Spider Fiction
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Over the past week, dozens of videos of teenagers fighting in shopping malls have gone viral on Russian social networks. Popular Telegram channels reported that it was a youth subculture of fans of the PMC Ryodan anime. Even the Kremlin was forced to react to the scandal: the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov called for the suppression of the illegal actions of teenagers belonging to “a pseudo-subculture that does not bring anything good to our youth.” The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation suggested that “everything comes from Ukraine,” while the Ukrainian media report that fights of teenagers in clothes with spider symbols were also recorded in a neighboring country.
News about the “new youth movement” began to appear on popular Telegram channels on February 19. Then in the Moscow shopping center “Aviapark” there was a skirmish between teenagers; footage of the fight got on the Internet with the explanation that the video shows members of the youth group “PMC Ryodan”. Throughout the next week, new videos of fighting teenagers appeared on social networks. Telegram channels explained that they were fans of Japanese comics about the Genei Ryodan gang, whose members call themselves “Spiders”. It was alleged that the “spiders” are fighting with football fans, “gopniks” and Caucasian youth. And the abbreviation PMC – a private military company – was added in the wake of the popularity of Wagner PMC.
In a few days, dozens of communities and channels appeared on social networks, which are allegedly run on behalf of the “spiders”.
Basically, advertisements were published there, but there were also calls to deal with the opponents of the PMC Ryodan. So, on February 27, the Ryodan-Stavropol channel appeared in Telegram, which gained more than 600 subscribers in two days, mostly schoolchildren. The chat claimed that they “scored the arrow” (that is, they agreed to sort things out) in the Cosmos shopping center, however, there was no information with whom. Later, the chat participants reported that at the appointed time, riot police were on duty at the shopping center and some teenagers were allegedly even detained. However, the incident was not included in the police report. The media reported that teenagers were detained all week in Tula, Kursk, Novosibirsk, Rostov, Yaroslavl, Kazan and other cities.
Apparently, within a week, PMC Ryodan had real enemies. On February 26, the police detained a group of teenagers in the St. Petersburg shopping mall “Gallery” who beat up a 15-year-old schoolboy in clothes with the symbols of a spider. A criminal case was initiated on hooliganism (part 2 of article 213 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation); the accused, 17-year-old Islam Abdulaev, was sent to a pre-trial detention center.
A source in the Chelyabinsk police told Kommersant about the preventive detention of 15 teenagers who “were looking for members of PMC Ryodan in the center to teach them a lesson.” In Taganrog, a group of young people calling themselves “Anti PMC Ryodan” gathered near the Marmalade shopping center on February 27. According to eyewitnesses, they were looking for “spiders” there, but they never found them. In the end, five members of the Anti PMC Ryodan were detained by the police. On February 28, the situation was repeated almost in detail in Ulan-Ude – eight teenagers who were looking for “spiders” were detained there. The head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Buryatia, Oleg Kudinov, said in this regard that “the law enforcement agencies of the region are carefully studying the situation … as they understand that everything comes from Ukraine.”
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian police faced a similar problem.
During the week, the Ukrainian media reported about the detention of groups of teenagers who allegedly “identify themselves as members of the Ryodan PMC subculture.” Such cases were recorded in Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lvov, Kharkov, Vinnitsa, Dnepropetrovsk and Odessa. The head of the main department of the national police in the Kharkiv region, Volodymyr Timoshko, suggested that this was “the plan of the FSB”, which “gathered all these people into groups through manipulation and deceit.”
The head of the State Duma Committee on Security and Anti-Corruption Vasily Piskarev said: we can talk about “attempts disguised as a youth subculture to involve the younger generation in a criminal environment.” The head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin, instructed to find out the circumstances of the mass fights.
“Teenagers from an early age should be occupied and involved in interesting cultural projects, otherwise they will involve themselves somewhere and find themselves in a criminal environment,” Kirill Kabanov, a member of the HRC, commented to Kommersant, who said that a report was already being prepared to the head of state. the main thing that bothered us in the situation with “Ryodan” is the complete lack of specifics: where they come from, what they want. And we need to look into this in detail.”
Roskomnadzor told Kommersant that they sent “a number of materials for examination” to Rosmolodezh: “Information about the involvement of minors in illegal acts posted on the Internet is recognized by Rosmolodezh as prohibited. Based on such decisions, Roskomnadzor restricts access to information.”
