Russia's Vigilante YouTube Stars. Digital Entrepreneurship and Heroic Masculinity in the Service of Flexible Authoritarianism

Abstract

Combating illegal parking and drinking in public is the raison d’être of Russia's best-known law-and-order youth initiatives, StopKham and Lev Protiv. These initiatives enforce and promote neotraditional morals amongst young people by challenging alleged offenders on camera and uploading the entertaining, humorous and often violent video clips to YouTube. I argue that their practices encapsulate flexible authoritarianism, in which the regime incentivises citizens to take initiative while expanding repressive measures against dissenters. Not only do these enterprises reflect the regime's goals back at itself, they also popularise a new ideal of heroic masculinity that fuses patriotism with entrepreneurialism.

‘Awesome video. Very professional while asserting your rights. Your's [sic] is a noble cause. Cheers!’ comments James Riley on the Patreon webpage of the Russian law-and-order youth initiative Stop a Douchebag (StopKham).¹ Through the crowdfunding platform Patreon, Riley and more than 100 other international fans donate US$544 per month to Stop Rudeness (StopKham).² The enterprise's English-language channels, called ‘Stop a Douchebag’, ‘Stop a Douchebag World’ and ‘Stop a Douchebag Moscow’ count about one million international subscribers, while its various Russian channels StopKham, StopKham MSKLive, StopKhammsk, StopKhamSPB, jointly count more than three million (see Table 1). StopKham is Russia's best-known law-and-order youth initiative. The predominantly male vigilantes fight against what they regard as unacceptable behaviour in Russia's streets. To combat such behaviour, they film drivers violating traffic rules and challenge them to change their ways. Those who refuse are punished with a huge sticker on their windscreen saying: ‘To hell with everyone, I drive where I want’. This often results in heated arguments and violence between the young vigilantes and drivers. As well as hyping these violent encounters, the video clips produced by StopKham engage their audience through skilful editing and production, using footage from popular movies, humorous dialogues, effects such as slow or fast motion, and rousing music, ranging from rock through metal to hip-hop. StopKham's sibling initiative—Lion Versus (Lev Protiv), whose members reprimand and punish people who consume alcohol or tobacco in public places—employs similar tools to dramatise and ‘popify’ video clips (Schiller 2019). This youth-focused marketing is not without success: the initiatives each count more than 2.5 million followers on their various YouTube channels (see Table 1).

TABLE 1 Overview of SADB and LV YouTube Channels used for Analysis and Estimated Revenues of the Channels (as of July 2022)

Channel owner	Channel ID	Channel start date	Subscriber count	Estimated monthly earnings according to Social Blade (US$)	Total number of videos	Total number of views
Lev Protiv	UCUBoIo2p7GSRMt1YcSswDEw	16 April 2014	1.93 million	$530–$8,500	351	346.3 million
Lev Protiv 2 Kanal	UCjkqm5yS4HGjxPFEl1vc4Ew	17 February 2015	530,000	$27–$440	240	118.7 million
Mikhail Lazutin	UCtYuhKLHsYS3omN0kR37VIA	11 November 2016	318,000	$43–$693	193	50.4 million
				Estimate of total monthly earnings $600–$9,633
StopKham	UCJIMS94jwjEmvnsNqkH_KUg	24 May 2012	1.75 million	$327–$5,200	337	574 million
StopKham SPB	stopxam78	16 January 2013	861,000	$623–$10,000	294	255.1 million
StopKhammsk	UCii_gXGV-mto1bdKWKCk92g	17 September 2012	591,000	$1,000–$16,600	403	266.4 million
StopKham MSKLive	UCdi3QiHIi4985ASkKtuVuaw	20 October 2018	108,000	$126–$2,000	235	53.1 million
Stop a Douchebag	StopaDouchebag	16 September 2011	880,000	$275–$4,400	356	318.8 million
Stop a Douchebag World	StopaDouchebagWorld	23 December 2015	264,000	$128–$2,000	213	99 million
Stop a Douchebag Moscow	StopaDouchebagMoscow	30 March 2020	11,600	$55–$872	15	500,000
				Estimate of total monthly earnings $2,534–$41,072

Source: https://socialblade.com/youtube/, accessed 22 July 2022.

What most international fans of StopKham seem not to know is that the initiative started as a state youth politics project at the Kremlin-backed Seliger summer camp in 2010. StopKham's founder, Dmitrii Chugunov, was an activist in the pro-government youth movement Nashi. StopKham's first cameras and what would become its signature feature—the car-wheel-sized stickers used to punish intransigent drivers—were sponsored by Nashi (Varyukhina et al. 2016).³ Even as StopKham's relationship with some state organs became strained, the state's symbolic sponsorship remained. Russia's former Minister of the Interior Rashid Nurgaliev and President Vladimir Putin have both praised StopKham as an important civic initiative (Marchenko 2010; Gabdulhakov 2019). Due to scandals involving sports stars and political VIPs including, for instance, the wife of Chechnya's deputy presidential plenipotentiary in Moscow and the former Olympic champion Alexei Nemov, StopKham has been unable to apply for presidential grants since 2015, following a court decision from Russia's Unified State Register of Legal Entities (Gabdulhakov 2019). These grants were important sources of funding for StopKham, which transferred part of the R21 million it received between 2013 and 2015 to Lev Protiv.⁴

Since then, both initiatives have successfully sought alternative sources of funding. Indeed, their estimated monthly revenue could support several people, if the monthly minimum wage of US$490 is used as a point of comparison.⁵ StopKham's monthly YouTube revenue, according to rough estimates by Social Blade, is US$2,534–41,072 as of July 2022.⁶ Similar Social Blade estimates exist for Lev Protiv, whose founder, Mikhail Lazutin, recently stated that he earns between US$2,300 and US$2,450 per month.⁷ Revenues from Russian online platforms, donations and sales of branded merchandise could add another few hundred dollars per month to these estimates.

The role of financial rewards for StopKham and Lev Protiv activists and their relationship to the state has rightly troubled scholars of post-Soviet vigilantism. In particular, because vigilante activities in the region are increasingly disseminated via online platforms and therefore promise revenues through monetisation, they emphasise the financial motivation of vigilantism (Favarel-Garrigues & Shukan 2019, pp. 6–9).⁸ Nevertheless, they still regard StopKham and Lev Protiv members as typical vigilantes, engaging in collective action that entails the ‘use or threat of coercion’ and targeting ‘people who have transgressed legal or moral norms’ held by a ‘larger community allegedly worrying for its security’ (Favarel-Garrigues & Shukan 2019, p. 5). I regard them as vigilante-entrepreneurs, and have labelled them accordingly: StopKham and Lev Protiv are run by young people who act as both vigilantes reinforcing neotraditional morals alongside the state and entrepreneurs seeking to gain from social-media monetisation.

Expanding on existing research on the connection between vigilante activities and entrepreneurship in the post-Soviet space (Favarel-Garrigues 2021), my analysis hinges on the question of how the actions of vigilante-entrepreneurs are shaped by Russia's regime and how they reflect the regime's goals back at itself. I show how vigilante-entrepreneurs’ actions arise from the specific politico-economic opportunities provided to young people by what I call Russia's ‘flexible authoritarian’ regime, and how StopKham and Lev Protiv help to stabilise this regime on an ideological level by promoting a new type of masculinity that fuses Soviet-style heroism with contemporary entrepreneurialism. Combined with authoritarian aggression—defined as ‘the tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values’ (Adorno et al. 1950, p. 228)—this heroic masculinity encapsulates flexible authoritarian ideas and repackages them in a new format of social media entertainment (SME), catering especially to young audiences. My analysis builds on and connects critical scholarship on masculinity, digital marketing and neoliberal entrepreneurialism with analyses of Russia's authoritarian regime.

