#39 | May 21 - June 4, 1998  

By Matt Taibbi

A few weeks ago Ames and I went out on one of the weirdest evenings either of us has experienced here in Russia. We'd been invited to a striptease party by a couple of punks named Sasha and Andrei, old friends we'd met at the Titan squat near Mayakovskaya Ploschad.

Sasha didn't tell us much about the party. He just said that there was going to be some kind of weird strip thing going on, and that we really had to come. But when we went down to the Hotel Cosmos to check it out, we found a very bizarre scene: a mixed gang of bikers and skinheads hanging out at the mezzanine lounge of the hotel, shooting pool and sipping mixed drinks and draft beer. At around 11:00 a couple of skanky strippers came out and performed an R-rated act in the bar, spinning around for a few minutes with their panties on before scooting out the back door. Guys in KKK t-shirts hooted and hollered and placidly sipped their beers.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the lobby, diplomats and businessmen in ties and jackets mulled around the check-in desk and exchange counter, enjoying the services of an otherwise very reputable hotel.

At one point I slipped away from the strip show and tried to get onto the pool table, which had been monopolized by a pair of skinheads for the last few hours. I waited for their game to finish, then put a token down.

"But my girlfriend and I wanted to play," said one skin.
"You've been on this table for an hour," I said.
"Okay," he said. "But can I have next?"
"Fine," I said, racking it up.

I remember thinking: a real skinhead would have kicked my foreign ass right then and there just for daring to speak to him in a public place. But these guys were acting like obsequious college freshmen. The KKK shirts were disgusting, but on the whole, I'd felt more fear driving through Northampton, Massachusetts and asking to use the bathroom at the Smith College administration building.

There are some real skinheads and racists out there, and their numbers do appear to be growing. And they really are beating up black people and Jews. On May 2, a black member of the U.S. Marine guard of the U.S. Embassy was savagely beaten by a group of skins, prompting an international press furor. Despite the irritating fact of it taking an attack on an American for the Western press to recognize a problem that had been developing for over a year, the gist of the press gangbang was essentially correct: there are a lot of young people out there in modern Russia with a lot of really bad ideas, and they aren't being given much incentive to change their minds about anything at all.

Nonetheless, the sudden focus on skinhead activity in Moscow looks and smells like a classic press snow job-the bombardment of information about one thing, to the exclusion of any information at all about something else. Neo-Nazis and skinheads, followers of Barshakov, they're all wrong in the head and ought to be stopped, but they're only one small reason why black people's lives suck in this city. In fact, minorities, along with the rest of us, have much bigger problems to worry about. Here are five reasons why the hype about skinheads is off-target-and the average person should fear the cops more than the skins:

1. Moscow policemen are ten times more likely to abuse minorities than skinheads.
Sheer numbers are a big reason. According to the Panorama research center, there are about 10,000 people nationwide who belong to anti-semitic, Neo-Nazi, or skinhead organizations. In contrast, there are over 25,000 police in Moscow alone, an armed force rivaled only by the 30,000+ army of the New York City police department. Last year, the Helsinki Watch human rights organization reported that there had been nearly a million illegal searches of apartments by Moscow police in a 12 month period spanning 1996-1997, with a sizable number of those being searched coming from the Caucasus or other ethnic groups. Police routinely beat up and detain African students, particularly in the Yugo-Zapadnaya region. Although Gabriel Kochofa of the Foreign Students Association reports that 10-15 people a month come to him with complaints about being hassled by skinheads, there are any number of accounts-including firsthand testimony by eXile contributor Stanley Williams-which suggest that a far greater number of blacks and African students are being hassled and detained on a regular basis by Moscow cops. Moscow policemen recently beat an Azerbaidjani to death, prompting an ugly public demonstration by 1,500 Azeris a few weeks ago. In general, the rise of skinheads only testifies to the moral slackening of the police, who almost certainly tacitly encourage skins to attack the same people they do, and who are certainly thrilled to see skins vilified as the chief oppressor of minorities in this city, while they go unmentioned in the press.

There is probably no larger force of violent racists in Europe than the Moscow city police. These guys are out there beating up black people and Kavkatsi in huge numbers every single day. But you almost never hear police called monsters or racists by foreign journalists. Instead, just as reporters in America focused on militia groups as society's bogey men, they found a group here in Russia that is already marginalized to turn into a primary villain of mainstream society. Skinheads make good copy and good television, and you don't risk being called subversive by writing about them. That's why they'll always outperform cops on the airwaves.

2. Somebody is benefitting from the flood of stories about skinheads.
Is it just us, or does it seem like a strange coincidence to anyone else that the instant the communist party is discredited, and Alexander Lebed arrives on the scene as a major political force, that skinheads suddenly appear as a big deal in Moscow life? As Oleg Vakulovsky, a journalist who has won a reputation for his reports on the financing sources of Russian Union chief Mikhail Barshakov, said in an interview with Novaya Gazeta:
"What's happening today really looks like a new round of scare tactics on the eve of the upcoming Presidential elections. Possibly, there is an attempt underfoot to manipulate public opinion. All the moreso, since nationalist-fascist groups have always operated under the protection of government structures in this country. It's paradoxical, but a fact: to have a strong contingent of fascists and Neo-Nazis in this country is very useful to the government. It means there's always someone to scare people with, always someone to fight against, and, most importantly, always someone to defeat."

