[lbo-talk] Russian skinheads

[John E. Norem]

It was 9.10pm and Karen Abramian was returning home to his flat in 
southwest Moscow. Abramian had been visiting his parents in a nearby 
tower block. His journey back took five minutes - past a series of grey 
high-rise buildings soaring into Moscow's packed skyline and a 
children's playground, and up a modest flight of steps. As he punched in 
the entrance code, two young men, one wearing a baseball cap and one a 
bandana, approached him from behind. And then they stabbed him. They 
stabbed him again - methodically slashing his head, neck, back and 
stomach. Abramian pleaded with his attackers. "Don't do this. Please 
take my money," he begged them. His assailants - two slight, boyish, 
almost nerdish figures - ignored him, stabbing him 56 times. At this 
moment, Abramian's wife Marta peered out of their ninth-floor apartment 
window and spotted two boys beating a dark shape lying on the ground. 
The couple's 14-year-old son Georgy, who had been playing nearby, found 
his father in the entrance, bleeding profusely. Georgy took off his 
T-shirt (it was April, still winter in Russia 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/russia>, and bitterly cold), wrapped it 
around his father and ran upstairs. Abramian was conscious when Georgy 
came back with a blanket and pillow. Georgy wrapped his father in it and 
they waited in the gloom for an ambulance. Abramian told his son simply: 
"They were skinheads." Four hours later, in the early hours of 17 April 
2007, Abramian was dead. Doctors had been unable to stem the colossal 
loss of blood.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/08/russia-race