Flexible authoritarianism denotes a government style that makes neoliberal appeals to citizens to take initiative while expanding the state's coercive apparatus. I use the term ‘flexible’ because neoliberal ideology is oriented along the lines of what Richard Sennett (1999) calls ‘flexible capitalism’: a mode of organisation that is guided by shifting market demands and spills over into politics. Flexible authoritarianism means the entanglement of neoliberal and authoritarian techniques of government and their underlying ideologies. The Putinist vision of an ideal Russia exemplifies flexible authoritarianism. It evokes a country that is modern, prosperous and internationally competitive, but also a bastion of traditional order and heterosexual family values. The neotraditional aspect of this vision romanticises images of the Russian past to legitimise the pursuit of a conservative future (Galvan 2007), while its flexible aspect encourages economic growth and development. Normalising this combination of neotraditionalism and neoliberalism, Russia's mainstream media presents the country's economic strength as being reinforced by Putin's authoritarian leadership and alleged protection of Russia's unique ‘civilisational culture’ from destructive liberal and foreign influences. Thus, ‘civilisational uniqueness’ and national economic strength are not only presented as being in a reciprocal relationship but also as requiring the state's—if need be, authoritarian—protection. Especially since the annexation of Crimea, this state ‘protection’ has been increasingly framed in terms of masculine strength, legitimising Putin's strongman rule through traditional gender norms (Riabov & Riabova 2014; Sperling 2015; Wood 2016). This essay expands on previous research by showing that traditional gender norms help to legitimise not only authoritarian rule, but also authoritarian aggression against alleged norm offenders, and—as Birgit Sauer shows for liberal democracies—neoliberal restructuring. As she points out, arguments for neoliberal restructuring are often couched in terms of restoring states’ independence, self-sufficiency and competition, characteristics which are commonly associated with masculinity (Sauer 2016, p. 164).

The ingredients of Russia's flexible authoritarianism, such as traditional gender norms, romanticised images of the past, a strong state and a strong national economy, are relatively far from the everyday lives of young people. This is why StopKham's and Lev Protiv's packaging of these elements into a novel social media format is still rhetorically supported by ruling elites, despite occasional scandals. Within Russia, StopKham's and Lev Protiv's enterprises are crucial to create loyalty to the regime amongst an age group that is otherwise disaffected by things political. Like most social media formats, theirs is consumed primarily by young people and offers a skilfully staged authenticity (Cunningham & Craig 2017, p. 71). StopKham's and Lev Protiv's social media brands promote amongst young people a neotraditional moral agenda, chiming with that of the regime. Russia's major television channels support the vigilantes’ depiction of alleged norm offenders. They use footage from the vigilantes’ clips as evidence—not recordings made by the vigilantes’ targets, thereby suggesting that the enforcement of neotraditional morals vis-à-vis the vigilantes’ targets is righteous (Gabdulhakov 2019). Understanding a brand as a story told to consumers that promises a specific experience (Banet-Weiser 2012, p. 4), I argue that these ‘vigilante brands’ promise transnational audiences the experience of identification with young, entrepreneurially successful heroes and Schadenfreude when alleged transgressors get their ‘just deserts’. Eliciting experiences of Schadenfreude that are based on psychological processes that dehumanise perceived transgressors (Wang et al. 2019), they promote the view that the targets of vigilante actions deserve punishment.

I emphasise SME and branding as important features of these initiatives to show how their vigilante practices and motives combine with entrepreneurialism. Under flexible authoritarianism, I argue, politically conformist, neotraditional activities promise both symbolic and material rewards. At the same time, entrepreneurial success becomes a new way to show one's heroism by contributing to Russia's economic strength (see also Bikbov 2017, p. 81). Thus, I show how the vigilante-entrepreneurs’ material rewards, gained through online monetisation, blur with the symbolic rewards of being recognised as a young person doing good for the country as both an economically independent, active entrepreneur and an ‘activist hero’, helping to uphold neotraditional morals.

Given the minor transgressions punished by StopKham and Lev Protiv, I argue that this halo of heroism is shaped by the specificity of the post-Soviet Russian scene. Aleksei Balabanov's neo-noir crime blockbusters, Brother and Brother 2 famously portray post-Soviet Russia as a state that ‘has proven itself incapable of establishing minimal security and social justice’ (Anemone 2008, p. 138). They thrive on the country's domestic and transnational reputation of lawlessness (Volkov 2002, p. 18), a reputation that has been also reinforced by dashcam videos going viral testifying to the ‘craziness’ of Russian traffic and the sheer absence of traffic police and rule enforcement in the streets (Tavlin 2013). Against this backdrop, the post-Soviet vigilante hero emerges in these movies as a person who is ‘selfless, and sometimes self-sacrificial’, struggling against ‘the unscrupulous and powerful elements that dominate a lawless society’ (Anemone 2008, p. 127). As I will show in the following, StopKham's and Lev Protiv's heroic self-fashioning depends on this notion of a lawless society that demands—due to the state's apparent incapability—that they protect those whom they define as society's most vulnerable members against unscrupulous and selfish people. In this sense, they conceive of themselves as a force complementary to the state, engaged in practices of moral oversight of society as a whole, including law enforcement. This understanding of their special position in society corresponds to the pop culture ideal of the rebellious vigilante hero who is incorruptible and follows the credo that ‘strength lies in righteousness, not in money’ (Anemone 2008, p. 130). Echoing this ideal, the vigilante-entrepreneurs insist that they are motivated primarily by ‘doing good’ for Russian society, not by career opportunities in state institutions or money. Their heroic image is based partly on the claim that they only seek a decent income in order to sustain ‘their activism’.

Methodologically, I combine visual and narrative analyses (Polletta et al. 2011; Doerr & Milman 2014; Jasper et al. 2020) of the initiatives’ video clips. My aim is to reconstruct the overarching moral story communicated by vigilante brands. Two assumptions justify applying such a visual narrative analysis to excavate the political meanings of vigilante actions. The first, taken from political iconography, is that the videos produced, even though they are not created for propaganda purposes, contain political messages. The second, taken from social movement studies, is that we can understand activists’ political visions, even those that remain unspoken, by analysing their repertoire of action. As expressions of activists’ ‘political identities and moral visions’ (Jasper 1997, p. 237), these repertoires are not neutral tools. From vigilante-entrepreneurs’ choice of online and offline repertoire, targets of blame (norm offenders) and immediate goals (reprimanding and shaming norm offenders), we can extrapolate those unquestioned beliefs that underpin their ‘choices’ of repertoire. Through this, we can learn how such choices ‘“make sense” within a prevailing political logic’ (Polletta 1992, p. 99). In the following, I will explain in greater detail how I proceeded.

Methods: analysing YouTube vigilante video clips

Given that there is no established way to analyse the political meanings of vigilante video clips, I combined existing tools of visual and narrative analysis. A basic assumption of political iconography is that many visuals, even if they are not created for the purpose of propaganda or political information, contain messages about the ‘cultural, social and thus also political state of our world’ (Fleckner et al. 2014, p. 7). Since my aim was to identify the political meanings of the products created by StopKham and Lev Protiv, I adapted iconological interpretation (Doerr & Milman 2014, p. 420) to video clip analysis. Unlike pictures, video clips are based on plots: the structures that order the sequence of events in a story and thereby lend it plausibility (Polletta et al. 2011, p. 109). When analysing stories, identifying characters—heroes, villains, victims—is crucial (Jasper et al. 2020).

The questions that guided my analysis were, first, who are the main characters, what is the general scheme of the plot and how is suspense created? Second, what does this tell us about vigilantes’ unquestioned beliefs about who is to blame for social wrongs and how to tackle them? Third, what kind of experience or feeling do the brands promise?

In order to gain a broad overview of all clips produced by StopKham and Lev Protiv, I created tables for each initiative's three largest YouTube channels, according to the number of subscribers. Both enterprises maintain several channels. In the case of StopKham there are both Russian and English-language channels (see Table 1).⁹ Assuming that ongoing production is mainly guided by past successes, I selected the 30 most viewed videos from each channel. I then worked inductively, clustering the videos according to topics indicated in the video titles and the main film still (visible in YouTube's ‘Up Next’ preview), and then describing in note form the main plot of the clips.