Or, as Liberal Democratic chief Vladimir Zhirinovsky once said about lunatic nationalist Alexander Lukashenko: "We trot him out every time we want a loan from the I.M.F."

It's routine tactic of repressive governments to play up this criminal group or another just before announcing a round of sweeping anti-crime measures, a "state of emergency," or other laws which would restrict bourgeois freedoms in the name of clamping down on social unrest. Again, it's probably no coincidence that the sudden press focus on skinheads came at exactly the time when a repressive new anti-drug law, which allows police to take people off the street and force them to take drug tests, has been introduced into the Russian criminal code. Among our own circle of acquaintances here at the eXile, three people have already been detained under the new law-all young people in their teens or early twenties.

Also, don't forget that the sudden focus on skins comes on the heels of a violent student demonstration in Yekaterinburg, which was probably the first serious anti-government youth demonstration to gain national attention. Like the youth political group Gamayun, which turned out to be a group of slackers so lame they couldn't fill a Russkoye Bistro for an announced anti-government demonstration at Chistiye Prudi park last summer, the skins are going to get a lot of press because it's in the government's interest to have skins attributed with a disproportionate amount of political might. It allows them to paint the youth movement as being led by dangerous anarchists (i.e. Gamayun) or violent racists (i.e. skinheads). You can be sure that whoever the government candidate is in 2000 is going to campaign as the candidate of tolerance, the one who will mollify and restrain the Neo-Nazi movement.

3. The government itself is inspiring the very attitudes skinheads are being vilified for.
In a recent Duma debate over a bill which would have outlawed fascist propaganda, Communists, Agrarians, and Liberal Democrats alike railed against the bill as unnecessary and even insulting to the Russian people. Vladimir Zhirinovsky stood up on the podium and said, "We're talking about a law that's going to put people in jail the instant they start talking about the motherland." Anatoly Greshnevikov of "Narodovlastiye" went one step further, demanding to know why an anti-fascism law was being considered when there was no anti-Zionism law on the table.

"The reason you're seeing synagogues blown up is because people in power are encouraging these attitudes," said Yuri Schekochikin, a deputy from the Yabloko fraction. "When people in power forward a picture of one group of people not as a friend, but as an enemy, then the rest of society will follow."

4. There just aren't that many of these people.
The skinhead movement first started to pick up speed around 1994, and today about 10,000 are scattered among various groups, including "White Power", "Blood and Honor", "Street Fighter", "Moscow Skin Legion"`and others. Their biggest numbers are found in Moscow, Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk, Irkutsk and Vladivostok. Skins have been observed hanging around demonstrations with the non-skin anti-semite political party Russian National Union, best known for its hate rag "Sturmovik", which can be purchased at a few streetcorners around the city. The RNU has led street raids on Kavkatsi and blacks, and has claimed responsibility for the 1996 bombing of a synagogue in Yaroslavl. The local leader of the RNU in Yaroslavl, according to the newspaper "Russkaya Muisl", is a skinhead who goes by the asinine name of "Hank." Hank is also said to be a leader of the local skinhead movement.

Nonetheless, despite their affiliations with truly dangerous people like the RNU, the skins are a pretty sad bunch. A group of them got their asses kicked by a bunch of lanky techno dancers when a brawl broke out at a recent "Clawfinger" concert. They are regularly beaten to a pulp in post-match brawls by fans of the soccer teams "Spartak" and "Dinamo," whose games they for some reason attend in large numbers. There isn't a country in Western Europe that doesn't boast an army of soccer hooligans ten times scarier than Russia's skinheads.

10,000 people scattered across the Russian land mass, in a population of 150 million, just isn't that many. At the same time, every major city in Russia has over 10,000 policemen, a large number of who come from the same class and have the same background as the skins. They're armed, organized, and have a license to harass. And they're doing so more effectively and thoroughly than the skinheads are. You don't see the cops getting beaten up at Swedish rap concerts.

5. This is anarchy-what do you expect?
It would be madness to expect that skinheads would not appear in a country whose government refuses to investigate or prosecute high-profile murders, allows whole industries to be handed over to gangsters for nothing, and rewards bribe-takers and embezzlers by giving them seats at the top of major state industries (like Pyotr Mostovoi, who was made VP of Russian Almaz, or Anatoly Chubais). The problem with skinheads is that their anger is totally misguided. This is a characteristic of fascism in general: a tendency to blame minorities for the failures of their own governments, and a politics based on terror for its own sake, rather than ideological conviction. Skinheads are stupid in the same way that teenagers everywhere are: they're attracted to uniforms, testosterone-charged symbols, and facile explanations for their problems, while at the same time being too lazy and uneducated to read the news and find out who their real enemies are.

Skinheads aren't an irrational phenomenon. Their presence makes sense. They're here because life in Russia sucks for most young people. That doesn't make what they do right. But it does mean that they're not the chief defendants in these highly-publicized violent crimes. Actually they're just minor accomplices in a conspiracy of violence for which the Russian government, by its cynicism, shortsightedness, and incompetence, is more complicit than anyone.