ABSTRACT
Skinheads (britogolovye, skinkhedy) first appeared in Russia in the early 1990s. During the first half of that decade, there were between 150 and 200 skinheads in Moscow, mostly working-class individuals and in part recruited from criminal gangs on housing estates (Belikov 2011: 25). In the second half of the decade, their numbers grew to thousands throughout Russia. Russian neo-Nazi skinheads adopted neo-Nazi ideas and (mostly) neo-pagan symbolism. Biological racism and the rejection of ‘foreign’ elements, especially non-Slavic ethnicities, were usually of primary importance. During the second half of the 1990s, skinheads started to replenish the ranks of certain marginal militant nationalist organisations. In Moscow, the pioneer of this cooperation was the Russian National Socialist Party (Russkaya natsional'nayasotsialisticheskaya partiya, RNSP), formerly the Russian National Union (Russkii natsional'nii soyuz), led by Konstantin Kasimovskii, and the neo-Nazi organisation National Front led by Ilya Lazarenko. 1 Some skinheads joined Barhashov's Russian National Unity (Russkoe natsional'noe edinstvo, RNE) and organisations that emerged from it after 1999, such as Dmitrii Demushkin's Slavic Union and the National-Socialist Society (Natsional-sotsialisticheskoe obshchestvo, NSO). After 2000, Aleksandr Ivanov-Sukharevskii's People's National Party (Narodnaya natsional'naya partiya, NNP) intensively courted the subculture; Ivanov-Sukharevskii was joined by the leader of the skinhead group Russian Goal (Russkayatsel'), Semen Tokmakov. In St Petersburg, Yurii Belyaev's Party of Freedom (which had been, until 2001, the National-Socialist Party of Russia) was particularly active.