As for the descriptive results of this overview, I found that the most usual plot of both initiatives revolves around violent encounters with various villain characters. To categorise StopKham's clips, I settled on four broad headings. The first was ‘Violent encounters’, with the subcategories ‘Weapons’ and ‘Chechens’ (meaning a non-Russian nationality portrayed as hostile);¹⁰ the second was ‘Female targets’; the third, ‘Status symbols and VIPs’; and the fourth, ‘Law enforcement’.

I defined the following categories for Lev Protiv: ‘Violent encounters’, with subsets ‘Mass fights’, ‘Weapons’ and ‘Chechens’ (a non-Russian nationality portrayed as hostile); ‘People apparently suffering from alcoholism or homelessness’; ‘Drinking and smoking youth’; ‘Law enforcement’; and ‘People using fascist language or symbols’.

Whereas StopKham plots differed according to the villain characters (portrayed, for example, as rich, crazy or hysterical), Lev Protiv plots varied mostly with regard to victims. The victims in StopKham clips were pensioners, mothers with children and trolleybus drivers, while Lev Protiv clips also presented sick animals and (non-drinking and non-smoking) homeless people as worthy of the vigilantes’ protection.

For the iconographic analysis, I chose four videos from each category that best exemplified the category and, if available, one per category that markedly differed from the majority of clips in terms of its making, setting or content (see Doerr & Milman 2014, p. 425). I used additional material to contextualise the analysis, such as media and YouTube interviews with vigilante-entrepreneurs, existing scholarly and media accounts of Lev Protiv and StopKham, as well as advertisements for Putinist state youth political programmes.

Flexible authoritarianism and Russian state youth politics

In order to appear dynamic and reliable, it has become crucial for today's national economies to create a climate of innovation (Fourcade-Gourinchas 2017, p. 108). In accordance with the conviction that innovation is key to national economic growth, states increasingly set their hopes on ground-breaking innovations that make for marketable goods (Sanghi & Yusuf 2018). Such innovations, metaphorically speaking, reshuffle the cards of competition, allowing new players to secure a more powerful bargaining position. They are also key to crafting a state's image as dynamic, positively influencing international credit rankings (Fourcade-Gourinchas 2017). Richard Sennett identifies flexibility as being at the core of this new capitalist phase: ‘The willingness to let the shifting demands of the outside world determine the inside structure of institutions’ (Sennett 1999, p. 52). The creation of a lean state and active citizenry through neoliberal techniques, leading to the ‘“economization” of political life and of other heretofore noneconomic spheres’ (Brown 2015, p. 17), can thus be interpreted as a direct response to the imperative of flexibility. States’ increased efforts to make citizens participate are part of their endeavour to create a favourable climate for innovation and investment.

States of all regime types have accommodated major reforms to increase their competitiveness (Ong 2006). While Putinist rule is known more for its state capitalism than for deregulation, neoliberal techniques activating citizens and shifting responsibility for wellbeing and the common good to the individual have been gradually introduced in various policy fields (Bikbov 2017). Neoliberal incentives are designed to instil an ethos of individual responsibility for economic success and societal cohesion in young citizens. They are intended to remove obstacles to economic development such as social passivity or apathy, which are widely regarded as legacies of the socialist state's paternalism (Bockman 2011). However, the introduction of neoliberal incentives in Russia has neither superseded state capitalism nor replaced traditional forms of authoritarian oppression. Rather, neoliberal techniques have been combined with classic tools of authoritarian governance, such as the suppression of dissent.

Such neoliberal considerations entered Putinist state youth politics in 2009, when Vladislav Surkov stated that the country's main resource was young people, not oil and gas (Kuz’min 2009). Surkov thereby signalled that Russia would now invest in its human capital, in young people potentially creating marketable innovations that could be as disruptive as the smartphone or the car and make Russia into an economic world leader. The focus of youth policy on preventing youth-led regime change (Krawatzek 2018) was thus expanded to include the task of making young Russians fit for the economic challenges of the twenty-first century. At the time, training in project management and branding took centre stage in Russian state youth politics (Hemment 2015). This was intended to enhance the development of human capital by infusing young people with an entrepreneurial spirit. Such training was also designed to enable young people to market neotraditional morals to their peers, partly through new media. Various subprojects of Nashi emerged, some seeking to incentivise entrepreneurship and innovation, others—such as StopKham—enforcing neotraditional morals.

Despite this change of emphasis towards marketable innovations, state youth politics remained invested in preventing regime change. In particular, after the annexation of Crimea and the protests by young people in 2017, the Russian government expanded measures to suppress dissenting voices.¹¹ Thus, Russian state youth politics as it evolved under Putin is understood best as a balancing act aimed at countering not only social apathy and brain drain of young talent (see Krawatzek & Sasse's contribution to this special issue) but also regime change (Schwenck 2017). Hence, efforts to align young people's self-image with the shifting demands of international markets are juggled with appeals to patriotism and conservative morals (Lassila 2014). Employing the language of self-realisation and empowerment (Hemment 2015, p. 139), projects and initiatives sponsored by state youth policies depict individual economic success as patriotic because it enhances Russian competitiveness—as long as entrepreneurs do not challenge regime incumbents. Moreover, state youth politics present the nurturing of a social bond amongst Russian citizens (caring about others and the common good) as the responsibility of the individual patriot. Such incentives appear to mesh with young people's self-identification as active and caring members of society. In turn, young people's apathy may appear non-patriotic and egoistic. The famous statement by US president John F. Kennedy in his 1961 inauguration speech, ‘Don't ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’, aptly summarises the neoliberal and patriotic imperative of state youth politics in Russia.

Insofar as the youthful branding of both patriotism and loyalty to incumbents has been central to state youth politics since Putin came to power in the early 2000s (Lassila 2014), StopKham's and Lev Protiv's packaging of conservative morals into video clips continues those political aims, forming part of an effort to stabilise the regime ideologically. Equally, the vigilantes’ self-fashioning as entrepreneurs corresponds to the shift in emphasis of state youth politics to fostering young people's marketable innovations to spur economic growth. Besides such ideological affinities, pro-government youth groups such as Molodaya Gvardiya Edinoi Rossii (The Young Guard of United Russia) or Mestnye (The Locals), who were already engaged in raids on migrants allegedly lacking work permits in the early 2000s (Schwenck 2016), seem to have acted as models for StopKham's and Lev Protiv's vigilante practices. Pro-government youth groups might have also provided templates for compliant forms of activism that ‘support existing social norms’ and ‘complement state activities’ (Janoski 2010, p. 112). In the shadow of Nashi's spectacular actions, such as hacker attacks on Estonian state organs when the latter decreed the relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial in Tallinn, campaigns by StopKham and Lev Protiv against the consumption of alcohol and nicotine could appear uncontroversial and non-political (see also Comai 2006). In the Russian context, such compliant activism is reminiscent of young people's engagement during Soviet times in volunteering initiatives, but also in vigilante squads fighting the legal transgressions and ‘immoral’ behaviour of their peers (Fürst 2010, p. 194; Hemment 2015, p. 146). StopKham's and Lev Protiv's vigilante actions continue to enforce moral behaviour in line with the state's precepts, albeit under very different socio-economic conditions.

However, the resemblance to Soviet forms of compliant activism and vigilante activities conducted by Komsomol squads should not distract from the fact that Lev Protiv's digital vigilante practices appear to be inspired by the far right (Favarel-Garrigues 2021).¹² Led by the neo-Nazi Maxim Martsinkevich (alias Tesak), the group Restrukt drew attention beyond Russia with its subproject Okkupai-pedofiliai (Occupy Paedophilia), which was devoted to the harassment and brutal humiliation of gay men (derogatorily called ‘paedophiles’) in front of a live camera (Roth 2013). Restrukt's other vigilante projects, Narkofiliai, Alkofiliai and Vyseliai, used similar means to target and humiliate drug users, alcoholics and undocumented migrants (Manina 2017). Mikhail Lazutin, the founder of Lev Protiv, started his vigilante entrepreneurship under the slogan Kamen’ Protiv (Rock Versus) together with Restrukt member and neo-Nazi Andrei Makarov. Kamen’ Protiv targeted and humiliated gay men in the same way as Tesak's Okkupai-pedofiliai (Todorov & Bolotov 2017). After Lazutin was detained alongside Makarov in January 2014,¹³ and Makarov was prosecuted in connection with the murder of an Azerbaijani citizen (Girin 2014), the two parted company and Lazutin started his own digital vigilantism projects: Lev Protiv Pedofilov (Lion Versus Paedophiles)¹⁴ and Lev Protiv (Todorov & Bolotov 2017). Lazutin now claims that he never held neo-Nazi views and has produced clips testifying to his change in opinion and supporting state-sponsored imperial (‘anti-fascist’) Russian nationalism.¹⁵ An example of this is the highly popular video clip ‘Lion Versus Skinhead Nazis [Scuffle] against Racism’ (Lev Protiv Skinkhedov Natsistov [Potasovka] Protiv Rasizma) with 13 million views as of July 2022.

