01.05.2005 Skinheads in contemporary Russia

Report prepared by the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights
Skinheads are participants of the radical nationalist youth movement adhering to the “white power” ideology – the ideology of “white fight” against the “aliens”. They consider themselves “soldiers of the Third World War in which the white race shall win or perish. Skinheads are fighting against “occupants” they believe all non-Aryans –Africans, Asians, natives of the Caucasus and the North – to be. Their goal is to drive all non-Russians away from Russia. At that their main rule is “The enemy does not have age, nor gender”. That is how they justify their attacks against women and children of “wrong” nationalities.
Skinhead’s uniform includes heavy boots (Dr. Martens, Grinders or army boots), rolled up khaki pants or jeans, suspenders, black (or sometimes khaki or dark blue) jackets (“bomber”, “scooter” or “Bundeswehr”) and military caps. On the stripes: the Celtic cross; the Confederate Cross (flag of the southern slave-owning states in the civil war); scull and bones (“Totenkopf”) over a heart; inscription “Skinhead” in gothic script on the back; the right white fist with the words “White Power” or letters “WP” over it (contrary to the Trozkists who use the left fist in their symbolic); imperial or state flag over the thunderbolt on the left sleeve; stripe with a shield on the right sleeve; swastika (both 4-ray and 3-ray – symbol of racists of the Southern African Republic); Hitler’s portrait; bulldog in a spiked collar; stylized picture of a baseball bat, runic symbols used in Nazi Germany – doubled “zig” (two thunderbolts like SS), “othal” and others; “Oi!” – the greeting of British workers that rendered a name to a style in music; numbers 88 (“Heil Hitler”) and 18 (“Adolph Hitler”); 14 words ("We Must Secure The Existence Of Our People And A Future For White Children!").
Practically every more or less significant internet resource of the Russian skinheads contains a library. Literature popular among the skinheads: Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler, Russia Is Awakening by Dmitry Nesterov, 88 Commandments by David Lain and ABC of Slavic Skinheads.
Skinhead image also includes Nazi tattoos and Nazi greetings.
The number of skinheads in the Russian Federation comes to 50 000 (to compare: the number of skinheads in the world, excluding Russia, is less than 70 000). The largest skinhead community (10000 – 15000) is registered in St.Petersburg, Kaliningrad (around 1000), Nizhniy Novgorod (up to 600, according to other data up to 2500), Rostov-on-Don (over 1500), over a thousand in Pskov, Kaliningrad, Yekaterinburg and Krasnodar, several hundreds in Voronezh, Samara, Saratov, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Omsk, Tomsk, Vladivostok, Ryazan and Petrozavodsk. Today skinhead communities exist in 85 cities of Russia. Mostly they form isolated groups of 3 to 10 members. At that if earlier skinheads group existed only in big cities and in the towns of the Southern part of Russia, where the ethnic tensions are very acute, today this movement is spreading over regional and county centers. However, their actions often do not meet the approval of the local population. According to the survey carried out by the experts of the Chelyabinsk branch of the Economics Institute of the Urals Regional Department of the Russian Academy of Science 60% of the respondents believed it necessary to institute criminal proceedings against skinheads; 15% declared that it was necessary to apply physical punishment to juvenile extremists i.e. to publicly whip them at city squares. On the other hand, one sixth of Chelyabinsk residents believe that it is useless to fight against skinheads. The majority of skinheads are teenagers aged 13-20, a lot of whom simply have nothing else to do.
Today the Russian skinheads do not have a central, uniting power. This movement consists of a large number of groups comprising 3 to 10 members.
Skinheads are the most aggressive group among Russian nationalists. The majority of committed in Russia in 2004 40 murders and hundreds of attacks on ethnic grounds is their doing.
