Unity day
I have a renovation team plastering & painting my apartment. Quite commonly, these workers are from Central Asia - Tajikis, Uzbeks. I, however, hired a nice "Rossiyanin" team composed of a Chuvash, a Tatar and a Russian fellow - all indigenous nationalities.
One of them, Ruslan, got beaten on the weekend, by a bunch of skinheads. Black eyes and all the rest. He says he had a lucky escape, and things could get much worse.
This is how we celebrated the Unity day.
I remember another episode, from my first renovation. It was an apartment on 5th store of a Stalin apartment block, now sold. No elevator.
In it, I had a nice heavy Soviet cast iron bath tube – maybe 100 kilograms or heavier. And I needed to get rid of it.
So I hired a small Central Asia team of 3 emaciated fellows who agreed to take the thing out. In mere 30 minutes they were able to drag it to the garbage container, where they were stopped by a militia patrol. Only to pay the bribe of just earned 500 rubles: their registration papers weren't right.