Lazutin's personal connections to the neo-Nazi scene may appear incidental, yet they correspond to the ideological overlap between anti-state far right nationalism and state-sponsored imperial nationalism in Russia (Laruelle 2019). This overlap is especially noticeable in the state's shifting position on gender and sexual freedoms: the depiction of LGBTQI activists and feminists as a threat to the nation, once a distinguishing feature of Russian far right ideology, has become central to state-sanctioned imperial nationalism since the 2010s (Omelchenko & Pilkington 2012, p. 8). With regard to the legitimation of authoritarian aggression against those who allegedly harm society with ‘immoral behaviour’, it is notable that Putinism integrates the far right’s sexual, gender and reproductive norms into its neotraditional ideals of a good society.

The fashioning of a new heroic character against the backdrop of a lawless society

The previous section explained that youth activism is welcomed by incumbents as long as it supports the broad aims of flexible authoritarianism. StopKham and Lev Protiv fashion themselves—literally—as moral entrepreneurs, encapsulating flexible authoritarian ideas in SME brands. Their brands present a youthful, hip way to police conservative morals. Their clips call on their peers to fight—alongside top-level politicians who publicly endorse their activities—allegedly immoral behaviour. At the same time, StopKham's and Lev Protiv's main protagonists are start-up entrepreneurs who, while educating the badly behaved, run a self-sustaining business based on their innovation of a SME format. In this way, they carry out important ideological work. Not only do they popularise both law-and-order values and a positive image of entrepreneurship, they also help to fuse the two by fashioning a new kind of heroic character.

Like the traditional hero, this new hero character performs his brave deeds—rescuing people and protecting the community—in combat (Brossat 2014). However, this character is crafted according to pop culture cues, such as cool behaviour and a youthful, seemingly subcultural appearance (Brossat 2014). In the post-Soviet context, the combination of these traits with the figure of the independent entrepreneur contrasts sharply with the depiction of men and the heterosexual family as being in a state of crisis. This so-called ‘crisis of masculinity’ discourse identifies the economic downturn of the 1990s and the loss of private ownership during Soviet times as having ‘left men unable to fulfil the role of breadwinner and therefore robbed them of an authoritative role in the family’ (Rivkin-Fish 2010, p. 719), resulting in low birth rates. This ‘crisis of masculinity’ discourse is linked to patriotic concerns about the future of the nation. The new hero persona crafted by vigilante-entrepreneurs stands in contrast to this ‘crisis of masculinity’ discourse. It builds on the figure of the muzhik (peasant), which has signified ‘real’ manhood in Russian popular culture and advertising since the mid-1990s (Sperling 2015, p. 36) and combines the can-do spirit of the start-up entrepreneur with dedication to the country's common good. In several respects, the muzhik is antithetical to the notion of the post-Soviet man in crisis, and also to the Western image of the liberal man. As Tatiana Riabova and Oleg Riabov explain:

This type [of masculinity] is founded on self-sufficiency, economic independence, [and] respect for private property (in that sense, a muzhik is anti-communist). It is also far from 100 percent support for liberalism—values that are interpreted as a cult of individualism and egoism—while comradeship (tovarishchestvo) and male brotherhood are crucial components of the image of a muzhik. … A muzhik is hardy, strong, and powerful; he doesn't say much, but always stands by his word. Finally, he is a patriot—he prefers the values of his own national culture, and expresses his readiness to defend the Motherland. (Riabov & Riabova quoted and translated in Sperling 2015, p. 36)

The various acts of self-fashioning of StopKham and Lev Protiv vigilante-entrepreneurs are telling performances of this heroic masculine character. His dedication to the motherland, rebellious appearance, esteem for male comradeship and entrepreneurial zeal make him the antithesis of the weak and apathetic male characters who inform the ‘crisis of masculinity’ discourse.

The self-fashioning as heroic rebels is particularly crucial for the vigilante-entrepreneurs’ construction of heroism. This rebellious attitude is sometimes read as a sign of opposition to the authorities (Gabdulhakov 2019, p. 37; Favarel-Garrigues 2020, p. 124). Presenting oneself as a rebel may, however, work well with a form of compliant activism that focuses on combatting minor shortcomings. As such, it may stabilise the regime by channelling everyday grievances. According to Libman and Kolzov, such critical compliant activism ‘limits the toolbox of potential opposition: if the public cannot clearly distinguish between the (apparently similar) forms of compliant activism pursued by groups loyal to the regime and actions of the opposition, it becomes more difficult for the latter to mobilise mass support’ (Libman & Kozlov 2017, p. 197). For instance, in a 2016 interview, StopKham's founder Chugunov attributed the court decision to exclude StopKham from Russia's Unified State Register of Legal Entities, preventing it from applying for presidential grants, to the initiative's profound incorruptibility. According to him, he and his fellow vigilantes would not close their eyes when members of informal power networks broke the law:

We are the only organisation in this country that does not make exceptions for anyone. … Who haven't we caught? … Gangsters, staff of the police, the public prosecutor's office. All of them have some kind of influential circle of friends who can play dirty tricks.¹⁶

The criticism of power networks and even the governing party expressed in this interview should not be interpreted too quickly as a sign of regime opposition. Not only was the interview conducted by Pasmi.ru, an anti-corruption organisation sponsored by the Russian government but, right after the statement above, Chugunov expressed his support for the president, signalling his loyalty to the regime. I read Chugunov's emphasis on incorruptibility in this interview as an element of his self-fashioning as a heroic rebel, a character that is well received in post-Soviet pop culture. The vigilante violence of rebels appears ethical and heroic against the backdrop of a lawless state. As Elizabeth Wood argues, Putin bolstered his rule through self-fashioning as an incorruptible rebel early in his presidency. For instance, he announced his intention, using expletives, to ‘rub out’ (mochit’) gangsters and oligarchs, ‘excluding the possibility of anyone sucking up to power [prisosalsya]’ in order to fight the actual and perceived lawlessness widely associated with Boris Yeltsin's rule (Putin quoted in Wood 2016, p. 8).

In a similar fashion, StopKham and Lev Protiv vigilantes construct their ‘rebel’ image in opposition to a context of lawlessness, as I will show in the following through an interpretation of their video, ‘Without Court and Consequences’ (Bez suda i sledstviya).¹⁷ Departing from StopKham's usual formats, which tell the story of individual transgressors, it shows the degree of helplessness many Russians experience vis-à-vis the unlawful decisions of authorities. The demolition of garages, rented by pensioners to store cars and goods, depicted in the clip can be seen as preceding the 2016 Night of the Long Shovels, when the Moscow city government ordered the destruction of several hundred makeshift shops in the city centre that the authorities equally considered an eyesore. As mayor Sobyanin put it, the city needed more modern uniform designs. Demolitions of trading pavilions were preceded by those of garages in several Moscow districts in 2014. In both cases, ownership of these plots of land was portrayed by the city authorities as ‘illegal’.¹⁸ The fact that StopKham only made a video of one of these garage demolitions and was not concerned with the Night of Long Shovels indicates its reluctance to engage in oppositional activism. While in 2016 it was clear that the city government decreed the demolitions, its role in 2014 is disputed. As suggested in an account of the garage demolitions by a supporter of the opposition party Yabloko, the private demolition squad, acting in the video as if it they had official authority, has close ties to a club of military officers, Ofitsery Rossii, some of whom are connected to federal incumbents (Florin 2014).

