ABSTRACT
By the time the first skinheads became visible in Russia’s urban landscape in the early 1990s, ‘skinhead’ was already a globally recognised and embedded cultural code. This has led commentators to envisage skinhead in Russia as a practice in which ‘in their dress skins imitate their western fellow-thinkers’ (Tarasov 2004a: 12), albeit adopting a predominantly ‘military’ version of the style (Likhachev 2002: 112) adapted for ‘street fighting’ (Tarasov 2004a: 12).1 Given the discussion in the previous chapter of the importance of both ritual and racist violence to being a ‘real’ skinhead, this interpretation of the style practices of Russian skinheads as ‘strictly functional’ (ibid.) and wholly subordinate to their ideological mission appears plausible. Moreover, the evidence already presented of the group’s engagement with, and appropriation of, some symbolic and ideological elements of the global skinhead and White Power movements means that it is impossible to argue that Russian skinhead style has evolved in anything but close dialogue with other versions of it.
