‘Menace to Society’: Eastern European Hipster Subculture Pushes Back
They are absolutely authentic—otherwise they would not inspire moral panic among their elders.
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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Comments
This is a curious article indeed: unlike any topic I have seen at LI, by an author I don’t recognize, and entirely unreachable from the LI homepage (it showed up on my RSS feed). What’s going on?
I recognize the name as an occasional contributor.
OK, suddenly it showed up on the homepage.
Surprising — usually the RSS feed lags, not leads.
Russian collusion!
Pushkin wrote “The Bronze Horseman,” which runs down Finns as forest dwelling barbarians living in “dark abodes.” Then, in the same poem, he moves on to threaten Swedes. They still teach young Rus children the poem.
I know for a fact that some Finns resent such treatment in “romantic” Russian poetry.
archive.org/details/russian-strategic-culture
The entire poem is a takedown of autocracy and is very typical of the intelligentsia’s unease with the city of St. Petersburg. Peter the Great built the city in the delta of Neva River — beautiful and moody and it flooded every spring.
Europeans are not all peace and love about each other and there is nothing special about Pushkin in this regard.
The entire poem is not solely devoted to anti-autocracy – otherwise the Finns would not take offense to it. Tell me why a learned man such as Colonel Martti J. Kari (ret) of the Finnish defense forces cites the poem as typical Russian chauvinism? He goes as far as saying that teaching the poem to young children creates and maintains Russian chauvism.
If you would’ve read the link to Russian Strategic Culture you’d not be arguing the point.
The Finns applied to join NATO. Which is quite revealing in itself – since the Finns are not easily intimidated. White Mannerheim ran Lenin’s Bolshevik sailors and troops and the Red Finns out of Tampere and Vyborg. The Krauts ran them out of Helsinki.
The Finns, just like the Ukrainians, have been fighting and defending against Russian imperial aggression for more than a century
I don’t think it’s valid literary criticism, but if you want to have a heart attack, I suggest reading The Battle of Poltava.
We were made to memorize and recite verses from it, including “Hoorah, we are pushing forward, the Swedes are bending!” Nobody had hard feelings about the Swedes in the heart of Ukraine, though.
Noted. No one here is having a heart attack. Do Soviet teachers make you read about the Winter War and the invasion of Finland? About The Battle of Suomussalmi-Raate Road and the destruction of the 14 Red Army? About stacking frozen Russian corpses like firewood?
Good art is about several “things” at once.
Polemic, advertising, or agitprop, however…
Did you bother to read the poem, or are you simply spouting random words of wisdom.
The biggest propaganda coup of contemporary Ukraine is selling their own heavily propagandized and erroneous historical narrative as THE alternative to the Soviet one. Talk about swapping one lie for another.
The Russians set about dismantling UKR culture since before autocrat-tsar Peter the Great defeated King Charles the XII at Poltava. In fact, Russian autocrats have tried to dismantle independent cultures all along its borders – the Bolsheviks being the most successful of all the autocrats. Putin is simply a less successful autocrat than his immediate forebearers.
People point to Putin as a moderating force in current affairs – then blithely state he will “nuke” the west if pushed too far – a more fitting description for that sort of behavior would be “madman,” but few seem to connect the two things.
Putin is simply a less successful autocrat than his immediate forebearers.
Ouch. An interesting analysis, and painful to the New Tsar.
Kharkiv is, and always will be, a major RUS-UKR culture clash-point. Simply calling it Kharkov denies Ukrainian sovereignty. Which is a typical Duganite red-brown tactic.
The Bolsheviks snatched Kharkiv during the civil war and claimed it as the new Capitol. Then they set about raping, murdering, dispossessing and generally sowing chaos – all followed by more rape, murder and thieving. Because agrarian peaasants dared oppose Bolshevism. The Kulak Deplorables.
All of it followed by famine. The First Red Famine.
BS. The Greens were the ones who raped, murdered, and utterly discredited the cause of Ukrainian nationalism. The Greens were bloodthirsty animals, and those who uphold them as heroes don’t deserve freedom.
Not BS. You want your cake and to eat it too. You know better.Funny how you choose to be loose with facts.
The Bolsheviks siezed Kharkiv.
Nestor Makhno allied with the Bolsheviks – though he flipped back and forth – but he never flipped to the Whites. The Bolsheviks gave him money. He was a doublecrosser. Green or Black the peasants followed him. Better Nestor than the Bolsheviks or even the Whites. As you are damn well aware – the Whites simply wanted to restore the anti-semitic tsarist autocracy.
And shame on you for implying that the Green/Blacks were the only group to engage in wholesale murder and rapine of Kharkiv and surrounds. It serves your purpose because you hate Ukrainians for their antisemitism. And Catholic Poles in the same sense. (I’m secular intelligent creationist).
