One Tuesday morning last month, a 15-year-old Russian boy got ready for school by packing a paramilitary vest, a helmet, and a knife. Before leaving his house, he sent a manifesto to his classmates denouncing gay people and Jews, and quoting a mass murderer along with a white-supremacist conspiracy theory.
When the boy, identified by prosecutors as Timofey K., arrived at his school, located outside Moscow, he went to the bathroom to put on his gear, which he’d branded with neo-Nazi symbols and racist slogans. Then he filmed himself patrolling the hallways and asking people, at knifepoint, what nationality they were. Several gave the wrong answer, and Timofey stabbed them. Most survived, but a 10-year-old boy from a Tajik family did not.
Timofey’s attack wasn’t the first instance of brutality among schoolchildren in Russia last month. Two weeks earlier, a ninth grader had beaten an eighth grader so severely that the latter couldn’t remember what had happened by the time he got to a hospital. The next day, a group of teenagers tortured a schoolgirl in the Ural region, cutting into her back with a knife. Less than a week later, schoolboys repeatedly kicked a 10-year-old student in the head. Several days after that, a ninth grader stabbed his math teacher in the back.
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For years, children in Russia have watched their country massacre Ukrainians and condemn hundreds of thousands of its own citizens to injury and death at the front. As violence has come to surround Russian youth, many seem to have become more violent themselves. Last year, the number of juvenile crimes in the country surged by 18 percent. Authorities also reported an uptick in “serious and especially serious” crime. “There is no positive ideology for children in a country fighting a murderous war,” Ilya Barabanov, a Russian journalist, told me. Instead, the war has amplified worldviews that encourage brutality.
The ethnic hatred that inspired Timofey’s attack has spread widely in Russia, thanks in part to President Vladimir Putin’s embrace of a militant strain of nationalism. The president has justified the war in Ukraine by appealing to a doctrine known as Russkiy mir, or “Russian world,” which makes no room for non-Russians. (Some of Putin’s soldiers in Ukraine have worn the kolovrat symbol that Timofey affixed to his vest, an neopagan emblem resembling a swastika.) Last year, the Kremlin even encouraged law enforcement to cooperate with ultranationalist groups. They helped police round up and deport tens of thousands of immigrants, who evidently did not belong in the Russian world.
Putin has claimed that the Russkiy mir ideology is based on “openness and constant respect” for other cultures. Yet just this week, his key propagandist, the TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov, called for additional “special military operations” in Armenia and Central Asia in order to maintain Russia’s “sphere of influence”—the same pretext for its war in Ukraine. For the Kremlin, other cultures, it seems, are not an object of respect; they are a threat that only violence and aggression can neutralize.
Timofey’s attack was not an aberration. It is a product of Putin’s dogma, and it has energized Russia’s many networks of ultranationalists and other extremists. The day after the assault, journalists spotted a neo-Nazi banner on the wall of the Federal Security Service office in Sochi. On social media, a neo-Nazi paramilitary group known as Rusich Army posted photos to its more than 1 million followers of the insignia on Timofey’s equipment, which included the English acronym SYGAOWN—“Stop Your Genocide Against Our White Nations.” One image showed Timofey pointing a knife at the school’s security guard; Rusich Army superimposed its logo on Timofey’s hand, seeming to claim him as one of its own.
Extremist groups are growing, and they are threatening further violence. In 2023, a far-right nationalist movement called Russkaya Obshchina said that its inaugural congress attracted some 200 people; it claimed to host more than 1,200 last year, including two members of Parliament. Last month, shortly before Timofey’s attack, the group posted a video with English subtitles, which included: “I will sharpen the knife. I will load the gun.” In June, nationalist Telegram channels reposted a similar video promising “big blood.”
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Alexander Verkhovsky, the director of the SOVA Centre for Information and Analysis, has studied Russia’s far-right movements and watched them expand. Every year from 2012 to 2022, he attended a council that Putin held with civil-society and human-rights groups. Verkhovsky warned Putin to his face about Russia’s growing xenophobia and the effect it could have on the country. Putin didn’t seem to listen.
Still, Verkhovsky told me that he has been surprised by just how quickly ultranationalism has taken root among Russian teenagers in particular—and just how violent they have become as a result.
Even some of Putin’s loyalists have expressed alarm. Nina Ostanina, a legislator who has largely endorsed Putin’s policies, responded to Timofey’s attack last month by telling the National News Service, “We see tragedy after tragedy. Our children are armed with a destructive ideology, and they don’t have a positive” alternative.
That might not be such a bad thing for Putin. Soon enough, Russia’s children will supply him with a new generation of eager soldiers.