At least four murders on ethnic grounds were committed by skinheads in St.Petersburg. The murder of 9-year-old Tajik girl Hursheda Sultanova (February 9, 2004) received the deepest public resonance. Five murders were committed in Moscow and the Moscow Region. The gloomy glory of the “murder capital" could be taken from the capitals by the city of Surgut where, as it turned out, 4 such crimes were committed within less than nine months of 2004. Two murders were committed in Samara; two in Vladivostok. Two persons were killed in organized by skinheads pogroms at the food markets in Volgograd (April 7, 2004) and Novosibirsk (July 15, 2004). On February 23, 2004 student of the Burdenko Medical Academy Amaru Lima was killed in the center of Voronezh. In May 2004 in Nizhniy Novgorod skinheads armed with rods and chains yelling “Kill the blacks!" attacked a 50-year-old migrant from Azerbaijan. Several days later he died in the hospital. On October 14, 2004 two youngsters aged 15-16 being under intoxication stubbed to death a Chinese.
There were a lot more cases of attacks on "aliens” rather than murders. The following are just several examples. At the end of February skinheads attacked 17-year-old sportswoman from Buryatia Darima Nimayeva who participated in the Archery Cup of Russia held in the city of Orel. She was attacked on her way from the competition to the hotel. The girl suffered injuries and severe psychological shock.
On 16 April, 2004 in Vladivostok, about sixty skinheads atrociously beat six Chinese people near a dormitory on the cape of Chumak. It was only owing to the armed guards of the yacht club that the Chinese citizens escaped death. The guards called the police and also managed to detain about ten skinheads.
In the night of May 9, 2004 more than 100 skinheads armed with stones, sticks and iron bars looted several stalls near Kolomenskoye subway station. Several passers-by were beaten.
In the late evening of September 18, 2004 a group of skinheads yelling “This is for terrorist attacks” attacked Azeri I.Abdullayev (42), Armenian B.Pogosyan (27) and Tajik Z.Dodozhenov (27) in a carriage on the stretch Aeroport – Dynamo of the Moscow subway inflicting multiple injuries and knife wounds on the victims.
On October 28 skinheads beat Luk Zoa, defender of the Moscow Spartak team from Cameroon. In the beginning of November intern of the Vienna Theatre Lu Chi Min was beaten in the subway by a group of skinheads. On December 4 a group of eight people, allegedly skinheads, attacked three officers of the Chinese Navy, students of the Navy Academy in St.Petersburg. They were attacked in the vicinity of “Chernaya Rechka” subway station on their way back to the hotel. Three Chinese officers – one aged 42 and two aged 32 – were hospitalized with cranial-cerebral injuries and multiple bruises.
Attacks on foreign students of the Russian higher institutions continued in 2004. Beatings were registered in Moscow, Ivanovo, Belgorod, Vladimir, Kaluga, Kovrov, Krasnodar, Kursk, Nizhniy Novgorod, Ryazan and Tula. Such attacks are quite often. In Kursk, over the period February 29 – March 14, 2004 five foreign students from Malaysia, Sri-Lanka and Arab countries were beaten. The local skinheads literarily besieged the dormitories of the foreign students. Not less than four skinhead attacks on dark-skinned students were registered in the first half of March in Kursk.
The latest of such attacks was registered on March 27 in Krasnodar. Two foreign students of the Kuban Medical Academy were atrociously beaten at the main entrance to the building of Kuban State University. In addition of attacks on and murders of “the aliens” skinheads also attack the premises of “wrong” (mostly Jewish) organizations. Attacks on a community center in Ulyanovsk and on synagogues in Penza and Kostroma were registered in 2004.
Unfortunately, the representatives of law enforcement agencies often declare that “there are no skinheads in their areas and all attacks on foreigners and “aliens” are but hooliganism”. For instance, though policemen had detained two participants of the attack on the synagogue in Penza in the beginning of November, the representatives of the City Internal Affairs Department declared that “there were no skinheads in the vicinity of the synagogue” trying to reduce the case to common hooliganism. The representatives of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department insisted on the “domestic crime” version of the murder of migrant from Zakavkazye D.Tarkeladze (December 19, 2004) even after one of the skinhead groups had taken responsibility for this crime.
