From the Financial Times
There are many gangs who hang out in the high-rise, low-income flats built in the 1960s and 1970s on the outskirts of most Russian cities. It is a world of drugs and warring subcultures of youths, and at the top of that grim heap are the skinheads, the kings of ultra-violence, motivated by hate, alcohol and, in many cases, mental illness. The NSO was made of the same raw materials.
Court documents from the NSO trial, which started in April, and in which 12 of the 13 defendants have pleaded not guilty, offer some unintentionally black-humoured insights into this world. “A skinhead, in my opinion,” testified Sergei Yurova, one of the defendants, “is a person who loves their nation. To affirm our love for the nation I, together with other skinheads, went to football matches, went to fight with the fans of other football teams, and together with other skinheads beat people of non-Slavic appearance.”
To others, though, a skinhead is typified by the NSO’s late leader, Maksim Bazilev, a diagnosed schizophrenic who went by the alias “Adolph”. Aside from his love of violence, he had a fixation on prostitutes – so much so that when police arrested him last April, they found 50 prescriptions in his home for medication to treat venereal disease.
But police also found something else – evidence that Bazilev may have been perhaps a more complex person than a run-of-the-mill psychopath. Bazilev had 200m roubles (£4m) in his bank account. NSO members testified they were each paid roughly Rbs25,000 a month – just over £500 – via a sophisticated system of untraceable bank cards, allowing them to withdraw their monthly salaries.
It’s rumoured ties to the state but it appears to be getting out of control
Instead of disappearing, the movement has gone underground. DPNI and Slavic Union members now belong to what are known in the movement as “autonomous” gangs – basically street thugs united by a loose ideology and a few websites that spout racial hatred.
“Instead of a political organisation, we will disperse into autonomous groups who will carry on military activity,” said Dyumushkin.
Like the Pakistani secret service’s indulgence of the Taliban in the mid-1990s, intended as a directed outlet for Islamic radicalism, the movement has slipped from the grasp of those who would rein it in. Instead of creating a docile manipulable movement, it has unleashed a generation of radicals.
“Five years ago,” said Dmitry Bakhirev, a lawyer for one of the NSO defendants, “you would hear about some skinheads beating a Tajik migrant on the metro. Then it became knives and aluminium bats. Then firearms. Soon you will be hearing about machine guns and grenade launchers.”
