#Slavs only

[thenuclearmallard]

One Man's Fight Against Slavs-Only Apartment Rentals in Moscow

"You have to solve this problem. Otherwise, I will sue, no matter how much it costs me."

By Evan Gershkovich

Feb. 27, 2018

Alexander Ryumin / TASS

The threat was typed in a fit of rage, an emotional outburst that spilled forth after weeks of frustration.

"You have to solve this problem," Emil Allakhverdiev demanded in a viral Facebook post last month. "Otherwise, I will sue, no matter how much it costs me."

Allakhverdiev, 26, was directing his public frustration at Yandex, Avito and the Center for Real Estate Information and Analytics (CIAN), among other Russian apartment rental companies. Hunting online for an apartment in his native Moscow, the English teacher of Azerbaijani descent had run into a ubiquitous fixture: disclaimers that apartments will be rented to ethnic Slavs only. 

The practice, aimed squarely at Central Asian immigrants, is one that Russian human rights advocates say has been prevalent in the capital for as long as they can remember. And because it is so entrenched, even Allakhverdiev’s singular Facebook post, they say, represents a step in the right direction.

"It feels like a new moment," Alexander Verkhovsky, the director of the Moscow-based SOVA Center, which tracks nationalism and xenophobia in Russia, told The Moscow Times. "Battling against discrimination requires citizens to be active and lawyers who will litigate strategically and attract media attention."

Although Allakhverdiev has yet to follow through on his threat to sue, he has forced the issue under Russia’s media spotlight. Before speaking to The Moscow Times, he shuttled between appearances on the state-run Moskva 24 channel and the independent Dozhd TV network.

"My primary aim is to bring attention to this problem," he explained in a central Moscow cafe one recent evening.

Emil Allakhverdiev

Facebook

Before setting out on his apartment search three months earlier, Allakhverdiev lived with his mother and rented from a friend. Previously, he hadn’t encountered much racism in Moscow, but the search, he said, had shown him how common it really is.

"It’s not just the disclaimers that you see in one out of every three ads," Allakhverdiev said. "It’s also the real estate agents who, after hearing your last name, just hang up the phone."

In a phone interview, Roman Babichev, who heads the leasing department of the Moscow-based Azbuka Zhilya real estate agency, defended the practice. The goal, he said, is less about keeping apartments in the hands of ethnic Slavs than it is preventing migrant workers from Central Asia and southern Russian republics from turning apartments into "hostels."

"It’s not discrimination," Babichev argued. "People who come from Central Asia, from the Caucasus, from Chechnya and Dagestan" — two predominantly Muslim Russian republics — "will say they will only have three people living in the apartment, but soon 10, 12 people have moved in."

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"This is based on years of experience," he added.

Migrant workers from struggling former Soviet republics have long flocked to Russia in search of better wages to send back home. More than a third of Tajikistan’s GDP in 2015, for instance, was earned by workers abroad, 90 percent of which came from Russia. In 2017, authorities estimated that there were about 10 million foreign laborers in the country.

Last spring, Russian researchers at the Robustory data journalism blog found that roughly 16 percent of the ads on CIAN discriminated on the basis of ethnicity or nationality. In their report, the researchers laid out the ads with disclaimers in map form, showing users where it would be easiest to find an apartment.

"This discrimination is not a secret to anyone who lives in Moscow," Vladimir Avetyan, one of Robustory’s researchers, said in a phone interview. "What we wanted to do was to visualize it so that the phenomenon would not just be discussed anecdotally."

Eva Mizrabekyan, 46, was born in Azerbaijan and moved to Moscow in the late ’90s when her Armenian husband found work at a restaurant. In a phone interview, she said she dreaded when the time would come for the couple to find a new apartment.

“My husband is light-skinned, so sometimes we wouldn’t have any problems right away if he went to see the apartment alone,” Mizrabekyan said. “But when it was time to sign the agreement the landlord would find out our name and start cursing and would either try to raise the price or back out altogether.”

“Thank God we found a nice landlord, and for the past seven years we haven’t had to move,” she added.

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In a statement to Dozhd TV regarding Allakhverdiev’s complaint, CIAN defended the disclaimers on its website.

"Such ads do indeed exist just as, for example, there are disclaimers on ads that say the apartment is ‘only for married couples’ or for those ‘without children’ or ‘without animals,’" the company said. "These disclaimers save our users time."

The company also pointed to Russian law, noting that, while it is clear on employment discrimination, for example, it does not "restrict renters in how they want to manage their private property."

Pavel Chikov, director of the Agora human rights organization, says that the practice is illegal. "The Russian constitution says that you cannot discriminate against people because of their race or ethnicity," he said. 

Verkhovsky of the SOVA Center, however, disagrees. Discrimination according to Russian law, he said, is the barring of someone from their rights. "Nowhere in our law," he explained, "does it say that it’s a person’s right to be rented an apartment from another person." 

Regardless, to fight the issue, he continued, will require people like Allakhverdiev to demand that discrimination be more thoroughly considered in the courts.

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Several days after the interview at the cafe, Allakhverdiev told The Moscow Times that his Facebook post had been removed for containing "open aggression against people on racial, national and religious grounds as well as ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability." 

The social media platform’s algorithm that removes posts had been hijacked by Russian nationalists sending in complaints, Allakhverdiev suggested. Facebook did not respond to The Moscow Times' requests for comment.

