The Volgograd Obama leads the way for Russia's blacks

Inevitably, any young black politician standing for election in a country with a white majority is going to draw comparisons with Barack Obama. So, though his ambitions at the moment are rather more modest, Joaquim Crima, a 37-year-old who moved from Guinea-Bissau to Russia in the dying days of the Soviet Union, has already been labeled the 'Volgograd Obama'.

Crima came to Russia to study for a teaching degree and ended up getting married and selling watermelons grown by his Armenian father-in-law. He is campaigning to be elected 'district chief' in Srednyaya Akhtuba, a town of 14,000 or so in the Volgograd region of southern Russia.

He was driven to run for office by the atrocious roads and unhealthy water in the town, and, after a billboard campaign, is optimistic of his prospects. "I have a chance to change some things for the better and I have an obligation to do so," he says, adding that "sooner or later Russia will be ready" to accept black political leadership.

But the evidence suggests otherwise – and reveals the strong undercurrent of racism in modern Russia.

Viktor Sapozhnikov, chief of the district election commission, told the AFP that voters in Srednyaya Akhtuba would only vote for Crima as a gesture of protest at the paucity of the other options available to them or "for the sake of a joke".

For black people in Russia, it doesn't pay to be too sensitive about their ethnicity

The real Obama was also recently involved in a joke. In an advert for 'Duet', a chocolate and vanilla ice-cream, there was a cartoon of the US President standing in front of Capitol Hill with a beaming smile under the slogan "The Flavor of the Week! Black in White!" The creative director at the agency which made the advert said, "This is not racism for Russia. It's just fun." Obama's image has also been used around Moscow to promote tanning salons and dentists.

So, for black people who live in Russia, it doesn't pay to be too sensitive about their ethnicity. Pop star Narcisse, who came to study in Moscow from a wealthy Cameroonian family, was evidently aware of this. He had chart success in summer 2004 with a ska tune whose chorus began: "I'm a chocolate bunny, I'm a tender rascal, I'm 100 per cent sweet."

Though Russia's national poet, Pushkin, had black ancestry, there were hardly any black people in Russia until 1960, when, as a symbol of internationalism and post-colonial solidarity, the Patrice Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University, named after the revolutionary Congolese leader, was founded in Moscow. Students from all over the Third World, including some 400,000 Africans, studied in Russia during the Cold War, and there are now, perhaps, somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 black or mixed race Russians.

That upper estimate of 70,000 is the same as the number of neo-Nazis that there may well be in Russia, which is said to host half the world's total. This is a homogenous and virulently nationalistic society, where more than half those surveyed recently said that they approved of the slogan 'Russia for the Russians'. As a consequence, flying banana skins and monkey grunts are considered unremarkable, and black western tourists recount how they've been spat at by old ladies, had restaurant staff refuse to direct them to the lavatories, and been rejected by doormen at clubs.

This situation has deteriorated over the course of the last decade; one Londoner, who enjoyed living in Moscow during the early 1990s, said that the country he returned to in 2003 was a far more hostile place. The police often participate in rather than prevent harassment. Not long ago Dirk Advocaat, the Dutch coach of Zenit St Petersburg, admitted in an interview with a Russian paper that Zenit's fans wouldn't accept it if he signed a black player.

Last December, Stanley Robinson III, an 18-year-old from Rhode Island, was studying with an American Field Service language immersion course at a university in Volgograd, an industrial city 600 miles from Moscow. After no apparent provocation, he was set upon by three skinheads, stabbed twice in the chest and eventually had to be air-lifted to Finland after catching pneumonia.

This sort of hate crime is common, is often perpetrated by teenagers, and the victims can include, for various reasons, anyone who doesn't have a Slavic appearance. This encompasses people from the Caucasus, notably Armenians, Muslims from Central Asian – a nine-year-old Tajik girl was stabbed to death in 2004 - Jews, Chinese migrants, and even white Westerners. Sova, a Moscow information centre, reported 80 race-related murders in 2008, along with over 300 instances where non-Russians were beaten up.

Vladimir Putin has relayed his condemnation of these attacks, but his track record is appalling. Responding in 2005 to accusations of human rights abuses in Russia, Putin retorted: "We all know that African countries used to have a tradition of eating their own adversaries." ·