RUSSIA'S SKINHEADS have begun to hunt and kill immigrants "like game" in the most serious surge in neo-Nazi violence since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Human rights groups say nationalist extremists murdered 41 people in the first three months of this year, more than four times as many as the same period last year. Some groups put the death toll even higher, at 53.

The number and severity of attacks seems to indicate that radical nationalists have become more organised and more willing to kill and maim, usually with a knife.

Victims are stabbed not once but sometimes 20 or 30 times in frenzied attacks accompanied by racial abuse. Those that survive are often scarred for life; in one recent case an immigrant had his nose and lips sliced off. Some of the victims have been women and children.

The attackers are driven by a hatred of non-Russians, who they believe are diluting the gene pool and irrevocably changing the fabric of their country.

"Russia for Russians" is their main slogan. Far-right websites warn that their followers are poised to crank up the severity of the attacks still further, turning to bombs and guns. The victims are mostly people from former Soviet republics in Central Asia, who come to Moscow and St Petersburg to work in construction or do other manual work that Russians don't want to do.

Though the migrant workers fill a gap in the job market, opinion polls show that many ordinary Russians are uncomfortable with their presence and would like to see immigration controls severely tightened. City officials in Moscow, where most of the killings take place, say there are around 850,000 migrants from Central Asia living in a city that has a total population of 10 million.

Their Asian features make them easy targets for skinheads scanning the streets for people of non-Slavic appearance. The killings have sparked a wave of diplomatic protests from the victims' home countries and stirred talk of a street war between skinheads and revenge-minded migrant workers.

Raimkul Attakurov, ambassador for Kyrgyzstan in Russia, complained in a letter sent to Russia's human rights ombudsman earlier this year about what he called "the savage attacks of fascist monsters".

Police have responded by clamping down on skinhead activity, especially in Moscow. But rights groups accuse them of a cover-up when it comes to discussing the problem publicly or providing meaningful crime statistics. Police prefer to classify many of the attacks as mere "hooliganism".

Moscow prosecutor Yuri Semin said last week that he thought the media had "exaggerated" the upsurge in killings and questioned the reliability of statistics released by human rights groups. The police itself keeps no detailed records but insists the number of race hate crimes is falling.

"If someone kills a Kyrgyz, it's inevitably assumed it's on ethnic grounds," said prosecutor Semin. "For some reason, it's assumed that people can't kill Kyrgyz people for other reasons."

Semyon Charny, an expert at the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, believes the authorities find the problem inconvenient. "The authorities in Moscow are interested in creating a good image for the city," he said. (But) in recent times the number of extremist crimes is on the increase. It is, as one magazine put it, like a safari."

Police also cite the large number of crimes committed by immigrants whenever the problem is raised, hinting that they are facing a backlash of their own making. Embassies are advising migrant workers to avoid going out on their own, to always be smartly dressed, and to drink alcohol in private rather than in the street.

Galina Kozhevnikova of rights group Sova believes official rhetoric, which has become increasingly strident and nationalistic in tone, is partly to blame. Politicians from outgoing president Vladimir Putin to Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov have made comments that appear to favour ethnic Russians over immigrants, while laws have been introduced to limit the number of non-Russians working in the retail sector.

Police made a string of high-profile arrests in the last year that appeared to have decapitated the underground neo-Nazi movement. But Kozhevnikova said the arrests have, paradoxically, only encouraged others who seek the same notoriety and infamy in far-right circles.

It has, she said, become "fashionable" to be a skinhead and "cool" to kill an immigrant.

Sociologists say Russia is home to about 70,000 skinheads and that they tend to congregate in large urban centres such as Moscow and St Petersburg, which has also seen a large number of murders of non-Russians. About 30,000-35,000 of them have neo-Nazi beliefs.

Yevgeny Proshechkin, chairman of Moscow's anti-fascist centre, urges the authorities to wake up to what he calls "acts of terrorism".

"Things need to be called by their name," he told the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta. "We are standing on a dangerous threshold."