ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the history and the social construction of the Russian “gang”. The “dangerous gang” discourse is largely absent in Russia, where street male socialization has been culturally normalized. During periods when concerns about orderly social reproduction led to panic about youth, it was expressed as fetishistic displacement of social problems onto individual hate figures such as “hooligans”, as well as constructions of youth practices as resulting from the “grooming” of innocent young people by adult criminals. Collective delinquency has not been typically seen through the “gang” lens. The Soviet authorities denied the existence of the gang in the socialist society at all; post-Soviet representations of the gang focused on adult criminals rather than on street youth. With the development of capitalism, street culture has become commodified as well as used as a source of added legitimacy by members of the dominant class. From a cross-cultural perspective, the use-value of a gang is changeable and flexible, and the gang itself can be reviled, accommodated or indeed celebrated, depending on cultural traditions and political needs.
