radical nationalists: true till death?idea of building a new, ethnically pure (or, at the very least, eth-
nically hierarchical) Russia in place of the lost empire. It built
on violence from the streets, and on the aggressive racism of the
neo- Nazi skinhead movement, although the skinhead sub- culture
as such was already going out of fashion. The present chapter
explores how the movement has evolved since then, whether it
has a future and, if so, what sort of future that may be.^4
2008: Setting the scene
According to SOVA Center for Information and Analysis data,
hate crime peaked precisely in 2008; we reported 116 murder
victims in that year alone. However, active police work against
the gangs committing these crimes had also been expanding at
the same time – or, more accurately, had begun to do so back in
- For several years, the number of people sentenced for these
crimes grew steadily, with arrests numbering in the hundreds, in
stark contrast to the situation in previous years.^5 Racist violence
escalated until 2008 – and then, just as swiftly, began to decline.
Organised battles between radical nationalists and youth from
the Caucasus had already passed their peak by 2007; on the
whole, the street war with ‘antifa’ (antifascist) fighters had sup-
planted the street war with the ‘Caucasians’ (kavkaztsy). For
some years, this war – conducted most actively from 2007 to
2009 – absorbed significant resources of the ultra- right sector’s
militant groups.
In about 2008 the sector itself became fully ‘equipped’, devel-
oping its own businesses, legal services, support systems for those
arrested and so on. This made it possible for members to confine
almost all their social contact to within the sector, and to view
society at large – not just ‘ethnic enemies’ – with increasing
scepticism.
It was in 2008, too, that antifascists faced the greatest number
of genuine threats from neo- Nazis. The terrorist component of
neo- Nazi violence directed against political opponents and the
authorities also expanded, including the activities of the Combat
Organisation of Russian Nationalists (Boevaia organizatsiia
russkikh natsionalistov) (BORN) (see Kozlov and Tumanov 2014;