A few days after the city's chief prosecutor harshly criticized human rights activists for supposedly exaggerating the problem of hate crimes in Russia, Moscow's chief of police Vladimir Pronin denied that there is an organized neo-Nazi movement in Moscow, according to an April 10, 2008 report by the Russian Jewish web site Jewish.ru. Speaking on TVTs television on Tuesday, Mr. Pronin said that, "There is no organized skinhead movement in Moscow, there are just individual excesses." He added that in the first two months of the year, Moscow police registered around 60 crimes motivated by extremism, and that prosecutors opened three hate crimes investigations. As usual, he tempered these numbers by emphasizing that foreign citizens are more likely to commit crimes than Russian citizens, according to police statistics.

Although not pointed out in the report, Mr. Pronin has emphasized the supposed lack of a neo-Nazi organizational structure in the past. Whether or not he is right on this point appears to be moot, since the escalation in racist violence over the past few years in Russia is obvious, demonstrated by both government and NGO statistics. This raises the question, is Mr. Pronin focusing on the organizational structure of Moscow neo-Nazis to distract attention from the more salient point of out of control violence on the streets of his city?

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