There exists—or existed, anyway, such things are usually short-lived—a criminal hipster subculture based on Japanese Manga. It’s named PMC Redan, after a character in the Hunter x Hunter comic, and it haunts parents, law enforcement, and politicians in Russia, Belarus, and especially Ukraine.
The first known appearance of Redan was on February ’22 at the Aviapark mall in Moscow where they staged a fight with a rival gang called CB Ne Meet. The Russian paper Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP) smirked:
The squabble was comical: lads with skinny arms but long colored bangs demonstrated some sort of kung-fu moves. Shoppers were dumbfounded. Zoomers were fighting each other or, alternatively, some athletic-looking dudes.Back then, police told kp.ru that they had no information about the incident. That can happen when nobody dialed 02 for an ambulance. Media relations of Aviapark speculated it was a prank. [translation by author]
Nevertheless 30 people were arrested and within a week, copycat skirmishes took place not only in Moscow but across Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. They were organized online, and in most cases, law enforcement officers were able to infiltrate Redan chatrooms and preempt the mass brawls.
For instance, in Ukraine’s second largest city Kharkov the cops picked up 245 teens at Nikolsky mall to prevent a fight from breaking out. In the process, they confiscated brass knuckles, blades, and pepper spray. All but thirty of the detained were minors and, gossip has it, many were not members of any kind of criminal gangs but teens who happened to be hanging out in the area when the police arrived.
Redan calls itself a PMC, or private military company, like Russia’s Wagner which has been grabbing headlines in the Russo-Ukrainian war. Members of the subculture maintain that the PMC initials were a joke and that the widely circulated claims that the subculture is opposed to ethnic minorities are simply not true. Most of the Redan members are said to be between fourteen and sixteen years of age, dress in an emo-style and/or in baggy tee’s, sometimes in plaid pants and always prominently display the image of a black widow spider with the number four inside.
They are nerdy anime fans who got tired of being picked on by jocks and decided to organize. Their shock victory at Aviapark inspired others.
Their rivals, the CB Ne Meet fall under the ofnik umbrella. Ofnik is the abbreviation for “near-soccerfan youth”—though KP is quick to caution that these Gen Z soccer fans are different from the soccer hooligans who clashed with the riot cops and migrant laborers a decade ago. According to KP, ofniks are non-ideological; they just don’t like the anime aficionados. They wear cropped jeans, sporty coats, sneakers, and neat haircuts, and they don’t stand out in the crowd.
Redan Spidermen and ofniks are not unlike mods and rockers with a contemporary Eastern European twist. In his classic work Folk Devils and Moral Panics, British sociologist Stanley Cohen wrote about the media framing young people as a menace to society with wild stories of mods and rockers battling each other. Distinct outfits made mods and rockers akin to two armies—and later inspired the Who movie Quadrophenia—but, as Cohen explained, they didn’t fight anything more than other young men.
Russia, KP recalls, has its own history of masculine working class subcultures battling non-conformist youth movements (and Jews, Caucasians). The working class louts are usually called gopniks. Our readers might have heard the word; these are the stereotypical squatting Slavs in tracksuits.
Gopniks are also called syavki, and in 1980’s in Moscow the slang term ‘Lyubery’ emerged. It was coined after the working class from the suburb Lyubertsy traveled to Moscow to beat up on hippies and metal heads. To be sure, some Lyubery were scary dudes, but most went to the capital for good times only, and the moral panic surrounding them should be credited to the late Soviet tabloids. In The Things of Life, anthropologist Alexey Golubev even reinvents Lyubery as law and order types—based solely on their own recollections recorded decades later.
As it happens, the eccentric PMC Redan is easy to otherise. Ofniks are not, so they seem to be getting a pass in the media. Yet team Spider claims the latter have been antagonizing comic book fans first. Moreover, it’s unclear who is more dangerous: the news reports give no indication whether the weapons seized from the juveniles belonged to the hipsters or the jocks.
The anti-Redan moral panic is in full swing. Kiev police obligingly created flyers and circulated them through chat rooms across Ukraine advising parents on how to know if their children might be the newest folk devils (spider symbols, long hair, baggy clothes) and what to do if they are (watch your kids’ online activity). D’oh!
Given how the world of Eastern Slavs is at war with itself, the hype went beyond sociology. The Kremlin might have accused the kids of destabilizing Russian society and the Belarusian president Lukashenko might have promised a merciless crackdown, but it’s the Ukrainian authorities who added a geopolitical angle. They claimed that the teen spider gangs are Russia’s plot to corrupt the country’s youth. The National Police warned:
The artificial spread of such a subculture is an attempt by Russian propagandists to conduct yet another informational and psychological operation and involve teenagers in illegal activities. [translation by author]
Kharkov police chief Vladimir Timoshko was more flowery yet:
Humanity — this not for the Rusnya [derogative term for Russians]. They pity no one. Not the old, not the young. They are interested only in chaos, panic, pain and suffering of others. Today’s events […] add one more example of Russia’s evil-doing directed against our children. Russian murderers and marauders launched a flash bomb for teenagers resulting in a mass fight. [translation by author]
In Soviet days, a cop from a backwater town would have invoked similar themes to talk about jazz and rock-n-roll. Today, thankfully, nobody talks of the bourgeois foreignness of Manga, but corruption of the youth by foreign elements is an eternal hot topic.
Most of the English language media accounts ran with the shadowy PMC spreading chaos across Ukraine thesis, but the fad seems to be organically spread from Lviv to Novosibirsk. And Kharkov has its own history with adolescent gangs.
I have no good news for Ukraine’s hyperpatriots. Shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukrainian authorities and the ideologically-minded intelligentsia embarked on a program of dismantling the memory of Russian cultural and historical figures, most notably the poet Alexander Pushkin. The idea is to sever ties with Russia and to forge a Western European Ukrainian tradition.
One can erase every mention of Pushkin, but romantic poetry is but an upper tier of the Russian culture. There also exists something deeper, called russkiy mir, Mundus Russicus, a civilizational space bound by language, mentality, and common history.
The very existence of PMC Redan suggests that Gen Z Slavs are socialized into that Mundus Russicus. They might draw their inspiration from the same sources as their peers the world over—in this case Manga—but they express it in their distinct cultural milieu. They are absolutely authentic—otherwise they would not inspire moral panic among their elders.
[Featured image via YouTube]
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