by Ross Kemp
Up we all trooped to the third floor, where the duelling was to take place. First up was Sasha, along with one of the younger guys. They squared up back to back. Dimitri counted to three; the duo walked five paces, turned and fired. Or at least the guy did – Sasha simply dodged about squealing. When Rumyansev asked her why she had failed to return fire, she admitted sheepishly she had forgotten to release the pistol’s safety catch. Lucky the promised revolution wasn’t quite upon us yet.
My own opponent was my very good enemy Artiem. He had a crafty little smirk on his face I did not much like the look of but, hey, I had a pistol too. Besides, in preparation for a previous television show I had done a fair bit of weapons training, courtesy of Chris Ryan and some other ex-SAS guys. I’m no James Bond, but I was reasonably confident of hitting Artiem at least once if I got the chance. I have to admit I was also quite looking forward to getting him some place where it hurt. I could tell the feeling was mutual.
We made ready, donning goggles, gloves and basic motocross-style balaclavas. But then the gang sprang a little surprise: to add a little extra zing to our duel we were first to be doused in petrol and set on fire. That had not happened to Sasha and her opponent. ‘Give the man a gun!’ someone shouted in guttural Russian. A gang member splashed petrol over my boots and down the back of my jacket then set fire to it. I felt the flames creep up my legs and curl over the small of my back. Things were warming up nicely.
We squared up back to back, just as men settling scores would have done in the old days. While Rumyansev looked on like the Cheshire cat, Sergei Malyuta counted down. ‘Three, two, one, Go!’
On ‘Go!’ I turned, aimed and fired at the dodging Artiem. I was pulling the trigger like a madman but nothing happened. I had no ammunition. But, as I now found to my cost, Artiem’s pistol had a full mag. I ducked and weaved as he fired, doing my best to avoid the ball bearings winging past me and ricocheting off the manky concrete walls.
Sadly, I’m no Keanu Reeves. My weapons training never included the Matrix slo-mo bullet dodge. As I swivelled neatly – at least I thought it was neat – a ball bearing hit me smack in the chest. A second pinged me in the ribs. I felt their impact all right, but neither shot did me much damage. Then I felt a sharp, stinging pain in my right forefinger. Now that did hurt.
Meanwhile, I was still on fire.
It seemed like a good time to put myself out. Luckily, at this moment Artiem ran out of ammunition. I rolled on the ground to douse the flames which by now were singeing my ears – the Nazis helped to put the fire out, I think they enjoyed stamping it out as much as setting fire to me.
‘Are you all right, Mr Kemp?’ Rumyansev asked me with the same crafty grin as his mate.
‘Fine,’ I replied through gritted teeth. ‘Never better. That was great fun, except that I didn’t have any ammunition in my pistol.’
They treated me to a pantomime exchange of surprised looks, confirming my suspicion that I had been set up. My finger was throbbing where the ball bearing had smashed into it, but I was determined not to let them see how much it ached. When they went off to discuss the next exercise, I pulled my glove off to look at the damage. The round had whacked into the left side of my right index finger, raising a button of flesh that was already turning hard. From Russia with hate, I still have the lump.
All of this running about and play-fighting felt a bit like being in the Boy Scouts, but as the day wore on I realized that no matter how repellent the gang and its ideology, this kind of adventure training bonds people tight. It forges them into a unit and infuses them with team spirit, just as it did for the ‘blond beast’ cohorts of the Hitler Youth. Despite my best efforts to stand well back and keep a firm grip on my senses; after dodging the bricks that rained past my head from badly fastened backpacks; while wading through waist-deep freezing water; avoiding death by a whisker; getting set on fire; having my finger whacked and boosting my fellow trainees over walls, even I was beginning to feel a part of the group. A feeling I managed easily to quash the minute I met Edik and Irina Satenik.
