Moscow News - 03.18.2003

 

Moscow News

Rowdyism or Fascism?

Young people wearing swastika on their sleeves roam the streets of a city that lived through a WWII Nazi siege

By Mikhail Rutman 

Gurini Salde, a 28-year-old Morocco national, in his fifth year at Polytechnic University, was beaten up by a group of unidentified assailants on the night of March 2 near the Chernaya Rechka metro station. The foreigner received abdominal and chest injuries. Officers at the 25th Police Station are investigating the incident. One theory police are working on is that the Moroccan was attacked on racial grounds by the so-called skinheads. St. Petersburg could turn into a "racially pure" city - or so quite a few people would dearly love to have it.

The first half of February saw a series of apparent hate crimes in the city. On February 1, a group of young men at the Piskarevskoye Cemetery attacked and killed Atish Ramgoolam, 23, a citizen of Mauritius and an undergraduate at the Mechnikov Medical Academy. On February 6, on Nevsky Prospekt, in a downtown area, another group assailed several Indian nationals, causing two of them grievous bodily harm. This time one of the attackers was detained. He had a White Supremacy emblem on his sleeve, a swastika tattoo on his hand and an SS tattoo on his arm. There was no doubt that the crime was the work of skinheads. According to eyewitness accounts, they were also responsible for the Piskarevskoye Cemetery murder. Young men with shaven heads in "trademark" uniform - short leather jackets, tight blue jeans, and heavy boots - are a common sight in the city streets. Meanwhile, experts are still divided as to whether they should all be classified as skinheads, i.e. members of ultranationalist organizations. I put thi s question to an official at the Internal Affairs Administration for St. Petersburg and Leningrad region who deals with juvenile delinquency.

"As a matter of fact, there are only a few people who can coherently formulate the idea behind the skinhead movement - not more than 300," he said. "There is a much greater number of those who they use for their own purposes, skillfully manipulating and brainwashing them with pseudo-patriotic rhetoric. Say, a boy has always been told at school that he is an idiot and just no good, but then a ‘kindly' adult will tell him that he is cool and the hope of the nation, and all he needs do is join a ‘team' and start ‘wasting' certain types. And so the boy shaves his head, has a swastika tattoo, and puts on heavy boots. Actually it does not make any difference to him who to attack. Meanwhile, adults use them as a cat's paw to solve their own economic and financial problems - say, crowd out ethnic Afghans or Azeris from a street market. The idea behind a particular group - and there are about a dozen in St. Petersburg today - is predicated on the ideology of a particular leader. There are Nazi skinheads, anti-Nazi ski nheads and even Red skinheads."

Dozens of officers from several police departments worked on the Piskarevskoye Cemetery murder, questioning about 500 young men who had anything to do with skinheads. Police also received tips from city residents responding to a public service announcement on television. In the end, investigators got on the trail of people who witnessed the attack. They identified the actual assailants, who were known to them only by their nicknames. Before long, three high-school students, who had kicked the Mauritian to death, were detained.

Only one of them proved to be a real skinhead, but all three saw themselves as "defenders of the Motherland." Who were they defending it against? They were unable to answer this question. Meanwhile, investigation of the case revealed a chilling picture. Many of those questioned owned up to a large number of crimes - assault and battery, robbery and armed robbery. They attacked in groups on the street or in the metro, throwing a person to the ground, kicking him and taking away money and cell phones. Their victims included both "aliens" and ethnic Russians.

Unfortunately many of these crimes will go unpunished owing to the statute of limitation or because no charges were filed. It is something else that should worry us, however. A new generation, ruthless and aggressive, that has learned to cover up criminal activity with incoherent talk about "patriotism," is growing up in a city that lived through three revolutions and a 900-day siege.