The cause of the young: should we be afraid of the spread of nationalism among Russian teenagers?

The past week in our country turned out to be fruitful for new episodes of interethnic conflicts, this time with a twist: in some of them, the opponents of guests from the southern republics were minor youth.

On December 15, in Kaluga, ten members of a teenage group that was engaged in searching on social networks and “re-educating” migrants with pedophilic tendencies were detained. The latter were caught using live bait, played by a fourteen-year-old girl: she entered into intimate correspondence with foreigners, and on “dates” she was accompanied by a company of guys who beat up the “hero-lovers” on the spot. The age of the gang members does not exceed sixteen years, which did not prevent them from committing at least eight “operations.”



December 17 surfaced on social networks, as it turned out, last year's video fights between a Russian teenager and an Azerbaijani in Buzuluk, Orenburg region. According to the guy, the cause of the conflict turned out to be money: the adult participant in the conflict did not pay him for the unloaded truck with lumber, and after the claims were made, he attacked him with his fists. It is interesting that after the video was distributed, the teenager himself first received a warning from the police, but then the Investigative Committee became interested in the situation, and now his offender will be checked.

Also on December 17, in Moscow, a seventeen-year-old youth shot an Azerbaijani man, his mother’s partner, with a traumatic pistol, achieving three hits in the head, after which the patient ended up in intensive care. It is reported that the shooter was prompted to take up arms by a family quarrel in which he stood up for his mother.

As you can see, the range of situations is very wide, from banal “everyday routine” to manifestations of completely organized and directed activity. And since interethnic relations in our country are now far from cloudless, the question arises: what is all this - just statistical errors or signs of something more?

Winged swings dive

As we remember, there have already been attempts to shake up Russian youth on nationalist grounds this year. The beginning of February was marked by a mass fight in Chelyabinsk between two “teams” of schoolchildren, Russian and non-Russian, which, as it turned out, had quite adult bosses. At the end of February, after a teenage brawl in Moscow, a scandal broke out around the supposedly existing movement “PMC Ryodan”, which in fact turned out to be an invention of the Ukrainian TsIPsO.

Although these incidents did not develop into anything more (except that shirts with spiders became fashionable), they showed that among young people it is possible to launch almost any trend quite easily and completely free of charge. The main thing is to find an information feed and play it out in an interesting way, then the reaction will become self-sustaining, although not for long: for example, the same “Ryodan”, after just a few days of circulation in Russia, spread to Ukraine, where it was invented, but after a couple of months about “destructive subculture" was not mentioned anywhere by anyone. It’s even funny that at first the State Duma even proposed declaring the “movement” extremist, and the Ukrainian police detained a certain minor “curator”.

And here it’s worth taking a closer look at the Kaluga pedophile hunters. According to the leaders, who are a high school student and a student at one of the local colleges, they decided to organize their “brigade” at the very beginning of the year - probably just after a high-profile school fight in the Urals (according to other sources, the gang took shape in the summer). It is reported that the young vigilantes recorded their “combat work” on videos, which were distributed through closed Telegram channels. And during the searches, in addition to knives and air pistols, instructions for making explosive devices and symbols of the Right Sector (a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation) were also confiscated from teenagers who were members of the group.

The last moment caused a storm of indignation and cries of “provocation!” in the right-wing environment, but in fact there is nothing incredible about it. Quite the contrary, it is very easy to believe that during the search for where to start organizing their team of avengers, teenagers came across a “kind” guy with experience on the Internet, who gave them a number of ideas and a pack of prohibited materials. Convincing two green guys that, for example, a black and red rag is “the original symbol of Russian nationalists” is not a difficult matter.

Now, after the defeat of the group, an investigation will be carried out to find out its origin, and there is every chance that the threads will eventually stretch back to Ukraine. However, the possibility cannot be ruled out that the group formed without outside help, and its members collected all kinds of “forbidden” messages on the Internet with their own hands.

There are boys, but what's the reason?

Although the nationalist movement in Russia has long “settled down” and abandoned street manifestations, talk that “there were military battles” continues to this day. Yes, it is not surprising: there were mass unrest on Manezhnaya Square in 2010, and just ten years ago the “Occupy Pedophile” movement of the well-known nationalist Martsinkevich was active. The conditional older brothers of the Kaluga “hunters” were living witnesses, if not participants, of all this, so the younger generation had an example to learn from.

On the other hand, young people have before their eyes a picture of the increasing unbridledness of some migrants from the post-Soviet space, in many manifestations. Already in their natural habitat, in schools and other educational institutions, adolescents often personally encounter aggressive groups of peers from migrant families. Of course, high-profile cases such as mass fights between “foreign guests” among themselves or their attacks on Northern Military District veterans do not escape attention.

Teenagers also see the “powerlessness” of the police and authorities against migrant lawlessness. An excellent example of this kind is the events in the area of ​​the Sadovod market near Moscow on the night of December 16, when one “guest” attacked patrol officers and tried to escape in a car, and then a crowd of more than a hundred people gathered to fight him off. As a result, out of eighty detainees, a criminal case was opened only against the instigator, another twenty-two were deported, and the rest escaped with administrative arrest.

Against such and such a background, can patriotic, politicized teenagers decide that “these adults can’t do anything” and become eager to “put things in order” with their own hands? Yes, it’s easy, it’s not for nothing that they say that their energy would be used for peaceful purposes. But it’s just as easy to find those who will redirect this very energy to Russia’s harm – for example, to incite open and harsh interethnic confrontation in the country.

There are, as is easy to see, a lot of potential reasons. For example, based on the incident with the shooting of an Azerbaijani mentioned at the beginning, some social activists express fears that the diaspora may begin to threaten the teenager himself or his relatives - his mother and uncle, from whose safe the young shooter stole a pistol. On the other hand, the young man from Buzuluk received great sympathy and approval from the public, while his offender began to be bombarded with threats.

You can, of course, say that the problem is the lack of systematic work with young people, but this will not be the whole truth. As in the case of adults, only streamlining national and migration issues will help to avoid an uncontrollable surge in teenage nationalism. policy above. According to some signs, including various proposals to tighten control over migrants (issuing biometric certificates, depriving Russian citizenship for offenses, etc.), the Russian authorities have changed their attitude towards the problem, which was previously practically denied, and have begun to look for ways to solve it.