To contextualise ‘Without Court and Consequences’, Artiom Leonov, dubbed StopKham's ‘wrestler’ (bortsukha) because he is famous amongst fellows and fans for his throws and takedown combat-sports techniques, explains the background story of the demolition in an introductory clip. Pensioners, veterans and disabled people had called StopKham for help because their garages were being demolished without warning. These people make for perfect victims in a post-Soviet setting, since respect for veterans is high, and pensioners and disabled people are known for being amongst the poorest in the country. The vigilantes thus play the role of heroes fighting for the vulnerable. The main video (almost four million views as of July 2022) starts with shots of the demolition set to tense piano music. We then see a young StopKham activist nervously asking the burly man heading the demolition squad to show him the official papers ordering the demolition. ‘Who are you, the owner?’ asks the latter. ‘No, I am not the owner, I am a Russian citizen, I have the right to ask this’, replies the young vigilante, but to no avail. ‘Continue the demolition!’ orders the foreman. In the next scene, big men in black jackets, black hats and sunglasses or stocking masks approach. Working for a private demolition squad, these men make for ideal villains in a country where corporate raids are common, that is, ‘authorised’ attacks on corporations such as the one on Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Yukos. A cut, and we see an extract from a scene that must have happened some hours later. Artiom points to the bulldozer behind him demolishing the garages. Talking directly to the camera, he again explains the situation: ‘There is the bulldozer tearing down the garages of pensioners. And the policemen just went away, maybe solving some other problems’. In less than 50 seconds, these few, heavily edited, scenes show us a lawless society in which the meagre possessions of citizens, presented as helpless victims, are destroyed before our eyes. The state, symbolised by the police, turns a blind eye to this injustice. The only ones left to support the pensioners are the StopKham vigilantes.

In the remainder of the video, we witness violent fights between the vigilantes and the demolition squad. The vigilantes try to keep the bulldozer from starting the demolition, while the squad members force them back using pepper spray and sticks. Several scenes underline the vigilantes’ manly heroism. We see Mikhail Lazutin, at that time a member of Stop Rudeness, with a bleeding laceration in his face, arguing with police officers that they should detain the person who beat him. He, like others, is advised to file a complaint, and told that it is not possible to arrest the person on site. The inaction of the police contrasts with the heroism of the vigilantes. Dmitrii Chugunov, having been beaten and pepper-sprayed, tells the paramedics: ‘No, I can't go with you [to the ambulance]. If I leave, they’ll tear it all down’. The clip's version on the Russian-language YouTube channel ends with an on-screen caption directing a rebellious question to the authorities: ‘Dear heads of the prefecture and the administration: if something is forbidden by law, but someone just wants it so much, does that mean that it's allowed?’ The subtitled version on the English channel, called ‘Garage Wars’ and published about two years after the incident,¹⁹ adds a final scene showing a police van. A narrator tells us: ‘The real police had come. The thugs who had been crushing the garages … were taken to the police department. … This was a great scandal with criminal prosecution on both sides of the conflict’. As there is no information regarding the outcome of the prosecution or the results of investigations conducted by the vigilantes themselves, it remains unclear whether the vigilante-entrepreneurs’ defiant gestures amounted to actual political opposition.

This portrayal of the police as a force aligning with thugs is not a standard theme of the clips created by the two enterprises analysed in this essay. In general, the police as the symbol of the state (Jäger 2014) play a more ambiguous role. In most clips, they appear to collaborate closely with the vigilantes, punishing transgressors and bringing brawls to a halt. These clips match the vision of collaboration expressed by the Minister of the Interior at the 2010 Seliger gathering, when StopKham was first presented to the public: ‘This [project] will raise awareness of boors [khamov] in traffic and increase discipline. GAI [the Russian traffic police] supports your project. An employee should be part of all [activist] groups to patrol the streets together with you’ (Marchenko 2010). In these clips, the police embody the rule of law, the importance of which Putin, often styling himself as commander-in-chief, has highlighted throughout his presidency (Wood 2016, p. 9).

Several clips, however, once again present a less favourable picture of official law enforcement. Take for example the Lev Protiv clip ‘Smoking and Assault by Police’ (Kurenie i rukoprikladstvo politsii), which has more than five million views as of July 2022.²⁰ It starts with Mikhail Lazutin reprimanding two very young policemen who are smoking not far from the entrance of a metro station. A typical Lev Protiv story unfolds, in which the transgressors are chased to the sound of heavy metal. The shots of the police station where Lazutin ends up clearly seek to discredit the local police. Besides zooming in on a pack of cigarettes on the desk and stubs in a bucket of water, the camera shows us a police force lacking the modern equipment that usually implies competent law enforcement (Jäger 2014, p. 254). Instead, we see a small room and a narrow corridor lit by neon lamps; the walls are coated in the same washable paint that can be found in under-resourced homes for orphans and public hospitals across post-Soviet countries. The young policemen who were seen smoking passively watch the argument unfolding between Lazutin and the officer in charge. The clip ends with Lazutin explaining that he won the argument and ensured that the two transgressors would be reprimanded. He further highlights how such ‘trash’ (bydlo) gives the police a bad reputation. While the clip shows on the one hand the authentic reality of local police stations, Lazutin's epilogue nevertheless frames the whole endeavour as being in support of the police as a respected institution. He presents himself as a dashing hero, morally incorruptible due to his outsider status and acting for the good of Russian society.

Unlike ‘Smoking and Assault of Police’, the ‘Garage War’ clip does not show actual winners. Can the vigilantes be identified as the clips’ heroes even though they could not rescue the garages? The outro song ‘StopKham’, written by the amateur rapper Frast, conveys the vigilantes’ heroic aspirations:

We are all heroes here. What we possess we created ourselves [chto imeem poradili sami]. … 

We are not ashamed to defend justice/truth [pravda], but it's shameful to be a boor [kham]. … 

A grown-up muzhik does not act like a lad.

To act [simply] to deny it afterwards [is like] dishonouring mother and father.

In contrast to the villains they fight, the song identifies heroes as self-made men who acquired their possessions through their own work and who stand by their word: they are real muzhiki. The song contrasts heroes not only with people who became rich by birth or gangsterism, but also with people who did not accumulate wealth. Such people cannot be heroes by definition: they are either villains or victims.

There is little evidence in the videos for the ways in which vigilantes self-fashion their entrepreneurial persona in the online public sphere. Several StopKham raid leaders have developed individual profiles and started their own YouTube channels. An interview with Lazutin conducted by StopKham's Artiom Leonov, produced for Leonov's YouTube channel Life in Russia, is an excellent example of how the figure of the entrepreneur is fused with common patriotic heroism. The first episode presents him as a strongman who has served in the army. Leonov wears a shirt by the patriotic brand ‘Mother Russia’²¹ featuring a portrait of Ivan the Terrible and the word oprichnik, which refers to a member of the first tsar's special police corps.²² For the interview, Artiom has switched his oprichnik shirt for a plain one. The scenery is Moscow's hip Gorky Park. Blond and clean-shaven, wearing a silver necklace and a LA Lakers baseball cap backwards, Artiom introduces us to the meeting with Lev (meaning ‘lion’ in Russian) Lazutin. He greets Lev (whose real name is Mikhail) with a handshake that turns into a hug. Lazutin wears a grey Nike hoodie. His shaved head contrasts with his long beard. The two vigilantes call each other ‘brother’ (brat’). How they greet, speak and gesture reminds one of rappers’ style of conduct: relaxed, cool, showing mutual respect. Contrary to the stereotypical image of rappers, the clip emphasises the vigilante-entrepreneurs’ law-abiding behaviour and virtue. When Lazutin is approached by a teenager (stylish haircut, branded T-shirt, iPhone) asking him how he can join Lev Protiv, Lazutin immediately checks whether he is underage. In a gesture of pre-emptive obedience, the teenager reacts with a question: ‘You should not drink and not smoke, that's the criteria?’ ‘What's the point of it all if folks [vigilantes] smoke and drink themselves?’, answers Lazutin. On leaving, the teenager adds that he will join as soon as he turns 18. Lazutin turns to Leonov: ‘Look, it's like in the army. Once they’re 18 they’re coming’.

