Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Even more interesting was that the Russian thugs were supported by high-ranking officials, from the representative of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Vladimir Markin, to the Duma deputy and member of the Executive Committee of the Russian Football Union, Igor Lebedev. And here one has to acknowledge a very unpleasant thing: the fans in Marseilles were representing perfectly the official policy and mass consciousness of post-Crimean Russia.

They carried out the same hybrid war that is so popular in our propaganda, when well-prepared fighters trained in hand-to-hand combat are sent into Crimea or the Donbass under the guise of ‘soldiers on leave’; when violence is carried out selectively and purposefully; and when attacks take place in unexpected places. Rumours abounded on the Internet about how, on many of the video clips, these Russian fans looked so muscular, organized and sober that they could almost have been spetsnaz soldiers from military intelligence; but let’s leave that theory to conspiracy lovers. What certainly appears to be the case is that in Marseilles an organized group of fighters, the ‘Ultras’ (as the organized fans who go to fight are known), gathered from various ‘firms’ of fans and schooled in street battles, attacked the ‘casuals’ – ordinary English fans. Some of these English fans had their families with them. What’s more, they were tanked up on beer and had come there not to fight but to cheer for their team and enjoy themselves. One of the Russian fans came straight out in an interview and admitted that our fans had gone there to fight: ‘It doesn’t matter which towns our fans are from or which team they support. All that matters is that we’re from Russia and we’re going to fight the English fans. They reckon that they’re the biggest football hooligans. We’re here to show that the English fans are just girlies.’

So even if the Russian attack wasn’t a well-planned military operation, there is fertile ground for rumours to start. For Russia this was not the first ‘hybrid’ interference in social movements in Europe; others include organizing protests and spreading propaganda, influencing the media, subtly stirring up anti-immigrant sentiments, cooperating with right-wing radicals and neofascist movements and supporting odious populists and separatism in European regions. Just as when the Comintern [22] The Communist International (Comintern), known also as the Third International (1919–43), was an international organization led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that advocated world communism and carried out subversive acts to try to bring this about. existed the USSR carried out subversive activities in the countries of the West, so Russia is getting into the cracks and splits within European society, trying to weaken the West from the inside, and explaining this as a total ‘information war’; and the nervous Europeans see these Russian fans exactly in that light.

Second, football fans really are one of the Russian state’s fighting groups. The state is irresistibly drawn to these dressed-up actors who like to put on a display of strength: Cossacks, bikers and football fans. Representatives of these tough male brotherhoods drink tea in the offices of high-ranking officials. They are held up as examples of patriotism and are given government grants for the development of civil society; and when necessary they are sent to support the ‘Russian Marches’ with the nationalists or to attack opposition rallies. In all this, the football hooligans are as far away from the traditions of football as the so-called ‘Orthodox bikers’ are from rebellion and the freedom of the ‘easy riders’; and the pot-bellied Cossacks with their stuck-on forelocks are from the honour and glory of the Russian Cossack tradition; these are all carnival fakes of the Putin era. In the conditions of total simulation of civil society in modern Russia, these protest countercultures become the representatives of pathetic officialdom, official patriotism and the fat cats who receive government grants.

Finally, the Russian fanatics (at least, those who are caught on camera) are readymade products of official propaganda, displaying on their tee-shirts and their bodies all the caricature-like kitsch of the era of the annexation of Crimea and ‘Russia rising up off its knees’: tee-shirts with ‘the little green men’ (the spetsnaz troops with no distinguishing markings on their uniforms who seized Crimea in 2014), and slogans such as ‘We don’t abandon our own’; Russian hats bearing the red star; banners with the roaring bear and Slavic warriors. And as the apotheosis of all this patriotic trash, there is a huge Russian tricolour covering half the stand bearing the words, ‘VSEM PI..DEC’ – ‘F.UCK YOU ALL’: for them, it seems, this is the national idea of this new Russia.

However, these excesses began long before Crimea: the Russian fans saved the most vile displays of great-state chauvinism and racism for their trips abroad. In the Czech Republic, Russian hockey fans unfurled banners with pictures of tanks and promises to repeat the Soviet invasion of 1968; and in the centre of Warsaw in 2012, football fans put on a procession in honour of Russia Day, almost provoking a massive fight with the Polish ‘ultras’. In the stands at football and hockey matches, Russian resentment rises up to its full height, pumped up with beer and propaganda; the Soviet empire taking its symbolic revenge: yes, we lost a great state and still haven’t learnt to play football, but we can still break chairs and ‘slap’ the Europeans around; ‘kick the hell out of the bastards’, as Vladimir Putin said one day, using the language of the fanatics. Ultimately, wasn’t it he who in one of his interviews shared the folk wisdom gleaned from his difficult childhood in the backstreets of Leningrad: ‘get the first punch in’? That’s exactly how the thugs behaved in Marseilles, and in this sense they are worthy representatives of the state: football hooliganism in hybrid Russia is a matter of vital importance for the state.

The term, ‘the thugs’ game’ exactly sums up what is going on: despite the ‘grown-up’ budgets of the clubs and the national team, despite buying world-class star players (the typical strategy of superficial modernization), Russia remains an average country in the world rankings, both in terms of its national championship and the performances of its national team. Just before the start of Euro 2016, our country was twenty-ninth in FIFA’s top fifty world teams. But our fan movement has very quickly and in a very organized way adapted the British model. The books of the English historian of football hooliganism, Dougie Brimson, achieved cult status among Russian football fans. Russia may not have become a football superpower, but it has excelled in the hybrid world of ‘the thugs’ game’, bursting onto the international stage with a deep-rooted culture of violence that is accepted by society.

But Russia is up to that same hybrid ‘thugs’ game’ in Ukraine – not carrying on an open war but delegating the task to well-prepared groups of fighters – and in Syria, interfering in an overseas war in order to demonstrate its strength, and in Europe, betting on populism, separatism and the break-up of European society. ‘The thugs’ game’ is a substitution for the honest game, for real work, for the painstaking development of institutions with simple acts of strength and demonstrations of hooliganism. Our whole society has been playing ‘the thugs’ game’ for years; the hooligans in Marseilles were simply the away team.

In order to understand the evolution of contemporary Russia, its politics and its society, books about Germany in the 1930s are becoming ever more useful. Even so, the collection put out by the Territoriya budushchego (Future Territory) publishing house, The State: Law and Politics , by the political theorist Carl Schmitt (who was known as ‘the Hobbes of the twentieth century’ and ‘the court lawyer of the Third Reich’) is amazingly relevant.