Originally from Nagorno-Karabakh, a mainly Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, the Sateniks were a pleasant, hardworking and intelligent couple who had fled their homeland after repeated attacks at the hands of militant Azerbaijanis, bent on ethnic cleansing. That was bad enough, but that wasn’t what I had met them to talk about. With great courage, given the potential threat to their safety, the Sateniks told us their shocking story. Shortly before we arrived in Moscow a group of neo-Nazis had set upon their son Arta as he was travelling home from college on the train. While one member of the unidentified gang kept watch, two others jumped Arta without warning. They stabbed him six times in the neck with a knife. According to eyewitnesses, one of the pair shouted ‘Glory to Mother Russia!’ as he stabbed. There in the railway carriage eighteen-year-old Arta Satenik bled out his life.
‘He was such a skinny boy,’ a still distraught Irina Satenik told me. ‘He had a very thin neck. What was there to cut up? But they stabbed him six times in the neck.’
With quiet dignity, Edik added, ‘What for? Why my son, whom I raised, to whom I gave all my love, all my tenderness. Why did this non-human kill my son? A real man would never attack from behind. Only traitors, only weaklings do it. A strong person would never behave like that. The people who hide them are also weak. They teach people to attack secretly; they never say things to your face. They are rats. They are cowards.’
Since the attack Mrs Satenik will not allow her remaining son to travel anywhere by public transport, but to get to work she herself has to travel the same line her son was riding the day he died. Now, Irina Satenik wants to quit Russia, a country she hoped would be a safe haven from racist thugs. The Moscow police have carried out an investigation, but to date no one has been charged with Arta’s murder.
The day after hearing Arta Satenik’s story, I met a friend of Dimitri Rumyansev. Also calling himself Dimitri but unwilling to give his surname, this man described himself as an author. The book in question – ‘book’ dignifies a thing that does not deserve the description – was a graphic and very badly written account of a skinhead attack on a young immigrant woman. Innocent of any crime or offence, the defenceless young woman dies. The excerpt the proud Dimitri quoted to me out loud read, ‘Why the fuck did you come here, bitch? Die, die, die!’ Dimitri the writer was delighted with the effect his disgusting tirade was having on Russia’s far right thugs. ‘Since the book was published,’ he said, ‘victims are not just beaten up; they are stabbed to death. People are using my book as an instruction manual.’
*
While most Muscovites are not racist, the idea that immigrants are taking their jobs is fairly widespread in the capital. One of the craziest things about neo-Nazi Russian gangs is that they seem to have forgotten that Hitler, the biggest Nazi of all time, killed some twenty million of their fellow countrymen in World War II, laid waste to huge areas of the Russian motherland and came very close to making Russia a German colony. All of this is somehow overlooked, and the German Nazis’ key message – that everyone and anyone who did not exactly fit their notion of racial purity merited enslavement or extermination – has become the gospel of the neo-fascist Moscow gangs. Hitler held Slavs in the same contempt as he did everyone else who was not ‘pure Aryan’. Maybe the gangsters don’t know…
The alarming thing that distinguishes gangs like the NSO from others I looked at around the world is the fact that they enjoy at least verbal support from members of the establishment. The most outspoken of these supporters is Nikolai Kuryanovich, who agreed to meet up and talk. I turned up for the interview in my usual jeans and T-shirt, only to be told that Member of the State Parliament Kuryanovich was far too important and grand to talk to anyone not wearing a tie. So I had to go out and buy one. Once I had passed the clothing inspection, I then had to negotiate Kuryanovich’s bodyguards, who checked our passports and permissions not once, not twice, but three times.
Just before the
meeting I asked our researcher Marta Shaw, who had already met him, what Kuryanovich was like. Uncharacteristically, Marta hesitated. ‘He’s all right,’ she said at last.
‘All right? What does that mean? What does he look like?’
This produced another reflective silence. ‘Well… he’s quite nice-looking.’ I studied Marta for a moment. She was telling me something in code; I just hadn’t understood it yet. When we were finally admitted into Member Kuryanovich’s presence, the penny dropped. Stocky, round-faced and with a very close-shaven head, Kuryanovich looked a fair bit like me. Only no jeans.
