>From: "Grant Lee" <grantlee at iinet.net.au>
>
>PS: Interesting article on Russian skinheads. You say:
>
>"It is no coincidence that many of the so-called "skinheads" are not, as
>with their counterparts in the West, from the working or lower classes.
>Rather, a disproportionately large number are the children of the former
>Soviet "middle class" and intelligentsia - doctors, teachers and so forth
>who would have had privileged lives under the old systems but were
>lumpenized by hyperinflation in the early 1990s."
>
>From personal experience of them at their peak --- including having
>friends
>beaten up by them --- I would say that most skinheads here were "working or
>lower class" only because the vast majority of the population is also those
>things. Here the skinhead gangs seemed to be dominated by British
>immigrants, the kids of British immigrants and/or misfit lower middle class
>types. The dominant youth subcultures, those based around (1) cars/metal
>music or (2) surfing were also very racist at the time and their membership
>also cut right across class lines.
The skins in the fSU are in a different boat (I'm using the term as shorthand for ultranationalist violence-inclined young people, inc. say in Central Asia, where they obviously wouldn't be Nazis). They're the product of what I guess you could call the nouveaux lumpen class: Children of families who lost everything in the early 90s. As you might expect, they're pretty pissed off.
Classes in the Western sense really have only existed in the fSU for a little over a decade, after all. Poverty is very new here.
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