ABSTRACT
This book has set out to expose ‘Russia’s skinheads’ not for their racist bigotry – although this has not been evaded or romanticised – or for cheaply imitating and distorting the true ‘spirit of ‘69’. It has sought rather to bring to the surface something much more disruptive of skinheads’ verbal and stylistic posturing: the beliefs, hopes, joys and pleasures, concerns, fears, hurts and pain that bind and separate them. In this final chapter we try to understand how the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ of skinhead are connected by asking what being a ‘skinhead’ meant to respondents beyond offering a convenient stylistic wrapping for racist sentiments. We do this, first, through a discussion of the meanings attached to skinhead identity by respondents. This is followed by a broader consideration of what the approach adopted in this book, and the resultant findings, add to our understanding of why skinhead continues to find resonance with new generations of young people in ever wider parts of the globe.