The first thing I noticed in Kuryanovich’s office was the large number of double-headed eagles dotted around, including a big brass example on his desk. A stuffed one perched on the wall above his head. As we went through the ritual of meeting and greeting, I found myself playing spot the eagle. I began to feel a little light-headed. There were eagles everywhere – it was an eagle convention. The stuffed eagle had landed. Enough eagles already. Yet more of these ancient symbols of Mother Russia – and ironically enough but with just one head – soared in majestic flight in the pictures and photographs plastered across the office walls. All of which made me think Kuryanovich might be a patriot. As if to scotch any lingering doubt about that, a large shot of a Hind-D helicopter gunship, the type Soviet forces used to kill thousands in the Russo-Afghan war, seemed to hint at a certain nationalist frame of mind.
To get the conversational ball rolling, Kuryanovich informed me that the leaders he most admired in history were Hitler and Stalin. Given they had been mortal enemies, this pairing struck me as strange. It was as if any old dictator would do, provided he was ‘strong’. Strong enough to murder millions? Kuryanovich said he liked the books and films produced by the leaders of the Third Reich, projecting the ‘unity of the nation’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘imperial power’.
Among many pieces of legislation Member Kuryanovich was trying to enact was one stipulating that any white Russian woman caught going out with a ‘black’ – as he termed immigrants – should be stripped of her passport. In Russia having no passport amounts to socio-economic death: no job, no freedom to travel, no civil rights, no nothing. The ‘black’ boyfriend, meanwhile, should be sent to the salt mines (no kidding) and made to work for the motherland. Kuryanovich called this ‘mild slavery’ without specifying the exact degree of mildness or otherwise. He also proposed the public execution by hanging of all corrupt Duma representatives. When I suggested he might rapidly run out of hooks, Kuryanovich gave me a crocodile grin: ‘The supply of suitable equipment will not be a problem.’
It is hard to overstate how out of place the neo-Nazi gangsters’ small and vicious ideology feels in a city as beautiful as Moscow. It is stunning to look at, and unless you happen to be an immigrant or penniless – or both – a great place to be. And there’s the rub: in common with other countries plagued by a serious gang problem, modern Russia is a society sharply divided between the small number of haves and an extremely large number of have-nots. Wherever I went looking, the same basic truth stared me straight in the face: the greater the social divide, the worse the country’s gang problem. In Moscow, also a city of grey monolithic housing blocks named after one or other of its grey, monolithic leaders, the poverty-stricken walk the same streets as billionaires. This was brought home to me at the upscale hotel where the crew and I stayed during the shoot.
One of the shops there did a nice line in Fabergé. Its precious metal and jewelled confections were made originally for the tsars and are now perhaps the ultimate symbol of wealth for Moscow’s nouveau riche. I was browsing one day when a showily dressed middle-aged bottle blonde swept in with two younger sidekicks in tow. Perhaps they were her daughters – I didn’t ask. Down to their scarlet lipstick and absurdly high heels, the younger women looked as if they had been cloned from the elder. As I watched from a postcard gondola, they bought the shop’s entire stock of Fabergé goods, down to the last diamond-encrusted egg. When they had left, ushered to their waiting stretch limo by fawning attendants, I asked the shop’s manager how much the trio had spent. Shrugging his shoulders as if this kind of thing happened every day, he replied, ‘Oh, maybe a couple of million US dollars.’
In the new, free market Russia life revolves around corruption – bribery is the norm, and very little gets done without money changing hands. There is always something going on beneath the surface. One woman I met summed it up nicely. Were things really very different since the fall of the old regime? She cocked her head to one side and said, ‘Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it is the other way round.’ Moscow humour – dry as a bone. During the two weeks or so I spent in the city I grew to like Moscow and its people – with the exception of its right-wing gangsters – so much that, while I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life there, I wouldn’t mind spending a couple of years in the city living it up.
The next person I interviewed was a human rights lawyer from Tajikistan known as Gavahar. Gavahar has built a dangerous career out of specializing in immigrant race-hate crimes. She told us that while not all Moscow police officers are corrupt, many view foreigners as fair game.
