How Violent Neo-Nazis Resurfaced in Wartime Russia
The war in Ukraine has given new prominence to Russia’s neo-Nazis, as official media echo their xenophobic claims. No longer afraid of repression, such groups circulate videos of spectacular street violence among hundreds of thousands of followers.
Members of Russian far-right neo-Nazi group Slavic Union outside Moscow on March 10, 2008. (Vassily Maximov / AFP via Getty Images)
The neo-Nazi subculture first emerged in Russia in the mid-1990s but remained marginal until the early 2000s. At the time, more traditional forms of neo-Nazi organization had gained greater popularity, mimicking the structures of fascist movements from the first half of the twentieth century: political parties with hierarchical structures and paramilitary units. The most successful among them was Russian National Unity (RNU). At its peak in the mid-1990s, the organization had up to 15,000 active members, with chapters operating in major cities. In some areas, fascists managed to establish connections with local authorities. However, due to internal splits, conflicts with official structures, and changes in Russia’s political system, the organization disintegrated by the early 2000s.
The decline of organized fascist movements coincided with the rise of the neo-Nazi skinhead subculture. Like most youth subcultures in the post-Soviet space, Russian neo-Nazi skinheads imitated the style and ideology of Western neo-Nazi skins, obtaining information about them from foreign media. The use of Nazi symbols and terminology from German Nazism provoked outrage among ordinary Russians, as almost every family had lost relatives during the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in Russia.
At the same time, this shock value helped draw attention to the movement and, as a result, increase its numbers. Furthermore, the radical rejection of the Soviet past, which was part of the dominant ideology in post-Soviet Russia, created opportunities for World War II revisionism. By 2003, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there were 15,000-20,000 skinheads in Russia, and by 2006, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev claimed that the police were aware of 98,000 “extremist” youth.
Since this was a youth subculture rather than a matter of formal organizations with structured membership, any quantitative estimates of this community’s size were highly approximate. Nevertheless, Nazi skinheads were constantly visible on city streets and at rallies of far-right politicians. They staged notorious pogroms in markets as well as less media-covered racist attacks on foreigners, “insufficiently” Slavic Russian citizens, and members of other youth subcultures.
This subculture centered on street attacks and attracted young people with a propensity for violence. Unlike fascists who joined together in parties, this subculture did not require participation in organizational events or adherence to party discipline. Subcultural neo-Nazis stripped away extraneous elements, leaving only violence, racial hatred, and an eclectic mix of aesthetics and symbols. Estimating the number of attacks involving members of this community is even more challenging than determining its size. Some insights into the level of violence can be drawn from data on racist murders: researchers from the Sova Center, which has kept statistics on racist violence in Russia since the 2000s, verified ninety-five racist murders in 2007, 116 in 2008, and ninety-four in 2009. In reality, there were likely more murders: neo-Nazis primarily targeted labor migrants and marginalized individuals, and police often showed little interest in thoroughly investigating these crimes, dismissing them as “domestic incidents.” Given the high general level of violence in Russia in the early 2000s, this explanation seemed satisfactory.
Turning Point
When the number and brutality of murders skyrocketed, and neo-Nazis began targeting not only migrants but also government officials and public figures, the state’s policy toward far-right street movements underwent a shift. It is likely that the political activism of antifascists, public organizations, and the media, who tried to draw attention to the issue, played some role.
However, the most significant factor was probably that the authorities realized this was no longer just about youth crime but political terrorism, which could pose a threat to the state itself. Racist attacks began to be investigated more thoroughly; many movement leaders were arrested and others fled abroad. By 2010, Sova recorded forty-four verified cases, twenty-seven in 2011, and twenty in 2012.
An equally important shift occurred in 2014 (incidentally, researchers were able to record thirty-seven murders that year). The military conflict in southeastern Ukraine fractured the far-right camp as a whole, while the state’s political stance deprived racists of their mobilization resources. Up until the mid-2010s, xenophobic and anti-migrant rhetoric had been used by both opposition groups and the authorities to attract supporters. Individuals linked to the street neo-Nazi scene engaged with the presidential administration, which at that time was promoting a policy of “managed nationalism.” Opposition figures, such as Alexei Navalny, who attended “Russian Marches” and produced openly racist videos, also did not shy away from stirring ethnic hatred and associating with overt fascists.
