The neo-Nazi gang war in Russia

In a paradoxical effect, Moscow's propaganda slogans about the ‘de-Nazification of Ukraine’ are causing skinheads and other violent forms of youth and social rage that seemed to have been archived to rise again in Russia.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - The statistics of assaults by Russian ultra-right-wing groups have been growing for two years now, and the number of such formations fighting with anti-fascists and people of other nationalities is on the rise.

These groups had appeared on the scene in Russia at the beginning of the 2000s, and now seemed to have disappeared. Their return, as documented in a report in Novaja Evropa, appears to be a paradoxical ‘rebound’ effect of the war events aimed at the ‘de-Nazification of Ukraine’, not out of solidarity with the people invaded by the Russians, but because of the topicality of the jargon and behaviour inspired by racism and Nazism, obsessively reported in negative terms by state propaganda, and reinterpreted in positive terms in pockets of youth and social anger.

The new generations of Russians are presenting revived variants of skinheads and even equally angry and violent antifa, renewing the street clashes of 15-20 years ago, a period that does not exist in the memory of the very young. Back then it was a drift of the protest demonstrations against the Medvedev and Putin regimes, which with Aleksej Naval'nyj's anti-corruption proclamations had mobilised many young people, but today such marches are banned and their leaders dead, imprisoned or in exile abroad.

The clashes of today's Russian youth, in which it is difficult to recognise to whom the conflicting groups belong (sometimes skinheads and bonkheads clash) are certainly an effect of the exaggerated bellicism, which is also widespread in schools of all levels.

A trigger date for this phenomenon was 16 November 2024, the anniversary of the killing in 2009 of Ivan Khutorskoj, the 26-year-old legendary leader of the Red and Anarchist Company, known as ‘Vanja Kostolom’, who organised security services to protect punk concerts from neo-Nazi assaults, until he was shot in the head at the entrance to his home.

In the Kprf communist party headquarters in Kostroma, North-Central Russia, a documentary was then shown about ‘Ivan, in memory of our friend’, in which the hero was praised as ‘the first who knew how to give an adequate response to the fascists, and to the other idiots who threw themselves into the fray’.

After the film, two 16-17 year old boys, who had no warlike intentions, were surrounded at the bus stop by a group of other youths, dressed in tattered military uniforms and other symbols of group violence. One of them started to criticise them, accusing them of ‘blasphemy’ for the signs they displayed, such as the ‘black sun’ and crosses, and the leader started to declare that ‘bonkheadism’ was his true religion, turning a beating into a theological dispute. The argument continued until the leader of the ‘blacks’ got tired and shot the boy who was defending the purity of patriotic Orthodoxy in the head.

The video of the episode, filmed by the other boy who escaped, was a sign of the resumption of street wars among the very young, alternating between punitive expeditions against internal migrants from the Caucasus and those from Central Asia, and clashes between the two opposing factions of the Russians themselves.

In 2024, the Telegram channel Made with Hate was opened, one of the main tools for neo-Nazis to gather and convene in places of violent action, and since then the virtual groups on social media have continued to multiply, along with the public and physical ‘Russian Community’ and other nationalist or anarchist formulas.

The ‘patriotic’ justifications of slogans directed at enemies of various kinds, in the context of the war Z-propaganda fuelled by all the media, singers and public figures, has meant that such incidents have long been ignored by the forces of law and order, until they completely lost control of the situation.

Today, young Russians are going beyond the war itself against external enemies, calling for ‘blood, death and extermination of all those who pollute our race’, preparing for a life of violence and universal war.