Ryan wrote:
The Russian ultras would like the name of our team though, an extremely racist bunch.
The last time I was in Moscow the security was extremely high because a Dynamo fan was killed when playing one of the Caucasus teams. They were chanting Russia for the Russians in the street, even though the peoples of the Caucasus have been part of the Russian empire since it's beginning.
As far as cost - Moscow is expensive, but you would have thought that the Russian national team would pay expenses? The reason why we don't get teams here is because we don't want to pay the fees, etc. And while it is cold in Moscow in winter the city is seriously set up to deal with it, -15 degrees (or 30+ in summer) is just part of life and everything still functions pretty well. The stadiums aren't covered (although that might have changed with the new spartak stadium that they built for the world cup?) but they are pretty well enclosed.
Not really from the beginning of the empire, and not necessarily willingly. Russia only managed to fully subjugate the North Caucasus in the late nineteenth century. Then it was occupied by the Nazis in WWII, so after the war Stalin forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of people from the region to Kazakhstan for "collaborating" with the invaders. When they came back Russians had shifted into their homes and taken their farms etc. Then when the USSR collapsed, Chechnya fought and won a war against the Russian state and was de facto independent for a few years until the Russian's rolled back in and crushed them in 1999. Now Chechnya is part of Russia again and ruled with an iron fist by a pro-Putin stooge, but Dagestan just beside it has had an ongoing insurgency against Russian rule. It's kind of been co-opted into global jihadism as the region is strongly Muslim but the roots of the conflict are very much ethnic and colonial. So there hasn't been much time in the last couple of centuries where there wasn't some sort of conflict between the Russian state/ethnic Russians and the peoples of the Caucasus. I guess it's kind of analogous to the Northern Ireland situation within the UK during the Troubles - historical grievances, population transfers, ethnic or religious differences, terror attacks against security forces and civilians etc. It kind of makes it hard to have an inclusive national identity when groups within your nation are trying to kill each other.
Russian football fans are notoriously racist though, regardless of the specifics.