Description
It was '93 or '94 when the RNE—the far-right Russian National Unity movement—came to our city. The walls of Belarusian factories and apartment blocks sprouted slogans: "The Russians are coming!", "Russian means sober!", "Russian, arise!" I didn’t consider myself Russian, and back then, I didn't really grasp the concept of a nation. To me, "Russian" conjured up fairy tales about mythic bogatyrs—ancient knights, Baba Yaga the witch, and Koschei the Deathless.
The first skinheads appeared in our school, though my classmates openly mocked them. We called them "baldies," "cue-balls," or "chrome-domes." They handed out stickers—mostly featuring the RNE swastika-like logo or the crest of the Dynamo Moscow football club—and, of course, preached violence against Jews and "Blacks." In those days, nobody had ever seen a "Black" person in our neighborhood, and Jews were merely the subject of anecdotes, rarely associated with actual human beings. To make matters worse, most of the boys at school were die-hard fans of the local working-class club, FC Traktor, and reacted with hostility to anything related to the Moscow team. In the eyes of the other students, the skins quickly morphed into figures who were slightly unhinged, dim-witted, but physically sturdy.
Console gaming was not a cheap hobby. Cartridges cost a fortune. But there was another way to get a new game—the swap. Kids whose parents were broke would hunt down other gamers, begging to trade cartridges for a few days or weeks. A newly released game was worth two or three old ones! This exchange rate sometimes led to veritable odysseys into neighboring or distant districts. It also led to unexpected encounters.
In the spring of 1994, on the outskirts of my own neighborhood, I was stopped by exactly the kind of "Black" the skinheads were always railing against. He was a couple of years older than me, with swarthy skin, dark hair, and a slight accent I couldn't place. Spotting the cartridge, the guy decided to shake me down for it. Taking it was effortless; I was never the fighting type.
The cartridge wasn't mine. That was standard procedure. When you were hunting for a specific game for another gamer, the chain of exchange could be convoluted—a complex, multi-step gambit. Having landed in trouble, I didn't know what to do next, but I knew where a notorious skinhead nicknamed "Shaiba"—The Puck—lived. I trudged over to him, despondent.
Shaiba listened with surprising empathy. He said he’d seen my attacker and that the guy was Dagestani—which, in his view, meant he was "Russian," not "Black," and certainly not some "dirty n—" singing rap music. The more he schooled me on racial theory, the less sense it made. Blacks and Jews were accused of getting Russians drunk and conducting a secret, targeted genocide against all white people. The "mystical Jews" were the scariest of all: they supposedly controlled the Blacks, importing them in gangs to rape Russian women and darken the gene pool.
"Why do they need to do that?" I asked. The skinhead grew angry. "Revenge against the whites for Hitler!"
I nodded uncertainly and listened, hoping Shaiba would eventually offer some physical muscle for the negotiations when I tracked down the robber. Instead, the young fascist kept loading me up with another story about his sister, whose friend knew a girl who had been raped by a Black man. We were standing in the stairwell; the spring air was cool. When Shaiba stepped away to put on something warmer, I managed to slip away just to escape the blathering nonsense.
In the end, my father sorted the situation out. He went down to the district, talked to the locals, and found the Dagestani boy’s parents. It took no effort at all. The cartridge was returned. My relationship with the skins, however, went down the drain. My crowd would eventually become the rappers, break-dancers, anarchists, and anti-fascists who, through street warfare, would later scrub the proletarian Tractor Works district—and all of Minsk—clean of the far-right contagion. A pity it wasn't forever...
Flux + Kylodzi low-rank adaptation, digital manipulation, loop by Hailuo, dither, converting to GIF
768 × 1144 px