Unless you read the European press you probably don’t know that there are blacks living in Russia.
I followed a link in Some Old Dude’s blog to the English Russia site.
There I followed the link to some photographs of the homeless in Russia and discovered this shot.

While I am assuming that one or both of the women in the foreground are homeless. It was the two men in the background that caught my eye.

Like most people I have seen photographs of Russia and her people, but these are the first blacks I have ever seen photographed out on the street.

I read an article on the BBC’s website about race relations in Russia, but without context, it’s just portraits and rhetoric with no solid associations. Those people could have been anywhere on the planet. In fact they could have been models hired for the job sitting in front of backdrops in a studio in London.

Somehow the news manages to portray people in a closed environment, detached from wherever the story occurred. If you see a person on the street amongst other people it makes that person and their story more real and gives them a location for you to reference.