In today's Russia, unfortunately, therre are foreigners, and then there are foreigners. During my two years as a student from Sweden studying Russian at various universities across the country, I have come to respect immensely all students of color who have done the same.

When I arrived in St. Petersburg in the fall of 2004, race-related violence seemed to course through the minds and newspapers of the city. The majority of students in my department were from Asia or Africa, and of course it wasn't the European looking ones who feared walking all alone through the streets of the Venice of the North. My hair color often led locals to think, mistakenly, that I was Ukrainian. If I happened to open my mouth and they heard my accent, they'd think I was from one of the Baltic countries. Most of my friends in Petersburg didn't stand out, so the racism I read about in the papers wasn't real to me. Not until I moved to Omsk, in the Siberian heartland, did I come face to face with the unattractive underside of Russian patriotism.

The number of foreigners in Siberia was, and still is, very low. Omsk State Pedagogical University's Russian for foreigners department includes roughly 50 students; all but five are Chinese. I was not prepared to be the only one among my classmates with a foreign passport in my pocket who wasn't harassed daily by the authorities. Apparently, blonde hair is all the protection you need to keep the police off your back. While my friends and classmates suffered through the daily annoyance of being stopped by the authorities and forced to prove they had a right to be in Russia, I was subjected to the same treatment just once in my 18 months in Omsk -- and that was for being too drunk in public on a freezing February night. Funny as this may sound, the police took pity on me after gazing at my Swedish passport, laughed off my drunkenness and gave me a lift home.

Not only was it easier being white when it came to the police; I also found that making friends with ethnic Russian students was harder for non-white students than for me.

Unlike many other big cities, Omsk had never seen any serious violence directed against foreign students. That was until June of this year.

The small Chinese community in Omsk had lived peacefully in the city for some time. Then, not so long ago, on a quiet afternoon, a Chinese student was beaten up by a group of locals just outside my dormitory. When I saw my friend Lun with a black eye, the university was desperately trying to catch the perpetrators while keeping the incident under tight wraps. My first thought was to stick my long, journalistically nosy fingers into the cookie dough. Yet before I had any time to begin researching racism in Russia, Lun was patched up at the hospital and the university declared that the guilty parties would be impossible to track down since they had left no incriminating evidence at the scene of the crime. Besides, the attackers may very well have been fellow students.

I transferred to another university at the end of August, this time moving to Yekaterinburg. The unanticipated perk of studying Russian at a university in Russia is the variety of people you meet from different countries. While mingling in dormitory halls, it is easy to run into Turkish, Japanese, Indonesian and American students. It is also easy to figure out who has encountered his or her fair share of trouble on the street.

While assaults on foreigners are more frequent in Yekaterinburg than in Siberia, there is still a world of difference between life in the provinces and life in Moscow or Petersburg. A Turkish student who studied for two years in Petersburg said he moved to Yekaterinburg because the race-related violence in the northern capital was intolerable. In between telling me how he hated the police and loved the people, he also let me know that Ural-State University authorities here were very careful and hands on when dealing with such incidents. Frequently, the head of the Russian as a foreign language department has personally come to the rescue of students whom the police tried to take advantage of, even though their documents were in perfect order. Usually the police just want some cash before letting innocent students -- guilty only of being born on the wrong side of the Urals -- go free.

A hidden, ignorant racism permeates other spheres of life in Russia. There was the time I found a box of children's cereal that had a picture on the back portraying black people as evil, bloodthirsty natives; the picture was apparently part of a game for kids. When I tried to explain to the store manager that no game for kids should depict people with dark skin as evil, bloodthirsty natives, she coolly explained to me that "such people" lived in the jungle, where there were crocodiles and that all of the above was a perfectly suitable theme for a game on the back of a box of children's cereal. It took me three visits to the store until I finally could meet with the owner and persuade him to remove the boxes from the shelves. To portray such people -- who most Russian children will never actually encounter in real life -- as public enemy No. 1 is unacceptable, hateful and mindless. But this was but one small victory, one small achievement.

So why does all this touch me so deeply here, in this particular place, when similar problems exist all over the world -- in the former Soviet Union, in the United States, in Europe (including my own country of Sweden)? Why does it pain me to hear ignorant, thoughtless opinion bandied about as if it were fact? Why should it matter that much that I often spot "Russia for Russians!" spray-painted or etched into the sides of buildings? Maybe it's because Russia has neither the huge boatloads of immigrants nor the challenges that often come from accommodating those immigrants that other countries face. Maybe it's because most Russians have never spoken to the people they disparage nor visited the countries these newcomers come from. Maybe it's because I am a foreigner who came to this country not for a night or a week but for my life.

I know I am welcome here -- I'm greeted with a warm smile everywhere I go -- but I hate to think the welcome mat is only extended to people who look like me.

Josefina Lundblad is a poet and writer from Gothenburg, Sweden. She is a student in Yekaterinburg.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/sitemap/free/2006/9/article/different-foreigners-confront-different-russias/202285.html