In January, 2007 at least 39 people, 7 of them dead, became victims of hate crimes in Russia. Moscow remained the center of racist and neo-nazi violence: all of the murders and 11 more attacks were committed there.

Besides, bias motivated attacks were registered in St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Voronezh and Chita.

The attack on a 20-year old antifascist Ivan Jelin on January 14, 2007, in St. Petersburg, became the high profile case of the month.

The young man was on his way home after a charity action "Food not bombs" he had taken part in, when he was attacked by a group of neo-nazis armed with knifes. Jelin was hospitalized with 20 knife wounds, he was operated on several times. Fortunately, his life is out of danger at the moment.

According to the information we have on the January attacks, half of all the victims were left-wing activists and youth subculture representatives. Although neo-nazi and antifa street clashes have become more frequent since the last year's fall, the latter ones are not a priority for the neo-nazi attacks. Consequently, we can assume the real number of hate crimes in January to be several times higher than that we know.

It is rather hard to determine a particular target group among other victims: any person of non-Slavic appearance (coming from the Caucasus, Central Asia, China, etc.) can become an object of racially motivated violence. However, the majority of the people murdered in January did come from the Caucasus (5 people).