Comparisons to the army are frequent in the clip. In another scene, Lazutin paraphrases a fellow activist who had compared the initiative’s raids to his army service:

With you it's in principle like in the army … you kill your legs, walking six hours every day, approach people, who all the time try to hit you, you go to the [police] department trying to sort things out. … And all of that solely for the good of the country!²³

The army comparisons underline the manliness of the raids and the vigilante-entrepreneurs’ bravery. What is at stake is more than individual gain: ‘doing good’ for the community at large inspires Lazutin's raids, as he emphasises several times. Whereas his main motivation lies, as he explains in a key scene, in the feeling that he is a ‘worthy person’, his second aim is to change the hearts and minds of young viewers through visible examples:

I upload a video clip, a social clip, which young people are watching. And that is what I count on. That there might be one, just one young guy out of 500,000 viewers, who sees this. And what he sees creates an aversion to alcohol in his heart, in his soul, an aversion to swear words, to aggression.²⁴

Fashioning oneself not only as strong but also as someone sacrificing himself for the common good is a defining trait of hero characters (Jasper et al. 2020, p. 165). The display of a virtuous self is another principal ingredient of classic heroism: one of Lev Protiv's most successful videos (Spasenie kotenka ot smerti, 6.5 million views as of July 2022) features Lazutin rescuing a sick cat by bringing it to a vet, underlining his good intentions and fundamental compassion with victims.²⁵

In the interview, Lazutin also makes it clear that anyone could follow his example. Clinging to the promise popular in start-up culture—that anyone can become an entrepreneur, a producer or an individual activist (Banet-Weiser 2012, p. 140)—he argues:

If a person really does cool things, then it's not important who he is or where he started [ne vazhno kto on], he becomes popular. … When a person starts to do something … he starts to develop. But the most important thing is your spirit, your belief in your undertaking.²⁶

Lazutin again appeals here to his young viewers to choose the path of (male) virtue, this time by calling upon their innate ability to live up to their full potential. His words in fact are very similar to a clip produced to advertise the state youth political programme You Are An Entrepreneur (Ty predprinimatel’):

Everyone said, ‘you don't have money for travel’—but you went on foot … everyone said, ‘This is a small town, there's no future’—but you became the first in your business. … Everyone said, ‘It's time to stop’—but you started. You are an entrepreneur!²⁷

The advertisement fashions the entrepreneur as a modern hero whose strength and determination, visually exemplified by jogging and push-ups, lie in fighting against all those external voices that tell him that he will not make it. The clip suggests that the main task of an entrepreneur is to believe in himself and fight his way up, against the opinion of the majority in an inimical world.

The interview makes clear that Lazutin is well-known and respected. He is twice approached by teenage boys who tell him that they adore his initiative. Lazutin, and also Leonov, are presented to us as young men who are not only strong and fearless but also virtuous, economically successful and following fashion trends. The fact that they look like bourgeois hipsters may normalise the authoritarian, misogynistic and, at times, racist overtones of their law-and-order initiatives. Altogether, their self-fashioning illustrates how the flexible and authoritarian dimensions of Russia's current political order are fused in a new heroic persona.

Creating suspense through plot, ‘popification’ and character work

The plots of StopKham video clips closely follow the deeds of male heroic figures. Except for clips produced prior to 2016, all follow the standard five-act structure of storytelling: Action—Background—Development—Climax—Ending. This means that the videos begin with a teaser, featuring dangerous or funny highlights. The clips are well structured. At the latest, the main ‘villain’ appears during the third quarter of the video clip, the climax. Plots and casts remain almost the same across videos. The heroic vigilantes fight against immoral villains who often turn violent, regardless of whether they drive taxis, vans or luxury cars. Bystanders usually support the heroes, but sometimes side with the villains. When passers-by are pensioners, mothers with children or trolleybus drivers, they are often presented as the victims of those who violate traffic rules. Footage from popular movies, effects such as sequences shot in black and white, slow or fast motion, the repetition of scenes from the angle of another camera and above all stirring music create entertaining variations on the repetitive plots.

A variety of targets play the role of villain. Clips that prominently feature women are amongst the most popular on the StopKham channels, and some have more views than those showing heavy fighting scenes. For instance, StopKham's second most popular video on the Russian channel (more than 15.8 million views as of July 2022) is ‘Cutie Worldstar’ (Krasnogarskaya Nyasha), featuring a ‘cute-looking’ woman who hits the vigilantes with her shoes to prevent them from attaching their sticker to the windscreen and drives off with several young men still clinging to the bonnet of her car.²⁸ Likewise, StopKham member Islam Ismailov created a highly successful compilation of the ‘Female Top 10’ (Zhenskii Top 10) on his channel (more than seven million views as of July 2022).²⁹ Unlike male targets, women are never depicted as serious opponents even if they fight back. This is underlined by the designations the vigilantes use for women: devushka (girl), nyasha (cutie), mamasha oblivasha (sloppy mommy) or predstavitel’nitsa slabogo pola (representative of the weak sex). The female targets’ behaviour is presented as unfeminine, unmotherly or hysterical. For instance, in ‘A [Female] Muscovite Born and Bred’ (Moskvichka v tret’em kolene), nine million views as of July 2022,³⁰ also part of the top ten compilation, raid leader Kirill Bunin appeals to a female driver with the words ‘girl’, ‘darling’ and asks her to repark her car to be ‘a real girl’ [bud'te devushka do kontsa]. When the argument intensifies (the woman is using offensive language herself), he shouts to all present: ‘Who wants to marry that one? Who needs her? You can bet on it, a hamburger is preferable … simply trash’. When the female target's husband shows up, Bunin asks him to reprimand his wife and seems disappointed by the lack of male comradeship when he refuses. The video is typical. In many clips, women as villain characters underline the vigilante-entrepreneurs’ manliness by means of contrast. Amongst StopKham's most popular videos are those that feature attractive women, often focusing on their childlike and innocent appearance (large eyes, small chin, carefully dressed and styled), which seemingly stands in opposition to their use of obscene language and rude behaviour in response to the vigilantes’ harassment. In particular, Bunin's raids present female villains as weak and hysterical, as for instance in the ‘Family Freakout’ clips (Semeinoe obostrenie), the first one counting almost five million, the second one almost three million views as of July 2022.³¹ At the end of the second of the two clips, Bunin addresses the audience: ‘As you also see, the psychological sanity of this woman is to be doubted. … We hope that both her sanity and her driver's licence will be inspected’. Female villains are depicted as people who cannot be taken seriously and need the guidance of men.

This depiction of women as inferior to men is one way to emphasise the vigilante-entrepreneurs’ apparent virility. Another is to show superiority in combat against male villains. Yet only when those villains are regarded as manly enough by the vigilante-entrepreneurs do they engage in a fight. If male targets behave in a way that can be interpreted as feminine, they need not be defeated in combat to emphasise the vigilantes’ virility. Rather, these men's inferiority is signalled by the vigilante-entrepreneurs’ use of misogynistic and homophobic language (such as in StopKham's ‘Mama's Boy’).³² Yet even the physically strongest male opponents show signs of weakness. Their seemingly unjustified aggression, their screaming and swearing, is characteristic for displays of weak character (Jasper et al. 2020, p. 62). When villains turn remorseful after a physical fight or the arrival of the police, this can come across as a double victory for the heroes. Not only do the transgressors defer to the vigilante-entrepreneurs’ interpretation of the situation, but they also change their minds, unlike real muzhiki.

