Even if the Kremlin really had nothing to do with it, enough people at the highest levels of government and in the official state media have expressed support and even admiration for those gangs to push Russia ever closer toward the pariah state status.
In fact, what happened in France fits in perfectly with Russia’s actions over the past couple of years. It is also a throwback to Russia’s inglorious past.
During the Soviet era, streets in every city and town across the Soviet Union used to be pervaded by nasty neighborhood youth gangs. Known disparagingly as shpana, they weren’t at all like deadly ethnic gangs in American inner cities, committing murders and selling drugs. They were a far less threatening phenomenon, very loosely organized and packing, at most, knives, bicycle chains or brass knuckles. But they were an omnipresent nuisance, a feature of pretty much every apartment building and courtyard.
Those kids, some as young as 12 and others almost 18, the age at which Soviet males became subject to the military draft, hung out in the back of apartment buildings and at children’s playgrounds after dark, smoking, drinking, pitching pennies and shooting the breeze. Their favorite pastime was to accost, shake down and beat up teenagers from other neighborhoods who happened to be passing by, which was a concern whenever you went out on a date. Park benches were the typical place to be attacked by a gang of shpana.
They engaged in petty crime, hooliganism, vandalism and fighting with similar gangs. For the most part, they would eventually do their military service and settle down, becoming blue collar workers, plumbers or truck drivers. There were some who for one reason or another ended up in young offenders’ correctional facilities – my own brother did – or fell in with career criminals – I had several schoolmates and neighbors who did – but the number of such cases was relatively small, considering how many boys in certain social classes engaged in shpana activities.
I have a couple of shpana characters in my detective novel, “Murder at the Dacha” (2013).
The shpana phenomenon grew out of the massive overcrowding of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, where everyone lived in old apartments divided into rooms and primitive houses, with several generations and extended family members often sharing one small room. Starting with the Khrushchev era, housing conditions were gradually eased with the construction of tiny private apartments in anthill-like prefab housing, densely built in concentric circles around every Soviet city or town.
The Soviet Union was also subject to rapid urbanization, as peasants fled the countryside devastated by collectivization. This process also got a boost during the Khrushchev era, since he put an end to Stalin’s war on the peasantry and issued collective farmers their internal passports, allowing them to flee their villages in large numbers.
Cities grew massively during the 1960s and 1970s, displacing more peasants from surrounding villages and shifting them into apartment buildings.
The villagers moving into town were lumpenized and disoriented – and so were their kids, growing up poor, often in broken families with hard-drinking fathers, in a featureless Soviet physical and social landscape, without much culture and education and under the oppressive weight of the omnipresent state. Their hooliganism, vandalism and petty crime was never for personal gain but an utterly pointless expression of resentment and displacement, taken up out of sheer boredom.
Shpana weren’t smart or brave. There wasn’t even the macho culture or the strict code of conduct or the pride that pervaded the criminal community. Shpana gangs attacked only with superior numbers, preferably several against one, and only when they thought there would be no resistance or retribution.
Once the first generations of that new urban class grew up and assimilated into the urban environment the shpana phenomenon started to wane – at least in Moscow and other major cities. In the 1980s and 1990s younger people got a lot more to be interested in – not hang out on street corners and beat up other kids. There were places to go and actual interests to pursue, ranging from rock music to soccer fandom. A more varied global culture also invaded the sterile Soviet landscape, with plenty to interest kids from working class families.
Vladimir Putin is a typical member of the shpana from my Soviet childhood. Looking at the photos from his teenage years people who grew up in the Soviet Union would instantly recognize the type – the clothes, the pecking order, the facial expression of skin-deep bravado. However, for whatever reason, Putin doesn’t seem to have changed an iota since those days on the dreary Leningrad outskirts.
That wouldn’t have mattered if he had not been shaping Russia into a shpana country. What analysts and political scientists have been calling, respectfully, his hybrid war against the West is in reality a fairly typical set of shpana activities scaled up to the size of a great nation’s foreign policy.
You can see the same shpana tactics in action when Russian fighter planes buzz NATO ships and aircraft and invade other countries’ air space. The language of the Russian media is typical of shpana as well: it has adapted its tone and even its slang.
The hybrid war fought by Russia chokes the moment the hybrid warriors get rapped across the knuckles – as was the case in Syria and in Eastern Ukraine. Then it slinks away and, from the safety of its dark corner, it starts heaping resentful abuse at its offenders.
But the most salient feature of Russia’s hybrid war has been its complete pointlessness. None of its components had been thought through and all looked like a spontaneous reactions of an angry hooligan – starting with the annexation of Crimea and aggression in eastern Ukraine. It tried to bully Ukraine – but only until Ukraine showed that it was capable of defending itself both on the battlefield and by forming international alliances.
All of Russia’s actions have been similarly rash, misconceived – and ultimately damaging to itself. The food embargo against the EU was hardly felt by European farmers but dealt a severe blow to the quality of life of ordinary Russians. The capture and trial of Nadiya Savchenko resulted in a humiliating climb down after considerable reputational damage. The spat with Turkey, caused by Russia’s belief that it could disregard Turkey’s sensitivities with impunity, deprived it of a key international partner and diminished its ability to play a crucial role in Syria, making Moscow hostage to Bashar al-Assad.
To understand why Russia is conducting its policies in such a ridiculous manner all you need to think of is a hooligan vandalizing the only pay phone on his street corner out of resentment and boredom.
And so it is with Russian fans. In the end, the Russian government has been forced to disown them – but not before people everywhere in the civilized world threw up their hands in disgust and desperation.
