One of Russia's top law enforcement officials told the press that "crimes of an extremist character" have increased by almost six times in Moscow, according to a July 25, 2008 report posted on the web site of the radio station "Ekho Moskvy." According to Aleksandr Bastrykhin, head of the government's Investigative Committee, 73 extremist crimes have been recorded in Moscow so far this year, compared to just 13 in the first half of 2007. Most of the extremist murders committed during that time were carried out by youths. Unfortunately, per the usual government practice, there is no distinction made within the statistics between neo-Nazi assaults and murders, the distribution of Islamist or neo-Nazi propaganda, or the increasing number of cases in which police detain non-violent political opponents of the government like the National Bolshevik Party or liberal followers of Gary Kasparov and charge them with "extremism."

A few days before (July 18), Moscow's chief prosecutor Yuri Syomin, who has a record of minimizing the scale of hate crimes in his city and as recently as March 2008 reported that the number of extremist crimes is actually falling "year by year" in Moscow, gave an interview to the local newspaper "Vechenyaya Moskva" in which he sharply criticized NGOs for what he termed their exaggerated reports of racist violence. He singled out the widely respected Sova Information-Analytical Center, stating that it puts out "astronomical figures" of the number of skinheads in Russia (though Sova does not collect such impossible to gather statistics), and accuses Sova of counting every attack on a minority that is not a clear robbery as a hate crime. Mr. Syomin also spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the National Bolshevik Party, which has not been implicated in any hate crimes in Moscow, but whose agitation sometimes gets counted as an "extremist crime." He reported in the interview that 52 extremist crimes have been recorded so far this year in Moscow--21 fewer crimes than Mr. Bastrykhin's agency reported just a week later. He added that thanks to greater police focus on "extremist crimes," the number of murders of ethnic minorities in Moscow has fallen for three years in a row.

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