Russia's Skinheads

Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives

Hilary Pilkington, Al'bina Garifzianova, Elena Omel'chenko

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136978777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Russia's Skinheads: Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives provides a thorough examination of the phenomenon of skinheads, explaining its nature and its significance, and assessing how far Russian skinhead subculture is the 'lumpen' end of the extreme nationalist ideological spectrum. There are large numbers of skinheads in Russia, responsible for a significant number of xenophobic attacks, including 97 deaths in 2008 alone, making this book relevant to Russian specialists as well as to sociologists of youth subculture. It provides a practical example of how to investigate youth subculture in depth over an extended period – in this case through empirical research following a specific group over six years – and goes on to argue that Russian skinhead subculture is not a direct import from the West, and that youth cultural practices should not be reduced to expressions of consumer choice. It presents an understanding of the Russian skinhead as a product of individuals' whole, and evolving, lives, and thereby compels sociologists to rethink how they conceive the nature of subcultures.

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Introduction

Rethinking skinhead lives

Hilary Pilkington

Russia’s Skinheads is a book that turns ‘skinhead’ inside out. It considers skinhead ‘style’ and ‘ideology’ as physical and verbal positionings within the youth cultural sphere but understands these aspects of skinhead as surface and exposes what lies inside: the blood, the guts, the heart, the soul. It is a book about the meanings young people attach to ‘skinhead’ when they choose to call, and to stop calling, themselves such. In this sense it is a book that tells the story of skinhead from the inside. But it retells these stories from the outside – as we, as researchers, understand them. It is thus about the forces that shape the choices a particular group of young people makes and about what it is that binds them together and makes them drift apart. Above all it is a book that explores and rethinks subcultural lives as it tries to explain why being skinhead continues to mean so much to so many.

What is skinhead?

Perhaps more than any other of the classic post-Second World War ‘sub-cultures’, skinhead has retained its familiar external shape while its meaning has shifted radically. It has, as Timothy Brown (2004: 160) suggests, developed from a subculture ‘organized around appreciation for black cultural forms to one organized around white and frequently racist forms’. This book does not consider any of the locally and temporally specific incarnations of skinhead over the last four decades to be its authentic or definitive form. Rather, it starts with a discussion of how the term has been used to denote a range of movements in different times and places and ends by reflecting on what it is that connects them and continues to make skinhead meaningful for new generations of young people.

Skinhead first took shape as a style-based movement emerging out of the mod scene in the UK at the end of the 1960s, as ‘hard’ or ‘gang’ mods took the short cropped hair, Ben Sherman shirts and Levis of mod style in a more fight-friendly (donkey jackets and combats) and industrial (boots and braces) direction (Knight 1982: 10). At its point of inception, however, skinhead style was also deeply bound up with elements of West Indian culture, in particular rude boy style (especially the pork-pie hats and long black coats) and ‘skinhead reggae’, which emerged from ska, blue beat and rock steady music (ibid.: 10, 14). Shards of this scene still exist; in academic writing they are captured in David Moore’s (1994) ethnographic study of second-wave skins in Perth in the mid-1980s and in among the range of scenes presented by Klaus Farin (2005) as constituting the contemporary German skinhead movement.

After fading in visibility, at least in the early to mid-1970s, a second wave of skinheads appeared alongside the punk scene from 1976. The emergence of the punks – and their confrontations with Teds in the King’s Road, Chelsea (Savage 1991: 374–5) – split the skins into a ‘traditional’ wing, who supported the Teds, and a new brand, intent on out-shocking the punks by reviving and exaggerating the most extreme elements of the old skinhead style (Knight 1982: 23–4). A new generation of skinheads thus grew up on a second wave of ska music, in the form of Two-Tone as well as Oi! music, both of which had their roots in punk. Indeed, according to Watson (2008: 12), punks and skins shared suburban gigs and scenes amicably.¹ However, while Two-Tone remained racially mixed and committed to trans-racial dialogue (Back 2002: 106), and skinheads who were part of this new punk-inspired wave hung out in gangs that were ‘black, white and Asian’ (Watson 2008: 13), a racist version of skinhead was also developing apace around the very different sound of White Power rock (Back 2002: 106).