Interestingly, Lev Protiv's clips focus much less on women as a special type of ‘villain’. This is already indicated by their titles, which do not advertise female villains and their physical attractiveness. Instead, they link public places popular either with youth or homeless people with behaviour described as ‘trash’ (bydlo), ‘horror’ (zhut’), ‘hell’ (ad), ‘mass disorder’ (massovye bezpariadki) or ‘mass fight’ (massovaya draka). StopKham's focus on drivers often means that targets are perceived as economically successful: luxury and middle-class cars mark economic success and poorer urbanites seldom own cars. In contrast, Lev Protiv's raids target primarily those who cannot afford to drink in bars and may lack a private space to invite friends. Youth and poorer people who drink, especially males, thus make up the majority of villains in Lev Protiv clips. While the few female targets are treated more politely than men by the Lev Protiv vigilantes, they are nevertheless portrayed as suffering from the same weak character as their male counterparts. An exception to this is the video, ‘I Am A Queen’ (Ya koroleva) which shows a young woman with a deep voice who breaks established gender norms in order to provoke the Lev Protiv vigilantes, who harass her with the camera: she uses obscene language and behaves in a highly sexualised way.³³ The camera constantly focuses on her, although she is part of a larger group of young people. Close-ups emphasise her non-compliance with the traditional gender binary. The raid leader questions several times whether she is a woman and, in the outro, finds her to experience a devilish enjoyment (d’yavol'skoe udovol'stvie) from such behaviour, suggesting that people who do not fit the gender binary or act according to established gender norms are bad people and undeserving of respect.

Contrary to the basic schema that strong heroes fight strong villains (Jasper et al. 2020, p. 3), the targets of Lev Protiv appear less as misbehaving individuals than as social types. As such, they function as visible reminders of what one should not become (Jasper et al. 2020, p. 244). The video ‘Crowd of Trash and Airborne Servicemen’ (Tolpa bydla i VDV), with over 10.5 million views as of July 2022, dwells on the depiction of middle-aged drunk people.³⁴ ‘There's nothing you can do about such people’, Lazutin explains to us in the middle of the clip. ‘They’ve fully lost their human character/temper [chelovecheskii oblik]. They don't care at all how they behave or what they do.’ The villains Lev Protiv vigilantes fight are presented as weak, their conduct subhuman.

It is telling that, for Lazutin, drinking in public places (which is a legal transgression), swearing (which is mainly, if at all, a moral transgression) and being aggressive (which is only illegal if it involves physical violence or abusive behaviour) are all part of one and the same unlawful syndrome. In another part of the interview with Leonov, he makes it clear that he has no illusions about his targets: ‘My main goal is not to change the people who we are approaching. A man who is 35 years old, swears and drinks. … I know he might swear at us and maybe even start a fight. He probably drinks alcohol again the next day’. He believes that this tendency can be effectively fought amongst youth by showing how his own virtue contrasts with the—ultimately unmanly—lack of self-discipline and considerateness of his targets. His contempt for the latter is mixed with despair; their fate seems already to be sealed. Alcoholics and homeless people function in Lev Protiv clips as visible warnings of how one should not become. Portrayed as social types, they symbolise the danger that Russian society may degenerate.

Acting in an exemplary manner and publicly shaming those who are guilty of minor misdemeanours is these enterprises’ strategy to ‘do good’ for Russia. Their self-fashioning as masculine heroes, allegedly serving the community as a whole, justifies their vigilante behaviour, including harassment and the instigation of violent encounters. In the self-styled vigilante heroes’ moral universe, belligerence can be virtuous, as long as it's instigated by the ‘right’ people. The vigilante-entrepreneurs’ character work reinforces the gender binary—especially amongst young people who consume their video clips. It stabilises a patriarchal hierarchy in which men are punished for behaviour that can be read as feminine, are responsible for the actions of their female dependants (wives, mothers and daughters), and need to prove their masculinity through economic independence. Russian mainstream television reinforces this character work by quoting the vigilantes’ clips rather than the sources of other parties, presuming the guilt of the vigilantes’ targets. Likewise, it reproduces the characterisation of women as inadequate, ridiculing them as ‘missy’ or ‘blonde’ (Gabdulhakov 2019, pp. 31–5). The vigilante-entrepreneurs’ fashioning of a new heroic persona is thus supported by mainstream television coverage. This depoliticises their actions by presenting the patriarchal hierarchy inherent in misogynist language and visuals as natural. This hierarchy helps to legitimise strongman rule and authoritarian aggression as necessary forces to weed out feminine and dependent behaviour that might weaken the state, and also the economy.

Conclusion

What worldview is conveyed by StopKham's and Lev Protiv's video clips? What stories do the vigilante brands tell their viewers? I argued that these clips suggest that society's main problems lie in the immorality and indifference of people who are too rich and selfish, too poor and apathetic, or who do not behave according to norms allegedly appropriate for their sex. Vigilante narratives thereby obscure larger social wrongs or increasing poverty and its corollaries. By zooming in on the minor transgressions of individuals, structural problems in Russia and the world are attributed to personal choices and apparently innate character types. The vigilante brands’ emphasis on character has an important ideological function: it shifts responsibility for social wrongs to individual citizens. If everyone strove to become more moral, caring and active—this is the brands’ moral story—many problems would simply not exist. The brands also tell the tale of young male heroes whose bravery, incorruptibility, good behaviour and entrepreneurial spirit stand in sharp contrast to the villains’ apparent weakness. The vigilante-entrepreneurs’ heroic masculinity is constructed in opposition to weak characters—passive, dependent and frequently changing their minds; traits that are historically associated with femininity and regularly used to characterise welfare states (Sauer 2016).

But how does such vigilante activity carried out in a heroic and male fashion relate to Russia's flexible authoritarianism? It chimes with the government's strategy to respond to people's everyday grievances by blaming the increase in immoral behaviour and reluctance to take responsibility amongst ordinary Russians. By portraying heroic masculinity as the antithesis of the alleged problems of dependence and apathy, the vigilante brands perpetuate the myth that masculine strength benefits society at large and that heroic individuals should be at the helm. Most importantly, they fuse the masculinity and down-to-earth character of the post-Soviet muzhik with the—internationally salient—figure of the successful entrepreneur who makes his way up against all odds. Rather than appearing as an unpatriotic liberal, however, this entrepreneur is invested in doing good for Russia. This fusion forms an ideological bolster that may justify even the vigilante-entrepreneurs’ use of violence—at least in their own view and that of their fans.

Why are vigilante brands successful transnationally? What experiences do they promise? The new types of masculinity they promote fuse the figure of the heroic, combative rebel with that of the successful entrepreneur. Many gangster-rappers successfully fashion their personas in a similar way: as outlaws who have achieved fame and economic success in a hostile world. Yet the vigilante brands discussed are different, in that they promise the possibility of retaining what they define as a virtuous, heroic self through shaming and punishing those who transgress norms but being gentle with ‘innocent’ victims. What is more, through digital diffusion, the brands can incentivise young people to emulate ‘good’ and eschew ‘bad’ social types. They offer their viewers the positive feeling of identifying with today's heroes, along with suspenseful, often funny, social media entertainment, and allow them to enjoy experiences of Schadenfreude that are facilitated by processes of dehumanisation.

Dehumanisation is easier when targets represent categories of people that are often devalued in the context of patriarchy and flexible capitalism. Indeed, as Richard Sennett notes, today's neoliberal regime ‘treats those who are dependent on the state with the suspicion that they are social parasites, rather than simply helpless’ (Sennett 1999, p. 139). StopKham's and Lev Protiv's packaging of authoritarian aggression into brands offering entertaining do-it-yourself justice also attracts many viewers within Russia and, increasingly, beyond Russia's borders, because it chimes with the authoritarian elements of flexible capitalism.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Iwona Janicka, Jussi Lassila, Valerie Sperling, the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism’s writing group and the anonymous referees appointed by Europe-Asia Studies for valuable comments on prior drafts of this essay. The research for this essay was partly conducted during my PhD at Humboldt University, Berlin, when I received a scholarship from the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS); and partly during my postdoctoral position at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, where I was employed as a coordinating researcher in the transnational project ‘Popular Music and the Rise of Populism in Europe’, which is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Several ideas for this essay were also developed in conversation with my current position at the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre ‘Transformations of the Popular’ at the University of Siegen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Schwenck

Anna Schwenck, University of Siegen, Herrengarten 3, 57072, Siegen, Germany. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 The names of commenters have been changed.

