Description: Russia's Skinheads: Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives provides a thorough examination of the phenomenon of skinheads, explaining its nature and its significance, and assessing how far Russian skinhead subculture is the 'lumpen' end of the extreme nationalist ideological spectrum.
Review Quotes:
"This work comprises a milestone in the study of contemporary Russian society. By having the courage to take as an object of study a group that is decried, marginal, and difficult to break into, and by ably going beyond the cliches linked to racism and skinhead violence, these three authors have succeeded in providing a refl exive reading, one performed 'from the inside, ' of individual and collective trajectories in Russia today. Marked by joys and fears, hopes and disappointments, love and hate, fraternal bonds and ruptures, these trajectories make it possible to give back to individual life choices their social depth, beyond ideological commitments. And they open up a large fi eld of research into the Russian cultural landscape and the strategies and resources that people use to give meaning to their lives." - Marlene Laruelle, Slavic Review, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Fall 2011)
Winner of the The Alexander Nove Prize, 2010.