Mystery surrounds Russian punk gig brawl

MOSCOW, Russia – Dmitry Spirin was halfway through one of his band’s best-known punk anthems when the blood started to flow.

“All of a sudden, many shirtless men ran into the crowd and started beating people. They didn’t single anyone out, didn’t seek out anyone – it was a massive beating,” Spirin said. “I was scared. It was horrible.”

Nearly one week after dozens of men descended upon the Tornado rock festival in Miass, a small city 1,000 miles southeast of Moscow, the picture of what really happened is far from clear.

Initial reports blamed the coordinated attack on skinheads. They said dozens of men rushed into the crowd, seriously injuring 19 people and killing a 14-year-old girl. Many observers took the attack as a violent example of the growth of Russia’s neo-Nazi movement.

With each passing day, however, the picture has become more muddled. Local officials have downgraded the number of injured at Sunday’s concert, saying just two were hospitalized. Officials and concert organizers now say that no one was killed, and that they have ruled out nationalism as a motive for the attack, blaming it on local political conflicts instead.

Spirin, the 35-year-old lead singer of punk band Tarakany!, isn’t so sure. A well-established member of the Russian punk scene, he had seen violence before, and was beaten up in his youth for looking like a nonconformist.

“This was scarier, because it wasn’t just strong people acting out of aggression, but people with professional preparation,” he said.

Spirin described groups of men, well built and all shirtless, swooping into the crowd in small formations. “It’s strange, the official number of victims that’s been given,” he said. “From the stage, it seemed there should have been much more and with more serious injuries than have been given.”

In a video filmed from the crowd, shots from traumatic pistols – gas-powered guns that tend to use rubber bullets and are popular, and legal, in Russia – can be heard. The scene gives way to panic, as concertgoers attempt to flee the attackers, burly men who shoot and stomp their victims. Some were reportedly wielding clubs. 

The attack lasted just a few minutes, Spirin said, and left the ground spattered with blood. “We’re a punk band and play rather fast, energetic music – at the time, it wasn’t clear if it was just fans horsing around or if something was happening,” he said.

When they realized what was going on, the band stopped their set. “We remained on stage, hoping the festival guards or police would get involved.” When that didn’t happen, they fled the stage.

“After a while, the men just disappeared – not as a result of any action against them, but because they were done. It was designed to be done fast, like a blitzkrieg,” he said.

Russian officials have sought to downplay the event. Only two of the more than 100 estimated attackers have been arrested and charged with hooliganism.

In Miass, the investigation is focusing on Robert Nazaryan, the owner of a local restaurant, who is currently being questioned on whether he organized the raid. Local press say he may have been sending a message to Valikhan Turgumbaev, one of the festival's organizers who has announced plans to run for upcoming local parliamentary elections.

Turgumbaev posted a statement on the festival's website on Thursday, saying: "As a partner of the Tornado festival and one of the organizers of this project, I feel responsible for what happened."

“We practically found ourselves in a zone of combat operations,” he wrote. “It’s too early to write about the reasons for what happened. But I’m sure that there was no religious, nationalist or, even more, a political subtext to this fight.”

Maxim Nesterov, another concert organizer, also said he believed the attackers were not neo-Nazis. “There were many different nationalities among the men,” he said, saying initial reports pointed to skinheads simply because the attackers were “shirtless, with short hair.” He put the violence down to a conflict with one of the festival organizers, but declined to provide further details.

Nazaryan's lawyer denied accusations of his client's involvement in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper published Thursday. "He declares that he does not know who attacked the audience. He even suffered during the attack – he has a head wound," Evgeny Yudin said.

Russian blogs have focused on the police’s failure to act, with several videos showing officers standing on the sidelines as the attack unfolds. Many doubt a fair investigation.

Spirin, the punk rocker, said he did not know who was behind the attack.

"They didn't look like members of right or radical youth groups," he said. "But in Russia, Nazis and skinheads have long stopped following the fashions, so as not to attract the attention of the security services."

Neo-Nazi groups flourished in the chaos following the fall of the Soviet Union – an ironic, if tragic, fact in a country that lost millions fighting Nazi Germany in World War II. Racism, particularly against people from ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus, is widespread.

According to the Sova Center, an NGO that monitors hate crimes, violence peaked in 2008, with 110 people killed and 487 wounded in racially motivated attacks. So far this year, it has counted 19 people killed and 158 injured in hate crimes.

On Tuesday, Vyacheslav Kozlov, deputy head of the Moscow police, said his force had disrupted attacks similar to the one carried out in Miass.

“We also had such attempts in Moscow, but we managed to stop them in time,” he said. “We will do everything to stop them in the future.”

In a message posted to Vkontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, Nikolai Berkutov, an alleged local skinhead leader, denied his group’s participation in the attack.

“We deny our participation in this event,” Berkutov wrote. “We love our homeland and work to prevent such bandit violence.”

No matter who organized the attack, it has faded from the headlines with great speed. Concert organizers seemed to want to pretend the attack never took place.

“The organizers asked us to go back out, because they thought it was a good idea,” Spirin said. “It wasn’t a great idea – there was so much blood.”