The open conflict with the West pushed Russian authorities to focus on internal unity against external threats and to emphasize gender conservatism. Interethnic conflicts began to be seen as a threat to the stability of the political system and an unspoken ban on xenophobic stories was introduced in the media. The last major mobilization on national hatred grounds was the riot in Moscow’s Biryulyovo district in 2013, during which around four hundred people were detained.
The incident stemmed from a murder following a verbal dispute: Azerbaijani native Orkhan Zeynalov stabbed Muscovite Yegor Shcherbakov to death during a fight. The murder, the search, and the capture of the perpetrator received extensive media coverage. But by 2016, even the horrific sight of a four-year-old girl being murdered by her mentally ill nanny from Uzbekistan did not lead to protests. Videos and photos of the woman of Central Asian descent in Muslim attire, displaying the severed head of the Russian child, circulated on social media and online news outlets.
But despite this story having all the prerequisites to stir nationalist hatred — and indeed, the far right’s efforts to inflame the issue — commemorative actions were limited to laying flowers and toys near the victim’s home. Media played a critical role in preventing mobilization: the incident received almost no television coverage, with authorities citing channel leadership decisions when journalists questioned the “silence.” This case highlighted the state’s new, cautious approach to interethnic issues.
Another factor was state pressure on far-right organizations that incited ethnic hatred. Part of the crackdown stemmed from the fact that many street-level far-right leaders, such as Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) head Alexander Potkin or Slavic Union chief Dmitry Demushkin, sided with Ukraine in the conflict, with some even joining Ukrainian military units.
For instance, former leader of Russia’s National Socialist Society and a close associate of Russia’s most prominent Nazi skinhead, Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich, Sergey “Botsman” Korotkikh became one of the founders of the Ukrainian Azov Regiment. Such sympathies discredited the entire street far-right political milieu in the administration’s eyes. Deprived of media and organizational support, issues related to ethnic conflict faded from public life. As a result, recruitment among far-right street groups dwindled. Older members left the subculture due to age and fears of repression, and fewer new members joined — Nazi skinheads disappeared from city streets, and racist murders became isolated incidents.
How the War Brought Nazis Out of the Shadows
It seemed that, in the new reality, the neo-Nazi street subculture had irreversibly faded into the past. Nazi skinheads hadn’t entirely vanished but had dwindled into a barely noticeable subculture. Occasionally, members would carry out attacks and end up imprisoned — pervasive video surveillance and law enforcement attention limited their growth potential. By the early 2020s, however, the far-right camp as a whole was in crisis. An informal ban on inciting ethnic hatred in the media had undermined their primary mobilization resource, leaving them to exist on the fringes of the extraparliamentary political field, where the left-leaning liberal opposition held a dominant role.
The war with Ukraine fundamentally altered the situation. From the start of the conflict, nationalist groups loyal to the state became the only political faction to support the “special military operation” and actively engage in wartime propaganda. At that point, the authorities were in urgent need of grassroots support, and the far-right received resources previously inaccessible to them, primarily in the media sphere.
State media began publishing remarks by far-right speakers alongside other war supporters, inviting them on television and apparently providing budgets for war propaganda. As a result, during the first year of the war, the audiences for their Telegram channels (this app had become the main information platform under war and censorship conditions) grew exponentially.
For example, far-right blogger Vladislav Pozdnyakov’s following rose from 70,000 to 200,000, DShRG (Rusich group) fighter Yevgeny “Topaz” Rasskazov’s from 5,000 to 50,000, publicist Yegor Kholmogorov’s from 10,000 to 50,000, and Igor Strelkov, leader of the “Novorossiya” movement, saw his followers increase from 15,000 to 800,000. By comparison, Navalny’s channel maintained an audience of around 250,000 up till the end of the first year of the conflict.
Similar growth spurts were seen among Russian-speaking neo-Nazis on the opposite side of the front. Korotkikh, the former associate of Martsinkevich and cofounder of Azov, increased his follower count from 15,000 to 80,000, while another former member of Format18, Artem “Uragan” Krasnolutsky, launched a Telegram channel on February 25 and gained 18,000 subscribers within a year. The media reach of the Azov Regiment, which included some far-right individuals who fled Russia, also expanded significantly, growing from 6,000 to 450,000 by May 2022.
The war, in which far-right groups emerged as the most visible political actors, along with relentless insinuations about “fascism” from both sides and a surge of unrestrained, ethnonationalistic military propaganda, predictably fueled an increase in interest in radical nationalism and neo-Nazism among teenagers. However, in the first year of the war, this interest did not translate into offline activity. Public attention was too absorbed by the war, mobilization efforts, and the sweeping political shifts within the country and across the post-Soviet space as a whole.
