The Russian Education Ministry is to investigate a St. Petersburg university who erased a non-Slavic student from their promotional material, the Baltika FM news station reported Friday.
The poster at the St. Petersburg University of the Humanities and Social Sciences (SPbGUP) used a photo which originally featured a student of Bashkir origin.
The
student was removed using Photoshop and replaced with a student of
Slavic appearance. The other students in the photo remained unchanged.
"Well, it looks like I've gone," the Bashkir student wrote on his social media page, saying that he would go to "get his self-esteem out from the bottom of the Mariana Trench."
The Slavic student whose head was used as a replacement also condemned the move, Baltic FM reported.
The Education Ministry said that the incident would be investigated, and that ethnic discrimination was in violation of the Russian Constitution.
"SPbGUP does not discriminate against its students and staff on the basis of nationality," the university said in a statement. "We use photos of students with high academic achievement in all of our posters, booklets and publications."
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