Russia's "skinheads" first appeared in the 1990s. Its members are all Russian young people, ranging in age from teenagers to twenties. They shaved their hair and wore black clothes, trousers and boots. Some even regard Hitler, the Nazi leader of Germany, as an idol, wearing Nazi symbols on his arms and printing Nazi symbols on his clothes, so he is also called neo-Nazi.
According to the statistics of the Russian Human Rights Commission, there are 50,000 skinheads in Russia, but there is no unified organization, and they are scattered all over the country in the form of small criminal groups. The skinheads are mostly teenagers, believe in extreme nationalism and Nazism, advocate white supremacy, hate foreigners and advocate violence, and their slogan is "Russia is a Russian country". There are seven nationalist political parties and organizations at the Russian Federation level, and local nationalist organizations are also very active, mainly targeting people of non-Slavic nationalities such as Africans, Asians and Caucasians. On a Saturday morning in mid-June, Katia Kirenko, who lives in her parents' shabby apartment in St. Petersburg, heard someone knocking at the door. She saw from the cat's eye that the visitors were two teenagers. The two men asked if they could talk to her father. When Katia's father came to the door and asked them what they wanted, the gun went off and the bullet went through the thin door and got into his chest. He was killed almost immediately.
At first glance, Kilenko is unlikely to be the target of murder. He is a 64-year-old bearded man with a tall figure, but his bones are not very good. He is famous for studying Swahili and blood. However, he is also a top expert in a Russian organization, which is the growing neo-Nazi. As the founder of the Minority Rights Protection Organization (GPEM), Kilenko served as the main consultant in 15 trials related to racial hatred, including the ongoing trial of six members of the neo-Nazi gang "Schultz 88" in St. Petersburg suspected of violent attacks.
Kilenko's work is very important to determine whether this attack is a crime of racial hatred or a general hooligan behavior. He was preparing for another trial when he was murdered. The defendant is a local branch of the neo-Nazi "Russian National Unity" party in Novgorod, suspected of inciting racial hatred and violence. The police believe that the most likely motive for the murderer to shoot Kilenko is to prevent him from giving expert advice, but the police are tight-lipped about the identity of the suspect and no one has been arrested yet. Alexei, a member of Schultz 88 who was prosecuted in St. Petersburg, said: "It's a pity that they didn't kill that bastard earlier." "He just wants to put me in prison." After six months of pretrial detention, 22-year-old Alexei was released in May, but he still faces charges of violence. He said he had nothing to do with Kilenko's death.
Alexei is short, strong and aggressive. He is a member of the wave of new nationalism sweeping Russian society. With the failure of 199 1 democratic reform and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, people's living standards plummeted, and the latent xenophobia in Russia became more radical and dangerous. In order to regain lost national pride, many young people like Alexei accepted neo-Nazism.
Alexander Vinikov, a friend and colleague of Kilenko, said: "His murder has made the nightmare we have been worried about come true." Vinikov is also a member of GPEM, and his fear is spreading in Russian minority communities. Just four days before Kilenko was killed, a group of neo-Nazis killed a passing Azerbaijani in saratov, southeast of St. Petersburg 1400 km. In May this year, Russian human rights organizations claimed that a neo-Nazi gang beat a Pakistani student to death in Ulyanovsk, 350km northeast of saratov. According to the Moscow newspaper Izvestia, over15,000 people have been violently attacked by neo-Nazis in the past seven years. The Moscow Human Rights Office reports that an average of 20 to 30 people die from such attacks every year, and this number is increasing by 30% every year.
In Alexei's view, Kilenko's murder was a turning point of Russian neo-Nazism. "We are a white al-Qaeda," he said. "We don't care how many non-Russians die. The more we die, the better. The era of our jihad has arrived. "
Alexei said that since 200 1, neo-Nazi gangs such as Schultz 88 have imitated Al Qaeda and woven their own grass-roots organizations. They got together when they launched the attack and then disbanded afterwards. It is estimated that there are 50 neo-Nazi organizations in Russia, and Schultz 88 is one of them. Some people think that there are 65,438+07 neo-Nazi organizations based in St. Petersburg.
"Direct action ('Schultz 88') has put hundreds of people into hospitals." Alexei said lazily leaning on a bench in St. Petersburg Art Park. Two members of Schultz 88 sat next to them. Alexei explained that various neo-Nazi organizations "communicate with domestic and foreign organizations through the Internet and other means", and he clenched his fist instinctively as he spoke.
Alexei glanced at the bronze statue of Alexander Pushkin and curled his lips with a wry smile. He sneered at the father of modern Russian literature, because Pushkin was a descendant of Abyssinia slaves. "How did he become a Russian national poet?"
Ever since Alexei realized that he might be suppressed for life, he said that he was ready for war. His role models are all such people: timothy mack Wei, who caused the explosion of the federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, killed 168 people and was executed by injection in 200 1 year; Robert Jay Matthews, the leader of the American white supremacist organization "Order", was killed in a firefight with the police in February 1984. "We don't consider ourselves Russian," Alexei said. "We belong to the white race."
Alexei is also a member of the newly established Nationalist-Socialist Association, whose goal is to establish a "unified Russian state", claiming that the Nazi leaders of the older generation "will be swept away as frustrated people". Alexei believes that the future victory depends on the spontaneous attack of grassroots organizations and genetic technology to achieve racial purity.
Alexei, a graduate student at a famous university in Moscow, said that his colleagues are bent on getting jobs in the fields of economy, politics and media. "It is many times better for people to gradually accept our ideological creed than to just create bloodshed in the streets," he said. "In that case, we can finally push them (ethnic minorities) into the melting pot." Cheslav Sukhachev, a professor of sociology at St. Petersburg University and an expert on Nazism, believes that this kind of racism is permeating the society widely. The poll results also confirmed his words. A survey released by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center last month showed that 6 1% people supported the slogan "Russia is Russia's Russia", while only 3 1% people in 1998 supported this slogan.
According to a study conducted by the China Foundation in May, 60% of the respondents want to restrict people from the Caucasus (Chechens, Dagestans, Azerbaijanis, Armenians and others), 565,438+0% want to impose similar restrictions on people, and 42% want to limit the influence of Jews. "Nationalism has gradually penetrated into Russia in the form of' soft invasion'," Sukohachev said. "What is happening is unprecedented."
There has been a mild form of racism in Russian politics for a long time. The Liberal Democratic Party led by the nationalist zhirinovsky, the newly established Motherland Party and the backbone of the Russian Production Party all support the nationalist policy. Zhirinovsky told the Armenian newspaper New Times that people in the Caucasus "must be completely separated from us and never let them come here again". According to the data of Moscow Human Rights Institution, in the last parliamentary election, 35% of voters actually supported the Nationalist Party.