Back to Inciting Ethnic Hatred
A turning point emerged by late 2022: public interest in the war began to wane, and Russian far-right groups gradually returned to their primary focus of stirring ethnic discord within Russia. Migrants, primarily from Central Asia, became the main targets of this hostility. Unlike the prewar period, the far right now had entirely new resources. From a prominent but marginal group, nationalists had transformed into a dominant extraparliamentary force with an expanded media apparatus and new institutional capabilities. They no longer faced competition from repression-ridden liberals and leftists, who previously diverted public attention. Moreover, some establishment figures saw political advantages in reviving xenophobic narratives, further strengthening this trend.
As a result, from early 2023, Russia saw the launch of a large-scale anti-migrant campaign, with an overtly racist component. The police began to conduct regular mass, demonstratively brutal raids on migrants, and in the fall, the raids began to include representatives of military commissions trying to recruit migrants for war. The actions of law enforcement were accompanied by positive coverage in the far-right media, and more and more officials, politicians, and public figures began to make harsh anti-migrant statements that bordered on racism.
Against this backdrop — where wartime nationalism and interest in fascism intersected with an internal anti-immigrant campaign — the neo-Nazi subcultural scene began to grow at an exponential rate.
Like any modern sociopolitical phenomenon, neo-Nazis grew online before moving into the offline realm. The communication platform for this new generation of far-right groups became the messaging app Telegram. Unlike mass-market social media platform VKontakte, where content moderation existed and police could easily obtain IP addresses of users suspected of extremism, Telegram — relatively safe and free from moderation — became an ideal media space for neo-Nazis. The first neo-Nazi Telegram channels appeared back in 2020 and 2021, though their audiences rarely exceeded a thousand followers and usually hovered around a few hundred.
At that moment in Russian social media, the interest in the ’90s changed to an interest in the ’00s. The new generation of young people wanted to explore the recent past, which they had not had time to catch. Early neo-Nazi Telegram channels tapped into this trend, mostly serving as archives of photos and videos related to the neo-Nazi skinhead movement of the 2000s.
The most popular among them were memorial channels about Martsinkevich, who died in prison in the fall of 2020. Gradually, other channels emerged, focusing on groups like National Socialism / White Power (NS/WP) terrorists Dmitry Borovikov and Alexei Voevodine of the Combat Terrorist Organization (BTO), and channels with literary adaptations of recollections of racist attacks. Some channels also featured videos of racist attacks from the 2000s and 2010s, with occasional new videos surfacing a few times each year, adding fresh material to the archive.
In late 2022 and early 2023, amid an intensifying anti-migrant campaign, primarily on Telegram, a new wave of neo-Nazi channels emerged: Project Mayhem, NazDem, and Russian Russia. These channels mixed xenophobic news, racist commentary, and mythologized images of 2000s Nazi skinheads, aiming to mobilize their followers for collective actions. Most of these actions were online, echoing the harassment tactics popularized by blogger Pozdnyakov’s “Male State.” Occasionally, they included calls for offline actions, like distributing propaganda leaflets.
The volume of new video content featuring attacks also began to increase. In several cities, groups of teenage neo-Nazi skinheads started their own Telegram channels, sharing videos of their actions with larger aggregator channels. Some of these videos showed street attacks on random pedestrians, while others — often more violent —mirrored Tesak’s “Occupy Pedophilia” approach. In this YouTube show, Russia’s most prominent skinhead, Tesak, would lure gay men onto fake dates, then intimidate and humiliate them on camera. While Tesak used boys as bait, these imitators used young girls, brutally beating and humiliating their victims.
This “snuff” content consistently attracted a following within the “lower Telegram” trash-content networks, drawing new participants into the far-right scene. Eventually, new videos started appearing several times a month. Many in this new wave were soon arrested. For example, a video published in April 2023 showing a brutal assault on men drinking in a park in Orenburg gained wide attention, leading to the arrest of the gang Merry Boots Squad. In June 2023, the neo-Nazi skinhead gang Paragraph-88 was arrested after posting five videos throughout 2023. That summer, members of the neo-Nazi vandal group Edelweiß in Yekaterinburg were arrested after not only attacking passersby but also setting fire to a historic building in the city center.
