ABSTRACT
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.
