Roma have nothing to do with drugs, though some, like in any group of people, use them and therefore possess them.
Kulayeva spoke extensively to Cherta Media about the limited job opportunities for Russia’s Roma community members due to a mix of ethnic bigotry, poor education, and language barriers. “Discrimination and the inability to find decent work have, in various eras, pushed different groups of people into illegal activities,” she explained, highlighting that the elusiveness of school diplomas for Roma students is especially disqualifying for legal employment. Even uneducated foreigners can leverage their past work experience to find jobs more easily than many Russian citizens in the Roma community, said Kulayeva.
A housing crisis
In 1956, the USSR effectively criminalized the Roma community’s nomadic way of life, leading to a police crackdown that rounded up many Roma members and dumped them on allocated land.
“This abruptly shattered a centuries-old way of life,” Kulayeva told Cherta Media. However, these allotments didn’t grow with the Roma population, leading to increasingly crowded accommodations and greater reliance on shoddy home extensions. “The authorities provided no assistance in registering these homes, and the problems of overcrowding and safety in such settlements were simply ignored,” Kulayeva said.
In post-Soviet Russia, owning a home outside the country’s metropolises became prestigious, and Russians went looking for real estate to build new cottages. “This led to demolitions in the Roma settlements and the expulsion of their residents,” said Kulayeva.
Russia’s Roma and the invasion of Ukraine
Following Elena Manzhosova’s murder, one of the criticisms Korkino residents made against the city’s Roma community has been to highlight the absence of Roma soldiers fighting in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Kulayeva said this reproof isn’t unique to the Chelyabinsk area:
There’s a video from the Volgograd region where the administration summoned Roma representatives and began yelling at them: “Why is everyone fighting, and you’re not?” And these pitiful, crushed fathers and grandfathers of families answered, “Well, maybe you could assign us to weave some nets instead.” I deeply respect that none of them said, “Sure, we’ll go fight.”
Kulayeva told Cherta Media that she suspects military recruiters have turned their attention to Russia’s Roma because they assume pillaging these communities of able-bodied men “won’t provoke any protests.” However, she pointed out that the education system’s abandonment of Roma students has put them largely out of the military’s reach since men are typically registered for the armed services in high school or later. “It turns out that the Roma are an excluded group in every sense,” Kulayeva quipped.
Cherta Media notes that Memorial’s Anti-Discrimination Center was forced to suspend full-scale operations inside Russia in 2013, after the Justice Ministry designated the group as a “foreign agent,” following its reporting for the United Nations on police violence in Russia against Roma, migrants, and political activists. As a result, Memorial was forced to sever ties to vulnerable groups it had actively assisted for years, including the Roma community, to protect them from reprisals by the Russian state.
Adapted for Meduza in English by Kevin Rothrock