This second wave emerged in a period of economic decline and increased immigration, and, given their territorially defensive predisposition (manifest in so-called Paki-bashing in the 1960s), skinheads quickly became a target for recruitment by racist movements (specifically the National Front and the British Movement) that were gaining momentum in the UK at the time. This racist strand of the movement was associated with the use of Nazi symbols and Oi! Music, and it was on the back of punk, and with a right-wing political agenda, that skinhead first emerged in the USA (Moore 1993), Germany (Brown 2004: 161) and numerous other countries. A central figure in the transnational development of this variant was Ian Stuart Donaldson (and his band Skrewdriver formed 1977), who had his musical roots in punk and also held extreme right-wing political views. The two coalesced in a mission to mobilise the skinhead scene for political purposes that was implemented through the ‘Rock against Communism’ and subsequently the ‘White Noise Club’ project financed by the National Front. Through extensive tours with Skrewdriver, and through the ‘Blood and Honour’ organisation which he established in the mid-1980s, Ian Stuart not only recognised but realised the potential for music to unite racists across the world in an international, centreless, politico-cultural entity (Back 2002: 106; Griffin 2003: 32). The release of a string of albums by Skrewdriver on Rock-O-Rama Records and the opening of a German chapter of Blood and Honour were central to the development of right-wing skinhead in Germany, for example (Brown 2004: 164). In its various local and national forms, this ‘white-power rock’n’roll’ (Lööw 1998) or ‘Nazi-rock’ (Brown 2004) subsequently became an important force in recruitment to the radical right across the world.

The trajectory of this second-wave skinhead movement’s association with the politics of the far right is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the case of the USA. Skinhead did not take off in America during the first phase in the UK in the late 1960s because, according to Jack Moore (1993: 30), there was ‘no cultural place in America for a youthful class expression of discontent and open, ugly antagonism to the middle class’. After punk had paved the way for its emergence in the mid-1970s, American skinhead developed both racist and non-racist strands. From the early 1980s some organised skinhead gangs subscribed to the range of xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic views expressed by bands such as Skrewdriver and were recruited actively by organised racist groups, most notably the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) movement (ibid.: 106). However, the racist agenda spread unevenly. As an urban phenomenon it mapped uneasily onto established racist cultures such as the Ku Klux Klan, which operated most vigorously in rural or semi-rural areas (ibid.: 60), and throughout the 1980s there remained skinheads connected to the punk or new wave/new music scene who, by the end of the decade, openly rejected their racist compatriots (ibid.: 70).

It would be wrong to see the development of the skinhead movement in a racist direction as a wholly external process, however. While reggae music originally brought young skinheads to black music and dance scenes, as dub reggae and its accompanying Rastafarian philosophy came to dominate those scenes, skinheads did not follow (Knight 1982: 15; Hebdige 1993: 150). The tension between the two movements is captured in Hebdige’s (1982: 32) characterisation of the skinhead movement as the mirror image of black youth cultural practices. ‘The skinhead style’, he writes, ‘is a defensive assertion of whiteness just as Rasta is a celebration of the black cultural roots.’ The aggressive force behind this assertion of whiteness, moreover, could be seen in other urban spaces, most notably the pub and the ‘home end’ of football stadia (Robins and Cohen 1978: 133–49; Clarke and Jefferson 1976: 140–42, 154–6), while ‘Paki-bashing’, racist repartee and stand-offs between local black and white youths were found far beyond skinhead circles (Pearson 1976; Robins and Cohen 1978: 115–18).

At the same time, the battle waged by ‘traditional’ (‘Trad’) skins to reclaim the movement from its racist variant should not be ignored. As the public visibility and concern about racist skinheads in America rose through the 1980s, a consciously anti-racist strand of the movement – SHARP (SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice) – emerged in New York and, by the late 1980s, had taken off across Europe. Around this part of the movement there also emerged left-wing (red and anarchist) skinhead groups. However, the relationship of anti-racism and anti-fascism to skinhead remains a deeply disputed and emotional issue; Farin’s overview of the contemporary German skinhead movement, for example, found that more than 60 per cent of members rejected ‘Redskins’ while almost 70 per cent refused to accept Naziskins as part of their scene (Farin 2005: 5). A further challenge to skinhead identity emerged from the active adoption of skinhead style within gay scenes as a means of reclaiming forms of masculinity that had become ‘off-limits’ for homosexual men (Healy 1996) and the widespread eroticisation of the skin body for both the heterosexual and the male homosexual gaze. Disagreement over whether ‘real’ skins listen to ska, punk or Oi! also problematises any consensus as to what constitutes ‘authenticity’ within the contemporary skin movement. For some, the right to define that authenticity is worth fighting for. For others, authenticity has been replaced by an understanding of skinhead as constituted anew each time by those who feel themselves to be such; as one of Farin’s respondents explains, ‘Skinhead is not about putting on a