On Monday, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “the Kremlin has a negative attitude towards the new teenage subculture Ryodan,” and he himself considers it “necessary to stop the illegal actions of its followers.” “This is, let’s say, a pseudo-subculture that comes with a minus sign and which does nothing good for our youth,” said the representative of the head of state.
At the same time, it remains unclear whether the Ryodan PMC subculture exists in reality.
Mediazona (included in the register of foreign agents) claims to have found the very first Ryodan Telegram channel among numerous clones. It explained that the fight on February 19 in Aviapark took place on a domestic issue: a “company of athletes” attacked long-haired anime fans in black sweatshirts “just for their appearance.”
The video of the skirmish hit the Internet and became viral, the publication concludes. According to the messages in the channel, the mysterious black clothes with a spider are just a symbol of fans of the rapper Shadowraze, who is popular with anime and computer game fans.
Leading researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, author of books on youth subcultures, Dmitry Gromov, believes that the media and officials misjudge the situation with PMC Ryodan. This is not a subculture, but a community of teenagers who are fond of anime, he is sure: “There is often a team of fans around films and series. They connect on social media, sometimes meet in public places, and then disperse.” In his opinion, in this situation, the hype arose due to several factors:
“The conflict became widely known on the anniversary of the beginning of the special operation. Law enforcement agencies were waiting for something to happen, so the teenagers’ conflict immediately attracted their attention. Many were frightened by the word “PMC” – now it is associated only with PMC “Wagner”.
“This is an artificially created newsbreak, there is no Ryodan,” said a source in the law enforcement agencies of Yaroslavl, who was asked by Kommersant about the detentions of teenagers in the city. “All thematic groups on VKontakte were created in the 20th of February. Someone provokes teenagers to action.” According to him, police officers have to detain groups of teenagers for prevention: “They are explained the rules of behavior in public places and the fact that information on the Internet should be treated critically.”
“The situation is complicated by pumping up the topic in the media, which is of interest to teenagers who are not even involved in subcultures,” a Kommersant source in the power structures of the Angara region expressed a similar opinion. “For example, the PMC Ryodan Irkutsk group was registered on VKontakte on 26 February, on the first day it had several dozen subscribers. However, after the regional media disseminated information about this event, the number of subscribers increased sharply to 1.5 thousand people.”
“In fact, this is a local party, which the cattle got to the bottom of, there was a conflict, and away we go. Teenagers are looking for “Ryodan” in all cities of Russia and Ukraine, trolls are inflating the Internet, and officials, police and deputies are fighting a new subculture, wrote anarchist Svyatoslav Rechkalov (wanted by Russian police, received political asylum in Europe) on social networks.—
The funny thing is that now there is no mass and aggressive subculture of “Ryodan”, but at such a pace it may appear.
People can find out about their existence, start copying the style, and also thinking that the point is really in the war with football fans. And then a funny situation will turn out, when at first a myth about a subculture was created, and then this myth created the subculture itself. And the original Redans will be *** (surprised).”
Anthropologist Dmitry Gromov agrees that the excitement around PMC Ryodan and the close attention of officials, deputies and the media may well form a new extreme group: “If earlier young people knew that this was just a community of anime fans, now there is a danger that Ryodan will be perceived precisely as an extremist community. Because many mentors of public opinion made such a promise. And there is a risk that the new members of Ryodan will behave exactly in the vein that the media and deputies attribute to them.” At the same time, Mr. Gromov says, there is a risk that law enforcement officers will try to pass off individual members of the organization as organizers of an extremist movement.
On February 28, Artem Metelev, head of the Duma Committee on Youth Policy, said that one of the Ryodan representatives approached him and asked for a meeting in order to “clarify the situation.” The press service of Mr. Metelev helped Kommersant to contact the author of the appeal, the administrator of the Ryodan group on VKontakte, 17-year-old Arseniy Almutov. He told Kommersant that he was not related to the community with the postscript “PMC”. “I led a group that was founded before this hype (hype.— “b”) and was dedicated to clothes and pictures related to anime,” the young man said. “We indicated that we are against general gatherings and any gatherings that provoke any conflicts. When I turned to the deputy, I wanted to explain what is happening on the network. And that ordinary people who just want to wear the clothes they like and grow their hair the way they like, walk informally, they don’t want to suffer the actions of those who create conflict in real life and online.
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