All Metro stations and most other transport nodes have a dedicated police station. The police who man them routinely stop immigrants – or anyone they don’t like the look of – to demand papers, passports and permits. If the person fails to produce the necessary documents, especially the crucial Moscow resident’s permit, then one of two things happens: they are either arrested or they have to pay. The going bribe for immediate release is twenty US dollars. That’s about a month’s wages for a Moscow labourer and an unsustainable tax on a worker’s daily commute. As a variant on this scam, once they have identified an illegal immigrant some police officers extort a weekly ‘tax’ from the victim’s almost invariably pitiful wages.
If they resist the extortion, the police threaten to fit up illegal immigrants by planting drugs on them or trumping up some other charge. Gavahar said her office takes on an average of a hundred cases of racially motivated attacks and other anti-immigrant crimes every year, and struggles to get the Moscow authorities to take them seriously. ‘Convictions,’ she told me, ‘are extremely rare.’
For obvious reasons it was hard to get victims to talk to me. One man brave enough to go on the record was ‘Rostam’. Travelling home on the Metro one night, Rostam and his friend were stopped by a drunken police officer who demanded to see his papers. Rostam explained he had left them at home that day, but could get them and bring them back. The officer called for backup. Two other policemen took Rostam and his mate to the special little room the Moscow police have in every single Metro station. Once there, the officer who had stopped Rostam in the first place demanded twenty dollars. Rostam had no money. The officer drew his pistol. Looking Rostam straight in the eye, he said, ‘Did you know I can kill you?’
What happened next defies belief. ‘He took the safety catch off, aimed the pistol at me and fired, from a distance of one and a half metres. He was aiming at my forehead. At the last moment I moved my head a little and the bullet hit me in the mouth.’ Pulling down his lower lip, Rostam showed me where the round had gone into his lower right jaw, smashed out a tooth, travelled down his neck and lodged in his shoulder. Too dangerous to extract, it is still there. ‘I could see my reflection in the mirror. There was blood everywhere. My friend picked me up and started shouting at the policeman. I croaked, “Call an ambulance for me.” The policeman yelled back, “If you want an ambulance, go to the street and use a public phone.”’
Contacting Gavahar, Rostam pressed charges. The case took more than a year to come to court. The policeman was found guilty and sentenced to nine years in jail, but such action takes real determination, persistence and courage on the part of the victim.
With the economy steaming ahead and the country’s birth rate in free fall, the Russian government is keen to attract skilled immigrant labour to help keep the boom going. I
t is therefore just a bit ironic that neo-Nazi gangs like the NSO are training for ‘war’ against the very people on whom the state believes its future depends. And a minority of Moscow’s police force seems to be lending a hand.
My final stab at getting under the National Socialist Union’s skin was to accept an invitation to a day’s ‘country training’ at what Dimitri Rumyansev proudly told me was the gang’s secret rural headquarters. The location was so secret they took the batteries out of our mobile phones so no one could track them. Unfortunately, they also rammed stinking old woollen balaclavas with no eyeholes over our heads, including that of our translator Elena. The gangsters made us wear them all the way to our destination, which turned out to be two hours distant. Strangely, no one seemed to notice the absurdity of leaving Andy free to carry on filming while the rest of us were blindfold, but by now I had come to the conclusion that logic wasn’t really the gang’s strongest suit.
We were decanted into the grounds of a nondescript red-brick dacha located I will never know where. It was a good size, but hardly Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. A set of steep steps led up to an imposing front door. Lined up on either side of this staircase was the rest of the NSO. In among the ragtag crew of about two dozen people, two individuals attracted my eye. The first was Tesak, a hulking young brute with a head-lice haircut and a constellation of scars – especially on his fists – he told me proudly were the result of knife wounds. ‘Scars are decorations for a fist. It’s beautiful to have a scar. They are combat wounds.’
‘What kind of combat?’ I asked.