We might also mention the surprisingly lenient sentence passed on the defendants charged with participation in pogrom at the Yasnevo market in 2001 when the majority of offenders got away with probations or were acquitted. Participants of the market pogrom in Volgograd in April 2004 were also sentenced to probations. On October 1, 2004 a similar sentence was passed on Krasnodar skinheads found guilty of attacks on African students in March 2004.
Often policemen simply do not want to be involved in such cases. The incident was registered in Yoshkar-Ola in Jul 2004 when policemen ignored a skinhead attack on two migrants from the Caucasus that happened before their very eyes. Similar indifference was registered when a Jewish woman was beaten by a group of nationalistic youngsters. It is interesting that according to the surveys conducted by the Levada Center, two thirds of the respondents believe that the law enforcement agencies shut their eye on skinhead activities. Only 19% believe that police and prosecutors try fight against it. According to 3% of the respondents, our law enforcement agencies support skinheads and their likes.
On the other hand, in case of close attention of authorities to a case, representatives of the law enforcement agencies manage to promptly find the guilty. After the murder of H.Sultanova the St.Petersburg Internal Affairs Department examined approximately 5000 persons affiliated with youth gangs, surveyed 97 schools and examined every person registered in the records of the department. Police "suddenly" revealed 30 youth groups, 17 of them of clearly extremist orientation.
According to certain sources, the Moscow Police Department started to form a special police force to suppress skinhead movement. Head of the Moscow Police V.Pronin who earlier had denied existence of skinheads in Moscow finally had to admit that there were at least 500 skinheads, “nationalists and anti-globalists” sadly stressing that “that is only the youngsters we managed to register in our lists, in reality there are many more".
In July 2004 the Moscow City Court sentenced the group of skinheads who had committed a double murder of migrants from the Caucasus in December 2003 to prison terms of 9 to 14 years. In October 2004 three skinheads who had killed a Tajik at a railway station of Yaroslavl direction on November 6, 2002 were sentenced by the Moscow City Court to 8 and 9 years of prison.
On March 11, 2004 the verdict was passed on the St.Petersburg skinheads who had killed watermelon vendor from Azerbaijan Mamed Mamedov in August 2002. The only defendant found guilty under the article 282 Mr.Lykin was released directly in the courtroom due to expiration of the period of limitation of this article. Two other offenders were sentenced to 7 and 4 years of prison. In December 2004 the St.Petersburg City Court sentenced seven skinheads found guilty of the murder of 6-year-old Tajik girl Nilufar Sangboyeva (September 21, 2003) to the prison terms of 5 to 10 years. On December 15, 2004 the same court sentenced the murderer of Syrian student Abdul Kadir Badavi to 10 years of prison.
On September 30, 2004 the Voronezh City Court passed the verdict on the murderers of Amaru Lima. Three defendants – Ye.Shilov, R.Lednev and V.Kakushin – were sentenced to 17, 10 and 9 years of maximum security prison. According to the court ruling they would pay 150000 rubles in compensation to the family of the victim; Ye.Shilov would pay additional fine in amount of 20000 to the state.
12 members of the organization “Kursk skinheads” were sentenced in Kursk. One of the organizers of attack on an Indian student in Kovrov in the fall of 2003 was found guilty under the article 282, but sentenced to probation since he was a minor. In July 2004 a group of local skinheads that was attacking migrants from Central Asia was sentenced in Surgut. Leader of the group K.Tereshkin was sentenced to 7 years of imprisonment; other members of the group were put on probation. In March 2005 a local skinhead who had been publishing nationalistic materials on the web was found guilty in Kemerovo.
Cases presently under investigation or transferred to the court: the case against yet another group of Surgut skinheads (that comprises four criminal cases); the H.Sultanova murder case; the case against the St.Petersburg Nazi skinhead group “Schulz 88”; the murder case of Korean Ya.Kan who was killed in a Moscow suburban train at the end of 2003; the case against two groups of Novosibirsk skinheads; the case against Kostroma skinheads who had severely beaten a Vietnamese couple; the case against skinhead from Vladivostok I.Nazarenko who has committed two murders on ethnic grounds in the end of August – beginning of September.
Author: Semyon Charniy