15-Year-Old Teen Knifed to Death by 6 Other Teens in Siberia

Russians may not be against the war, but rising rates of violent crimes tell a different story

Courtesy of Vesta-Teplij

The boy stood at the bus stop in Irkutsk. He was 15. A group of boys aged 15 to 21 approached and started messing with him. He didn’t back down. One of the boys shouted a slogan from a popular new TV series, The Word of a Paisan: Blood on the Street, that glorifies the violence of the 1990s. The group then stabbed the unarmed boy five or six times. He died immediately at the bus stop.

Out of a sense of hopelessness and a narrative that tells Russians they must be tough to face a world out to erase their culture, violence is becoming again a means not so much to an end but just a means to survival. 

Since the invasion of February 2022 and the number of unprecedented deaths, the little value that human life held in Russia has been further depleted. Requiring an expendable army, one that it could throw at Ukrainian lines in the form of meat waves, Russia is emptying the prisons. Rapitsts and murderers are being pardoned, and those who survive their deployment to the front are returning home to kill ever more.

In some ways, Mr. Putin’s war has turned the country’s entire criminal justice system into a military recruitment tool, experts say. Russia’s extremely high conviction rates — 99.6 percent — its long prison terms, and inhumane conditions inside jails create strong incentives to risk death to obtain freedom (The Convicts Sustaining Putin’s Invasion).

Russia’s violent criminals, the drug dealers, and the rapists are being regarded as heroes. When you are a young man, and you notice around you that the police are too busy arresting people for wrong political views, preserving order in the street falls to the people. Shootouts are taking place, and the mafia has started again to seize businesses. At a restaurant owned by an acquaintance in St. Petersburg (The Fish of My Dreams), a shootout took place. In another place in the center of the city, a family restaurant saw gangsters beating each other until one was stabbed in the chest and collapsed. 

Crime is not just okay again, but it is considered the only way to survive in a society preoccupied with waging an illegal war and filling the ranks of the army with law-breaking men and boys. The more crime, the more arrests, the longer Putin can hold off ordering a nationwide draft. 

The 1990s were good and they were bad

He’s aging. Having always been a man of Kewpie doll proportions, he has clearly approached life with a chip the size of a softball on his shoulder. As a young man, at least according to him, he was prone to get into fights to prove that his small stature was not a sign of weakness. I don’t doubt that he fought because that is what many kids in Leningrad did. 

Compared to his wife in this photo, he could easily be perceived as a “Yes, dear” type of man. Many Russian men hail from the “Yes, dear” school of thought. The belief is that it’s just easier to let her rule the roost with an iron hand as it permits them to stray more easily with other women. These men view their transgressions as a form of vengeance: “You want to treat me like your bad little puppy, I will get what I need then elsewhere, ok, ‘dear?” 

Vladimir Putin, the moment he got over the shame of having to drive a taxi, which was a typical gig job in which many men took part in the 1990s to earn a few extra rubles, Putin got himself in with Anatoly Sobchak. He was on his way to not just compensating for his inner demons but would soon be able to make others pay for the slights he surely perceived throughout his wife. His wife paid almost immediately as she was forced to tolerate his infidelities. 

Fast forward to 2020. Having felt a little less relevant during the COVID period and still feeling full of piss and vinegar thanks to hours of reminiscing about the “good old days of the 1990s” with Sergey Shoigu, Putin set Russia on a collision course with its 1990s past. Most Russians supported Putin because he helped them put the trauma of that decade behind them. Since February 2022, though, he has returned them to that same violent, unforgiving mentality. 

Few people can express indifference to human life the way Russians do. Few nations of people can so freely hate each other the way Russians do, and Vladimir Putin’s choice to isolate Russia again from the world has reignited that wick hidden deep in the souls of Russians. The anger and cold-blooded brutality that so framed the 90s is returning in expected and unexpected ways. 

Survived the 90s for nothing 

I lived in Russia for most of the 1990s. It was indeed a difficult time. There was a breakdown in law and order in many respects, but not as much as Russians go on about. I think the greatest shock was that if, during the Soviet Union, there existed a specific limit to lawlessness, from 1992, limits to the lawlessness were obliterated. After prices were freed, it was suddenly legal to open businesses. It was legal to earn as much money as humanely possible, and people went a little crazy. 

The overwhelming majority of Russian citizens craved “normalcy.” They wanted schools where kids would get an education. Given that most Russians live in urban settings, they wanted summer camps for their children so they could breathe the fresh air of the forests and Black Sea. Russians — me included — wanted trains to run when expected and planes to make it from point A to B. There were about five years when anything was possible, and no one knew how to plan anything. 

In the Fall of 1991, President Yeltsin announced the country wouldn’t push the clocks back for daylight savings time. Nonetheless, much of the country moved them back in, and it took a week to get things back in sync. Neighbors joined the mafia, and the sweet little girl across the hall in the communal apartment started bringing home clients when she turned 16. It is hard for people in the West to comprehend this social upheaval. 

The greatest achievement that Putin can be thanked for by most Russians is that he extracted control of the violence from the mafia from the people and made it the domain of the government. Most Russians appreciated this sense of order, and I can tell you that it was pretty peaceful in the 2000s. Crime existed, but the “limitlessness” of the 1990s was gone. It belonged to the police and bureaucrats; they mainly just wanted money.

Because Russia needs the inmates for cannon fodder, it requires the Russian people to regard them and the criminal culture as positive elements that can toughen up the men of the country. The violence prepares the boys and men for the war Putin expects will last many years to come.

When Vlad recalls the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse, it is undoubtedly the feebleness of his beloved country that most angers him. It angered many. Unfortunately, and like many, he does not see his own reflection in the mirror when he searches for answers. He sees only what is behind him in the room and what’s out the window. He sees the rest of the world, and so he blames them for Russia’s embarrassing state in the 90s — and Russia’s pariah status now.

He sees every reason to return violence to the people again, albeit temporarily, because he needs it.