uniform but about embodying a feeling’ (Farin 2005: 6). The emergence of a global, or, more properly, translocal, racist skinhead movement has been facilitated by the rapid acceleration in the use of the Internet (Back 2002). Les Back (ibid.: 107) argues that the proliferation of racist skinhead style in this way has challenged previous explanations about the centrality of particular local conditions to the movement’s formation. In the diffusion of racist skinhead style, he writes, ‘two things have remained constant: its appeal as a translocal emblem of national chauvinism and white pride, and the transposition of a language of racist rhetoric and style from a variety of European contexts to specific local concerns’ (ibid.). This translocal movement has forged around the music and rhetoric of White Power – in which the North American-based Resistance Records, founded by George Burdi in 1994, was central – and, as is demonstrated clearly in Part 2 of this book, much of its symbolism and rhetoric has been re-exported to European movements (see also Nayak 1999: 82). As Back (2002: 128) notes, the circuit of this international system is made possible by a shared translocal notion of race encapsulated by Don Black’s (Stormfront) slogan ‘White Pride World Wide’, which was also adopted by Resistance Records as a title for their compilation albums of White Power music. Weinberg (1998: 14) estimates that by the end of the 1990s just under 20,000 individuals belonged to extra-parliamentary right-wing extremist groups in Western Europe, while in the USA there were 15,000 members of racist anti-government militias and around 3,500 right-wing skinhead gang members. Analysing the linkages between extreme right-wing groups in Western Europe and the USA, moreover, Weinberg (ibid.: 26) shows that more than 50 per cent of Western European groups emulate² foreign groups and 28 per cent of Western European organisations have personal, interactive relationships across national borders (ibid.: 27). Thus, despite its deeply local roots and the twists and turns of its historical trajectory, skinhead today is a global cultural resource employing extensive translocal networks to articulate particular fears and hatreds, both local and national.

The Russian scene

Skinheads appeared in Russia in the early 1990s. The first skins (no more than a dozen in Moscow and St Petersburg) were in evidence in 1992 (Tarasov 1999) grouped around the journal Pod nol’ in Moscow and the band Totenkopf in St Petersburg (Likhachev 2002: 116). I first encountered them in 1994 when, according to respondents, there were 150 to 200 skins across Moscow, with an elite ‘core’ to which others aspired (Pilkington 1996: 254). Respondents interviewed at that time articulated their behaviour in terms of participation in a pan-European neo-right youth movement and punctuated their speech with German slogans such as ‘Ausländer Raus’ (‘Foreigners out’), references to Jean-Marie Le Pen and knowledge of internationally recognised signifiers of ‘skinhead’ (Doc Martens, cult films such as Romper Stomper) and combined these with locally rooted everyday racisms, focused on a resentment of men from ‘the Caucasus’ dating Russian women. However, this group of skins all had long youth cultural (tusovka) histories and remained closely linked to those scenes (ibid.: 252).³