2 Stop a Douchebag (StopKham) on Patreon, available at: https://www.patreon.com/stopadouchebag, accessed 20 July 2022. As of March 2021, shortly before I submitted this essay, there were more than 200 patrons, jointly donating US$755 per month. My translation of StopKham as Stop Rudeness diverges from the activists' own translation (Stop a Douchebag) but is closer to the Russian meaning. All translations are mine. If available, the titles of YouTube clips are given in English.

3 Khrushi Protiv (Piglets Versus) is another vigilante initiative developed within Nashi. Activists wearing piglet costumes punish shop owners who allegedly sell expired products (see Gabdulhakov 2021). Since the initiative has been much less successful than StopKham and Lev Protiv, I have not included it in this essay.

4 ‘“Lev Protiv” otvetil za svoi reidy’, YouTube, 23 July 2020, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip3CecnI9H4, accessed 18 March 2021.

5 See Oleg Nikolaevich Smolin's talk ‘Socioeconomics: Uniquely Russian Poverty’, Russian Social Forum, 13 September 2019, available at: https://www.transform-network.net/en/blog/article/socioeconomics-uniquely-russian-poverty/, accessed 22 July 2022.

6 I have added up estimates for the channels, available at: https://socialblade.com, accessed 22 July 2022. See also Table 1.

7 ‘“Lev Protiv” otvetil za svoi reidy’, YouTube, 23 July 2020, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip3CecnI9H4, accessed 18 March 2021. Milonov is widely known for drafting St Petersburg's first homophobic law.

8 Thus, StopKham's English channels, featuring clips with English and French subtitles, appeal to an international fan base.

9 The StopKham channels I analysed do not feature video clips created before 2015. Older clips were moved to an additional channel called StopKham Archive, which was recently renamed StopKham Official. I compared the most popular archived clips (exceeding 500,000 views) to the above selection. The comparison affirmed the existing categorisation.

10 A thorough discussion of racism in the clips exceeds the scope of this essay. The use of ethnic designations such as ‘Chechens’ in clip titles to promise an especially violent encounter is notable (see also Gabdulhakov 2019). StopKham's clip ‘From Kirghizia with Love’ features overt racism by an (ethnic Russian) raid leader, who tells a bystander to go back to Kyrgyzstan, adding: ‘I eat your sort for lunch’. Targets regularly use racist slurs against raid leaders whose appearance is not ethnically Russian.

11 The scope of these measures recently reached a new level. See, ‘New Threats to Russian Civil Society: Human Rights Activists Appeal to Representatives of the Council of Europe’, Memorial, 25 January 2021, available at: https://memohrc.org/en/news_old/urgent-appeal-russian-human-rights-organisations-representatives-council-europe-concerning, accessed 22 July 2022.

12 StopKham's far-right connection is unclear. Its founder, Dmitrii Chugunov, was a member of the anti-migrant organisation Mestnye in Odintsovo before he joined Nashi (Kozenko 2006). Mestnye had connections to the brutal Militant Organisation of Russian Nationalists, BORN, whose members killed anti-fascist activists, human rights lawyers and a judge, amongst others (Tumanov et al. 2015).

13 ‘Lider dvizheniya po bor’be s pedofilami “Kamen’ Protiv” otpushchen pod podpisku o nevyezde. Andrei Makarov i ego pomoshchnik Mikhail Lazutin podozrevayutsya v grabezhe’, TASS, 21 January 2014, available at: https://tass.ru/proisshestviya/902563, accessed 22 July 2022.

14 See for example ‘Lev protiv pedofilov. Korol’ pedofilov. Okkupai Pedofiliai 19 vypusk’, 8 March 2017, available at: https://ok.ru/video/247475735137, accessed 22 July 2022.

15 ‘Mikhail Lazutin—interv’yu dlya “Novoi gazety”. Lev Protiv’, YouTube, 7 June 2019, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y5LT-8XaOc, accessed 22 July 2022. It is highly unlikely that Lazutin could overlook his colleague's convictions, as is shown by the Kamen’ Protiv clips in which he also features (see Kamen’ Protiv: Novyi God 2014): ‘Kamen’ Protiv: Video’, available at: https://vk.com/videos-71872292, accessed 22 July 2022.

16 ‘Osnovatel’ dvizheniya “StopKham” Dmitrii Chugunov: predlagali milliony, no reputatsiya dorozhe’, Pasmi.ru, 23 May 2016, available at: https://pasmi.ru/archive/142529/, accessed 22 July 2022.

17 ‘StopKham Bez suda i sledstviya/Extrajudicially’, YouTube, 6 November 2014, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoTTQ0snWZg, accessed 22 July 2022.

18 ‘Small Businesses Cower after Moscow's Night of Bulldozers’, Reuters, 17 February 2016, available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-economy-bulldozers-idUSKCN0VQ1W5, accessed 22 July 2022.

19 ‘Garage Wars’, YouTube, 24 November 2016, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmCMs4C9Hwk, accessed 22 July 2022.

20 ‘Lev Protiv—Kurenie i rukoprikladstvo politsii’, YouTube, 29 January 2015, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iKXacN0uCE, accessed 22 July 2022.

21 ‘Mother Russia’, available at: https://motherrussia.ru/, accessed 22 July 2022.

22 ‘Meeting Lev Lazutin (Lion Versus)’, YouTube, 14 November 2016, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdmOknVJ0T0, accessed 10 January 2021. In late 2021 the video was removed from Leonov's channel. The channel still exists and is available at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOahMmtT3QW2Dba1muvjbhw, accessed 2 August 2022.

23 ‘Meeting Lev Lazutin (Lion Versus)’, YouTube, 14 November 2016, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdmOknVJ0T0, accessed 10 January 2021.

24 ‘Meeting Lev Lazutin (Lion Versus)’, YouTube, 14 November 2016, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdmOknVJ0T0, accessed 10 January 2021.

25 ‘Spasenie kotenka ot smerti’, YouTube, 30 September 2015, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0uEXoL04OM, accessed 22 July 2022.

26 ‘Meeting Lev Lazutin (Lion Versus)’, YouTube, 14 November 2016, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdmOknVJ0T0, accessed 10 January 2021.

27 ‘Programma Ty predprinimatel’, Rossiiskii tsentr sodeystviya molodym spetsialistam, 2018, available at: http://роспредприниматель.рф/you-re-an-entrepreneur/, accessed 10 August 2020.

28 ‘StopKham—Krasnogarskaya Nyasha’, YouTube, 30 June 2015, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53WbKPqgbdQ, accessed 22 July 2022.

29 ‘StopKham—Zhenskii Top 10’, YouTube, 10 June 2016, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vswPtRwxcA8, accessed 22 July 2022.

30 ‘StopKham—“Moskvichka v tret’em kolene”’, YouTube, 3 May 2018, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBcJxfB1hTU, accessed 22 July 2022.

31 ‘StopKham—Semeinoe Obostrenie. Chast’ 1’, YouTube, 10 April 2018, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_QAXp8ZFuQ; ‘StopKham—Semeinoe Obostrenie. Chast’ 2. Prodolzhenie’, YouTube, 23 April 2018, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf7k_rTHzRo, both accessed 22 July 2022.

32 ‘SADB—Mama's Boy’, YouTube, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbjFv81l1qQ, accessed 22 July 2022. To be sure, the targets of raids often use misogynistic language themselves. Female StopKham vigilantes, who actually never play a heroic role, but usually function as bystanders or hold the camera (decreasing the likelihood that the camera person will be attacked by male targets) are sometimes called ‘sluts’ (slukha) by female targets. Male vigilantes are often referred to as ‘faggots’ (pederast).

33 ‘Lev Protiv—Ya Koroleva’, YouTube, 13 March 2020, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlSH8hab4QI, accessed 22 July 2022.

34 ‘Lev Protiv—Tolpa bydla i VDV’, YouTube, 20 October 2018, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a9Au1F9bUY, accessed 22 July 2022.