Ferguson riots play big in Russia

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In the United States, “which has positioned itself as a ‘bastion of human rights’ and is actively engaged in 'export of democracy' on a systematic basis, serious violations of basic human rights and barbaric practices thrive,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Friday, in a special commentary on the situation in Ferguson. “We would like to advise American partners to pay more attention to restoring order in their own country, before imposing their dubious experience on other states.”

The United States' problems with racism have long been a favored topic for Russians, dating back to the heyday of the Soviet Union.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet leaders pointed to the existence of Jim Crow laws in the United States as a way of asserting the moral superiority of the Soviet Union. Racism, which was illegal in the Soviet Union, was deemed a systematic byproduct of capitalism.

In the civil rights era, especially, the Soviet Union used American anti-black racism as fodder to challenge the United States’ claims to leadership of the “free world.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry said the “police murder of an African-American teenager in the city of Ferguson” had happened in the context of the United States' generally “inhumane” treatment of black Americans, listing medicinal testing and forced sterilization of inmates who are “mostly black,” as well as police abuse of non-whites.

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