Lumping all Ukrainians into a single group. Doing so is exactly what you object to when talking about Jews and Jewishness. Lumping disparate factions together. As if it was they – the peasantry – that created the Pale and not the Russian autocrats. The Rus autocrats enslaved the Jews, not some ignorant, Slavic serf.
As if Trotsky and his Bolsheviks were innocents in events 1917-1921. Instead, you yoke the Ukrainian serfs with that responsibility. It’s the Russians who should be apologizing.
This is none of my business – did Ukrainians murder members of your family? I get the impression that you’ve more than a passing interest in the subject. That it’s personal and ever-present.
The largest pogroms across Ukraine were perpetrated by the forces of Ukrainian People’s Republic.
Not the Greens/Blacks. Just the Greens. And yes, they were the only army that went out of their way to rape and murder, for the sheer joy of it. The Whites weren’t innocent, but they weren’t bloodthirsty. You stood a reasonable chance of surviving a White attack. But if the Greens came by nobody would be left alive. They were animals. They loved killing. Men, women, old people, babies, they didn’t care. Damn them all.
The largest pogroms were Tsar inspired pogroms. Yet here you are, assigning blame to peasants.
Milhouse: “Not the Greens/Blacks. Just the Greens. And yes, they were the only army that went out of their way to rape and murder, for the sheer joy of it.”
That’s a bald-faced lie. No one believes that for a one moment. You’re ax grinding. I’ve seen you talk about Polish Catholics in the same way. Amazing, a learned man such as yourself willfully and purposefully engaging in such historical half-truths and outright smears.
Historians (Encyclopedia of the Russian Civil Wars 1914-1926) sometimes refer to the Greens as Blacks (Makhno’s Standard was the black anarchist flag).
Contemporaries like the British author C.E. Bechhofer called them Greens. I won’t play the pedant game with you.
There is no culture clash in Kharkov.
Kharkov is where I was born and raised. A Russian city, not very different from Rostov, with Ukrainian language signs to remind us where we were. Communists pushed the Ukrainian culture there.
Countryside spoke a Russo-Ukrainian dialect, just like in the nearby Belgorod region. I suppose where to draw a border between Russia and Ukraine is an open question but the existence of monolith Ukrainian culture is a fiction.
Deciding where to draw the border is certainly not an open question.
Maybe not modern Ukrainian culture. Primarily because Russia rode roughshod over said culture and rewrote history to make the Cossacks out as Russians.
And, honestly, modern culture is mostly what it needs to be about, as trying to revive ancient nationalistic claims is where you often end up with bloodbaths. But don’t paper over the Russian part of making Ukrainian culture more Russian.
Cossac culture existed, often quite willingly, under the Russian empirical auspices.
Under the Tsarist-autocrats In exchange for military service, typically thirty years on border garrison detail.
Not true under the Bolsheviks.
“…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:…”
OMFG. My head hurts. Meanwhile, in other news, the Germanic tribe known as Vandals sacked Rome in 455 A.D.
Shouldn’t those Ukrainian kids be in the Boy Scouts or something learning marksmanship, land navigation, pioneering and first aid? Why are they at the Mall given the state of things in Ukraine?
You just hit the nail on the head. Also ask: where the hell is all that money going – aside from the u-turn much of it makes into the pockets of democrat and GOPe politicians?
The entire poem is a takedown of autocracy and is very typical of the intelligentsia’s unease with the city of St. Petersburg. Peter the Great built the city in the delta of Neva River — beautiful and moody and it flooded every spring.
Europeans are not all peace and love about each other and there is nothing special about Pushkin in this regard.
Double post?
Yes, apologies.
Same thought I had.
You don’t want to know who runs that kind of camps in Ukraine.
Rather than cancelling Pushkin, how about if the Ukrainians were to dismantle the memory of true monsters such as Bogdan Khmelnitsky. If they want to be Western Europeans, they need to do to Khmelnitsky what we forced the Germans to do to Hitler. Until they do they will remain identified with his monstrosity and will deserve everything they get.
Both Russians and Ukrainians regard Khmelnitsky as a hero. Ukrainians see him as a champion of nationalism and Russians as a figure that reunited Ukraine and Russia. Granted, many Ukrainians agree with the Russian assessment.
I know both regard him as a hero. That just means both are barbarians. Both sides should cancel him the way Hitler was canceled. Not to forget him but to erase anything that treats him as a hero. But if they’re canceling historical figures and not doing him, that makes them worse.
So, everybody was kung fu fighting? Were they fast as lightning? It certainly would be a little frightening if performed with expert timing.
You should have saved that one for the coming war over Taiwan.
the cops picked up 245 teens at Nikolsky mall to prevent a fight from breaking out
So, did they put them all in uniform and ship them to the front? If not, why not? Aren’t they in an existential fight for their lives or something?
I thought things like that only happen in peacetime. I guess I was wrong.
See “zoot suit riot”, 1943.
What’s the point of being a subculture if it doesn’t freak out the normies?
Well, done.