Tarasov (1999, 2004a: 1) interprets these early skins as products of ‘teenage aping’ as discussion of Nazi-skins in Western Europe and America became fashionable in the Russian press. However, from 1994 the movement began to expand rapidly in response to the profound economic and political upheavals taking place in Russia at the time. The mid-1990s was a period in which all the social consequences of price liberalisation, rapid privatisation and marketisation were felt without the anaesthetic of optimism of the first post-Soviet years. Moreover, the political events of September–October 1993 – when President Yeltsin ordered tanks to shell the parliament building in which elected deputies were barricaded, protesting against the dissolution of parliament ordered by the president – appeared to legitimate violence as an extension of politics. Perhaps still more significantly, against the backdrop of preparations for the first Russian military campaign in Chechnia, the introduction of a ‘state of emergency’ in Moscow on 3 October 1993 allowed the arrest, frequent beating, and deportation from Moscow of almost 10,000 people, primarily of ‘Caucasian appearance’, for violation of the internal passport system, creating an atmosphere of officially sanctioned ethnic cleansing (Tarasov 2000: 46; Domrin 2007: 134; Burt 2004: 5). According to Tarasov (cited in Dolgopolova 2004), these events turned the skinhead movement into a mass phenomenon in a matter of weeks. Subsequently, during the period of the first Chechen war (December 1994–May 1996), not only did the authorities fail to challenge racist rhetoric and violence but skinhead gangs often perceived that law enforcement agencies tacitly supported their actions (Tarasov 2000: 43). Thus, despite reluctance on the part of the police to acknowledge motivations of ethnic hatred in incidents of violent crime, the mid-1990s saw a number of violent attacks on individuals or groups organised by skinhead groups, including a series of attacks on Arab students’ hostels in Voronezh in 1996 involving skinhead groups and members of Russian National Unity (RNE).⁴

This joint action is indicative of the significant effort invested by extreme right-wing parties in actively recruiting and cooperating with skinhead groups. In many provincial cities, such as Voronezh, it was the RNE and its splinter groups that were most active (Tarasov 1999, 2004a: 13). In Moscow in this early period, however, the Russian National Union (RNS) was particularly visible; it created a dedicated department for work with skinheads, financed the skinhead publication Pod nol’ and invited the leader of one of the main Moscow skinhead groups, Skinlegion, to speak regularly at its meetings (Tarasov 2000: 40). Another close collaboration was formed between the People’s National Party (NNP) and the small but well-disciplined skinhead group Russkaia Tsel’ after the NNP leader Aleksandr Ivanov-Sukharevskii shared a cell (following his arrest in February 1999 for incitement of racial hatred) with the leader of Russkaia Tsel’, Semen Tokmakov (ibid.: 40–1). Tokmakov subsequently led the youth section of the NNP (Pushchaev 2002: 78). The National Front Party (PNF), founded by Il’ia Lazarenko, was also highly active in recruiting skinhead members in Moscow. In St Petersburg, the National-Republican Party of Russia (NRPR; from 2000 known as the Freedom Party; PS) pioneered collaboration with skinhead groups (Tarasov 1999), but thereafter the St Petersburg branch of the National Bolshevik Party (NBP) and the pagan organisation the Union of Veneds (SV) proved more successful (Likhachev 2002: 119).

Notwithstanding these efforts, most skinheads remained in small groups or gangs, with no ‘party’ organisation or formulated ideology. In Moscow there were around twenty skinhead gangs, the more organised of which had a name, a leader, a regular meeting place and a structure that allowed rapid mobilisation for participation in some kind of ‘action’ (Likhachev 2002: 117; Pushchaev 2002). In addition to the Skinlegion and Russkaia Tsel’ groups noted above, in Moscow there were a number of other major skinhead groupings (each with 100 to 150 members): Blood and Honour–Russian branch; Hammerskins-Russia; and Ob’edinennye Brigady 88, formed in 1998 when around a hundred skins from the Belie Bul’dogi and Lefortovskii Front united (Tarasov 2000: 40; Likhachev 2002: 116–17). There was one exclusively female skin group, calling itself Russkie Devushki (Likhachev 2002: 117). In St Petersburg around 150 skins were organised in the Russkii Kulak, while other major skin organisations were Solntsevorot and Totenkopf (ibid.). Tarasov (1999) estimated that, by spring 1999, there were more than 2,000 skinheads in Moscow and St Petersburg, up to 2,000 in Nizhnii Novgorod, and between 500 and 1,000 in a number of other cities across the country.⁵

A significant new stage in skinhead violence began in 1998, signalled by the announcement – via faxes sent to Moscow newspapers – of an impending coordinated campaign of violence to ‘commemorate’ Hitler’s birthday (Likhachev 2002: 121; Dolgopolova 2006: 10). These actions were organised over a period of one month from 20 April by Semen Tokmakov, the 22-year-old leader of Russkaia Tsel’; during this month there were, on average, four vio...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1 Growing up in a harsh climate
• Part 2 The meaning(s) of skinhead
• Part 3 Reflections on the research process
• Appendix 1 Parties and extra-parliamentary groupings
• Appendix 2 – Biographical characteristics of respondents
• Notes
• References
• Index