Despite these arrests, the volume of new attack videos only increased. In May 2023, fifteen new videos were published; in June, twenty-five; in July, twenty-three; and in August, forty-nine — meaning new videos were appearing at a rate of more than one per day, compared to only about once a month before 2023. It was evident that these numbers would likely continue to rise in the foreseeable future.
In late summer and early fall of 2023, most of the videos were more like acts of hooliganism than serious violence. Far-right teenagers, often very young, were seen attacking “non-Russian” passersby with pepper spray and slashing car tires. These incidents were not severe enough to attract police or media attention. Previously, even the far right themselves would likely not have published such insignificant, and often simply pathetic, videos. For propaganda purposes, violent videos need to evoke strong emotions — fear in potential victims and excitement among sadists. But these clips provoked more confusion and disgust than anything else.
The purpose of this wave, however, was different. The leaders in this scene aimed to draw as many new participants into offline activities as possible. This was emphasized in both the video captions and comments: “Better to do something, anything, than just write online.” As early as summer 2022, a Telegram post from the NS/WP group published the “Guidelines for Novice Fighters of the Russian Resistance.” The authors lamented the far right’s wholesale online shift and the near disappearance of street activity. They urged readers to engage in minor attacks: slashing tires, pepper-spraying passersby, committing arson, and choosing victims from vulnerable groups unlikely to report incidents to the police. The authors hoped that this small-scale violence could eventually build a new environment akin to the neo-Nazi skinhead subculture of the past:
What did many skinheads have in common before, apart from certain ideological views and attacks on outsiders? Yet, from this environment came Nikita Tikhonov, Alexei Korshunov, Mikhail Volkov, and many other distinguished Russian fighters. So, we will create this environment under new conditions.
The stated aim of this minor violence was preparation for more serious attacks:
Once you’ve gained experience and inflicted enough damage on the enemies, you’ll inevitably want to try something bigger and more substantial. So be it. You can’t shift from first gear to fifth all at once.
To some extent, this approach worked. At the start of the wave in fall 2023, half of all attacks on individuals consisted of low-risk assaults with pepper spray and minor beatings, while about half of all incidents involved tire slashing. By winter, despite a decrease in the number of videos, the frequency of severe group beatings that could cause serious harm began to rise. By spring 2024, such videos made up half of all uploads, often showing attackers striking their victims on the head with hammers and clubs. Unfortunately, the consequences of these attacks for the victims remain unknown.
The rapid increase in attack videos was evident to the far right themselves and to those who closely monitored this scene. Equally predictable was the escalation in violence, as the far right openly declared their intentions. However, to outsiders, including most journalists, this growth went largely unnoticed. This is why, in the fall of 2023, we launched our project, focusing not so much on individual videos as on the volume, which would inevitably transform into a “new quality.”
Currently, the number of attacks has stabilized at around seventy to eighty per month. Despite the alarming increase in the frequency and brutality of videos in the spring of 2024, an unexpected decline occurred over the summer. Unfortunately, it’s unclear whether this was due to police efforts, as several prolific contributors were apprehended, or if neo-Nazis became more cautious and stopped posting every video online. Shortly before this publication, in late October 2024, the administrator of Project Mayhem, the second-largest Telegram channel regularly sharing attack videos, was arrested (the administrator of third-largest “Archive of good deeds” was arrested in summer). During its operation, the channel posted 157 videos documenting 241 attacks, and its audience had grown to nearly 20,000 followers. Panic quickly spread through neo-Nazi Telegram channels:
In the Russian Federation, FSB raids on Russian nationalists are starting due to the recent rapid growth of the far-right NS. Russian comrades, be extremely cautious: hide your weapons, clear your chats, clean everything up. They could come for you as early as tomorrow.
Another far-right channel reported, “Our organization has lost 4 major cells in different cities, 23 activists have been captured,” urging members to “temporarily refrain from actions in cities like Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinodar (Krasnodar), and Yekaterinburg.”
Whether these arrests will lead to a decline in far-right activities and reduce racist street violence, particularly preventing a new wave of killings, remains to be seen. However, it’s likely that without significant changes in internal policy, this decline will not occur. As long as far-right media platforms with millions of followers systematically fuel hatred toward migrants and non-Slavic Russian citizens, propagate conspiracy theories about plans to “replace native Russians” with foreigners, and promote the myth of the inherent criminality of all “non-Slavs,” there will continue to be hundreds, if not thousands, of young people willing to resort to radical violence. Thus, far-right “ideologists” will likely continue to replenish their ranks by recruiting new, impressionable, and violence-prone young people.