Russian Real Estate Service Deletes Xenophobic Elements In Rental Ads After RFE/RL Report

An online real estate service in Russia has started deleting advertisements with xenophobic elements after an RFE/RL report focusing on ads offering rentals "for Slavs only" was published last week.

CIAN.ru announced on December 6 that all individuals and companies who placed ads on the service's website with discriminatory texts must edit them and delete any improperly worded sentences by February 1, 2022.

The service added that, after this deadline, it will fix such texts on its own as it sees fit.

"We stand for equal opportunity for all CIAN.ru users and believe that this decision will become the industry standard" for the real estate market, the CIAN. statement said.

The announcement comes four days after RFE/RL's Idel.Realities published an investigative report revealing that more than 1,000 ads on renting apartments and houses on the CIAN.ru website noted that the properties could be rented by "Slavs only."

Lev Gudkov, deputy director of the pollster Levada-Center, told RFE/RL that xenophobia was on the rise across Russia as a result of government policies that "turned inaccessible slogans into accessible ones."

CIAN.ru's press service told RFE/RL on December 6 that the group's current goal was "to exclude content that discriminates the rights of some categories of users on the basis of their ethnicity, religion. etc."

Millions of Russian citizens are not Slavs, but represent different ethnic groups such as Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Mongol, Jewish, and many other ethnicities.