They also said he looked like a "kavkazets," a man from the Caucasus." In some Russians' minds, "kavkazets" is a negative word that conjures up a longstanding negative picture of a foreign and unwanted figure in Russians' midst [...]

Xenophobia has a long history in Moscow with economic crises exacerbating the situation...

This kind of generalizations regarding negative words and "long histories" are not something I really understand. What I can say is that this "kavkazets" xenophobia was much less obvious in the Soviet times - if you could call it particularly discernible at all. For what I experienced, it was relatively safe to live in Moscow for Caucasians, even Africans or anyone else. The Caucasians were often considered as cheerful, friendly fellas; there were plenty of jokes about them - but who would say they were mean?

My point is not to idealize the Soviet national relations - even if I would recommend to consider them as remarkably carefree. The rapid post-Soviet transformations to ultra-individualist, xenophobic, neo-feudal predator societies make me wonder of some intelligent designs or biased selections prepared ready for the communist collapse, seriously. It is not only "oppressed" post-communist churches that got free passes to the status of national symbols. And whatever you think of "Pravda" or "Izvestiya" (not that I ever read them more than a few articles), the uniform dumbing down of media was another development that stroke me.

I will take liberty to quote from an email from a Russian friend (with a bit of emphasis of mine). He got into Kafkian trouble with former business partners and the legal system. It was certainly much simpler to stay out of serious trouble under the repressive Soviet regime.

...the difference is that previously if you do not say anything wrong against the communist system than nobody touch you. Now, I think about 50% of men in Russia serves in some security structures, their salaries are not too small but surely not enough to buy mercedes, houses, etc. So there are many organized groups who earn their money by threatening normal people and business. If you look in our Russian news almost every week there is information that milice attack this or that relatively large business, arrested offices, confiscated documents, computers, goods, together with the owners. After that the business is destroyed and it taken by some person affiliated with these "security" structures. All these process is actually organized from Kremlin, so now we cannot go to any " nachal'nik" like it was in Soviet time and ask to stop violence. This organized criminal groups has their roots exactly in Kremlin, it closes its eyes on these things as long as Milice and FSB (the analog of KGB) suppress political opposition. The only thing which is possible to do in this situation is to find another analogous criminal group, pay them and let them agree with the first group....

If all this free sway of "security" and xenophobia can be predictably good to control the huge country "comfortably", wouldn't central forces choose to encourage that? There must have been a method behind "waking up" that Russian xenophobic nature so badly.