Allakhverdiev also shared screenshots of comments on his original post and messages in his inbox from Russians urging him to leave the country. All of it had made him "want to throw my hands up in the air."

But it wasn't all negative. Others had reached out, too, including some offering him their apartments, and a human rights lawyer who suggested Allakhverdiev file a formal complaint to the Moscow’s prosecutor’s office as an intermediary step before suing. And going to court, Allakhverdiev said, remained an option.

Still, the stream of hate seemed to have taken its toll. 

"I am a Russian citizen and Moscow is my home," he said. "Now it doesn’t feel like it so much anymore."

[momokatzetzgo]

NOOO MY SLAVIC BESTIE PETROFSKY 😔😔😔😔😭😭😭 bro was born in the gothic horror world not the crime and punishment world

[coolnonsenseworld]

i might be too late for ur pins preorders but discovering u have a polish store made me so happy bc wow shipping that maybe wont be twice the price of what im ordering?? sign me up i cant wait for your next shop update

It would be so much easier if I had a shop that takes different kind of currencies, but these cost like a leg and a rib 🤣 Also I am so happy to hear about an interest in that store! 😭💖

Got you a slav Keith

[chr0n1c-ag0ny]

Fyodor/Nikolai/Sigma, domestic au, but they are painfully slavic and living their best lives, is something that can be so personal.

(this post took forever cause I essentially had to make it twice. I didn't look at what blog I originally posted this to the first time round. shoot me)

[merrymorningofmay]

linguistics is about the only context where hearing the word "slavic" doesn't set off kill bill alarms in my brain

[depoteka]

honestly when will the "polish is a wifi password language" memes end. shit's not even funny

[telleroftime]

Viktor x Reader where the Reader is also slavic but hasn't been separated from their culture compared to what became of Viktor. At the end of his battle against Jayce, the Machine Herald is found by Reader and their people who were visiting Pilltover before the events of the second season occurred (I can only guess what will happen in the second season of the show. In LoL lore we trust).

Viktor wakes up in an unfamiliar place. Yes he shares the accent with Reader and their people but he does not understand their language. Reader would need to teach him it but the most he can do is speak a very broken form of it. He'd be able to read the simple words and although he's very smart and unsurprisingly keen to learn, he does not enjoy how long learning a language takes or how often he messes up. Or how the Reader teases him every single time. Well, he might enjoy it.

The air is clean, different from what Zaun was like. The homes were smaller and less grand to what Pilltover was. Smaller than what other kingdoms had to offer. It was a village much more tribe-like than what the rest of the world has grown to be, a fair distance from its capitol and its muscovite style architecture. It was rural. It was home.

[slav-every-day]

[eerna]

Sweden winning is the most rigged win to ever win what the fuck is happening

[tchotchkez]

for some reason this hardcore run has been my best, most successful run of all the other times I've played disco elysium??

the most homoerotic, the most efficient, the most everything. what is happening.

[enderham]

I've seen people portray Max in fic as having abysmal alcohol tolerance, and, I mean, it probably looks like that when he's standing next to a slivovitz-drinking slav who can likely put most people under the table.

However, counterpoint, Max is English. There's no way he hasn't had the chance to test the limits of his gut and build up some tolerance, at the very least during college. I headcanon that Max knows exactly HOW to drink and how much before he enters dangerous territory, and that the amount he can put away would be surprising. He knows greasy food will affect the amount, he knows how mixing different alcohols will affect him, that sugary drinks are more dangerous and he knows to drink slow if he can. All these rules are followed quietly and without much fanfare.

This results in giving off the impression that he's virtually immune to alcohol to some, while others who see him for the first time think he'll be stumbling after the second drink.

In reality, he can put away several glasses of any kind of wine plus one or two harder drinks on a good night, but will start to get woozy after a few cocktails, especially if they're sweet. If he has to knock back a slivovitz he'll survive up to three before throwing in the towel, not because he can't take more but because he knows two-3 more might actually put him in the hospital if he's not careful. Slivovitz takes practice to get used to and there's a reason why it's a sipping drink. Drinking it slow with food in between, he can likely drain half a (good) bottle in a night, though you shouldn't ask him how he's doing the next morning.

[pears-trinkets]

.

[kringelorde]

your honour: he was made for me

[stromuprisahat]

Vlkodlaci se vracejí do své lidské podoby při kohoutím kokrhání nebo při oslovení křestním jménem. ~ Werewolves revert to their human form when a rooster crows or when called by their first name.

Encyklopedie slovanských bohů a mýtů ~ Encyclopedia of Slavic Gods and Myths (Naďa & Martin Profantovi)

Oj, Venco, nedělej blbosti a přestaň na mě štěkat!

~

Oi, Venca, don't be silly and stop barking at me!

[mishkakagehishka]

And i can't be the only one who thinks 99% of the representation we get is entirely soulless btw. I can't speak on POC since i'm white, but every time someone tells me "watch this, it has gay people" it's like. Okay. So did they add the gay people because it's marketable now? Did they give the gay people a personality beyond the yass queen stereotype that is suddenly seen as not offensive? Do they have a personality? A character? Or are they just the "gay people" meant to be used as a marketing slogan, a line meant to hook and draw people to stream and give their money to it?