I wrote this:
Actually the skinheads are developing a racist ideology, imported from the West via the Internet. --- I think this may give an idea of what I am talking about about the way the skins are grafting Western racial ideas/symbols onto their own particular conceptual systems. I was watching the political show Namedny last night, and they had an episode on skinheads down in, I think, Voronezh. One of them had scrawled a swastika on a wall. The journalist said to a young woman there, one of the woman associated with the skinhead group, that the symbol wasn't exactly popular in Russia, what with the whole Hitler thing and the Nazi invasion. Her response was to get defensive and assert that the swastika has "nothing to do with Hitler and the Nazis, but is an ancient symbol of strength and power."
They get this stuff off the Internet, you know. They have only the most marginal ideas of what any of it actually means. These aren't the brightest bulbs in the Russian population.