Shooting in a Russian school, the Kremlin speaks of neo-Nazis

On Monday 26 September, in Russia, an attacker opened fire at school No 88 in Izhevsk, killing 17 people, including 11 children, and injuring 24 others. The assailant is 34-year-old Artem Kazanstev, formerly a student at the same institute. He committed suicide after the attack and were reported that he was wearing black clothes, a balaclava, and a shirt depicting a red swastika. The Russian Investigation Committee suspects the existence of links between the assailant and the neo-Nazi environment. The same ideological mould is evoked by the Kremlin, which through its spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the act as terrorist, perpetuated by a person who would have links with neo-fascist groups or organizations. It appears of interest the presence of writings on the magazines of his two guns, bearing the word “hate”, and as reported by Washington Post and Mirror, of appendages to the weapons with engraved names “Dylan”, “Eric” and “Columbine”, a direct reference to the massacre carried out by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in 1999 at Columbine High School.

The quote thus evokes the culture of school shootings by former students, a phenomenon also known in Russia itself, which has witnessed, in recent years, other similar attacks. In May last year, in fact, a former pupil killed 9 persons in a school in Kazan, followed, in September 2021, by a second massacre in the University of Perm. These two events have led to greater regulation in the State’s granting of weapons, and the identification, by the Russian security services, of a terrorist group called the “Columbine Movement”. Therefore, although the existence of this group is to be demonstrated, the similarity of the recent attack in Russia with those perpetrated by white supremacists in other areas leads us to hypothesize a real penetration of the far-right universe also in the Russian context. An example is provided by the Christchurch’s carnage, in which the assailant wrote on his weapons the name of various white supremacists, including the Italian Luca Traini, right-wing extremist author, in 2018, of an attempted massacre racially motivated. Similarly, Payton Gendron, author of the Buffalo shooting in May this year, in addition to wearing a Nazi symbol, presented, on his equipment, some of the names already mentioned in Christchurch.

If Kazanstev’s links to neo-Nazi circles were confirmed, it would be interesting to pair his attack with the others, related to the supremacists and the far right’s networks, perpetrated in other countries. In this sense, the attack of Monday suggests that even the Russian far right observes what happens abroad, absorbs the narrative and the symbolism, and fits itself into a precise global trend.