Paul Goble
Staunton,
November 5 – Bands of young people intend on violence and crime are re-emerging
in many of the cities in Russia’s regions, according to experts who have
examined official figures, the result of falling incomes and a sense of
hopelessness like the trends that gave rise to their predecessors in the 1990s
(ura.news/articles/1036276678).
And
this development, according to a Urals regional activist, not only undermines
public order and confidence in the future among the population as a whole but
has the potential to threaten the very survival of the country much as the
descent into lawlessness destroyed the Soviet Union earlier (freeural.org/vozvrashhajutsja-lihie-90-e-s-posledujushhim-razvalom-strany/).
Mikhail Bely of the URA news agency
says that official statistics shows that criminal youth groups like those in
the 1990s have re-emerged in the cities of Russia’s regions. One measure of
that is that crime among young people has risen by 4.7 percent for the country
as a whole and by much higher percentages in the most economically depressed
areas.
Konstantin Dolinin of the Parental
Assembly movement says that the rise of criminal youth groups is no surprise.
It reflects three facts: the lack of any serious youth policy by the
government, the depressed economic situation young people and their parents
face, and the absence of any legal possibility to express their point of view.”
Under current conditions, if you
appear in the street with a sign “’Against Bad Weather,’” the siloviki will
detain you as an extremist, Dolinin says.
Not surprisingly, criminal organizations find it easy to recruit young
people because such groups can give them hope for the future.
A member of one such group told Bely
on conditions of anonymity, that the growth of criminal youth groups reflects
the fact that there are fewer resources available and that adult criminal
groups are now being forced to fight over their division. These groups recruit
young people to help them do so.
It
is wrong to think of criminal youth groups as separate organizations, he says.
They are simply “the lowest rung of criminal groups” more generally.
Psychologist
Aleksandr Kolesnikov confirms this: “Now many youths see that their parents
work, get tired and don’t have much. It is hard to achieve success if you don’t
belong to the elite. This creates complexes. The groups play on this: one must recognize
that social lifts really function in them.”
“Theoretically,”
the psychologist continues, “today you can be at the lowest level and after a
few years, you can become a more or less high-status bandit, if of course you aren’t
put in prison or killed.”
And
Sergey Zhuravsky, a political analyst at the Moscow Institute of Regional Expertise,
says that these bands “have literally seized the country.” Now, they dominate
things throughout the Urals region where young people feel they have been
abandoned by everyone. Soon they will
spread everywhere: “this is already an epidemic which it is hard to stop.”
Andrey
Romanov, in a comment for his Free Urals
portal, says that those who want to understand where Russia is heading should
not be looking at Moscow where Putin will keep the standard of living
relatively high to forestall any protests but rather at the cities in the
regions where criminal youth groups now hold sway.
“Travel
through the regions and look at how people live” and then you will see the
future, one in which no one trusts anyone else and in which the Russian
Federation as a single country is being undermined.
This
“chain reaction will pass through the regions and eventually reach Moscow,” he
continues. “Out of the popular protests in the regions will come new leaders”
and they won’t be stopped by the Kremlin’s siloviki. “The people do not believe
anyone, not the right, not the left, not the systemic or the extra-systemic.”
Many
are suffering, and the re-emergence of criminal bands of young people is a
harbinger of the collapse of the entire system.
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