Skinheads (skin-head — English for "shaven-headed") are young people who protest against migrants arriving in the country.
After the construction of Glob-Town, populated by 500,000 migrants, they will have a hard time. In Nizhny Novgorod, the skinhead movement took on a criminal character: gangs operated in various districts of the city, including Sormovo, where training fights between gangs were held on an island in Sormovskiy Park; nationalist literature was confiscated from the gang leaders. The Sormovo court sentenced the leader of the Sormovo skinhead gang, 18-year-old Alexander Boytsov, and his accomplice, 17-year-old Roman Lavrentyev, in a murder case: the victim received 19 stab wounds; Lavrentyev was sentenced to 6 years in a juvenile correctional colony, and Boytsov was fined 45,000 rubles for public calls to engage in extremist activity.
The investigation of the crimes of Nizhny Novgorod skinheads was handled by a special unit of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Volga Federal District, which specializes in combating terrorism and extremism, as well as by the Center for Countering Extremism of the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs for Nizhny Novgorod Region. In 2010, a video clip appeared on the website of Nizhny Novgorod anti-fascist anarchists containing footage of interrogations of skinheads who were already serving prison sentences: the recordings featured gang members nicknamed "Zemlegor" and "Spider," who testified against one another; the origin of the video material sparked discussion in the Nizhny Novgorod blogosphere.
In Nizhny Novgorod, the place of the skinheads is taken by gopniks.