Hooliganism
A new law published 19 November 2025 expanded the list of crimes for which criminal responsibility now begins from the age of 14. This includes crimes of a terrorist nature and sabotage. And individuals who try to recruit minors for carrying out sabotage and terrorist acts can now face up to life in prison. While the general age of criminal liability in Russia is 16, it has been lowered to 14 for specific serious crimes, including sabotage, aiding terrorism, and participating in terrorist communities. Cases involving minors on these charges are typically tried in closed court sessions, making independent monitoring and access to information difficult.
More and more dangerous crimes had been committed by minors. When one young citizen was apprehended for setting fire to a railway line relay box, he smirked into the camera, "I'm only 14. I'll get away with it." Now such youths will have to answer for their actions. Komsomolskia Pravda called this "terrorism in short trousers".
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, arson attacks by juveniles on rail infrastructure and military in Russia increased. Sometimes, youths are promised money for carrying out these attacks. Authorities maintain that young people are being commissioned to carry out such operations by "pro-Ukrainian handlers" on social media networks. According to the human rights project Avtozak LIVE, by October 2024,more than 550 people are being prosecuted for acts of sabotage and arson against recruitment offices of the Russian army. It did not have figures specifically on minors.
Russian courts have convicted at least 158 minors on terrorism and sabotage-related charges since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, according to November 2025 data from the Russian Supreme Court analyzed by the exiled news outlet Vyorstka. The number of convictions increased steadily since the start of the war, with 26 in 2022, 35 in 2023, 41 in 2024, and 29 in the first half of 2025 alone.
Many of the cases involve arson attacks on military enlistment offices and railway infrastructure, actions often associated with anti-war sentiment or resistance. Law enforcement officials and media reports indicate that some teenagers were motivated by payments from individuals or groups ordering the attacks, often via Telegram channels. Russian authorities, including the Investigative Committee, have accused Ukrainian intelligence services of recruiting these minors.
A Telegram channel chat began with the automatic greeting "Bot for schoolchildren who need money." The following sums were offered for arson attacks: $5,000 for a helicopter, $10,000 for a plane, $3,000 for a transformer and $4,000 for power lines. The chat partner asked straightaway where the pupil came from and what "objects" were nearby. For the destruction of military equipment with a video as proof, the individual even promised $150,000 paid from a crypto wallet into any bank account desired. In addition, the chat partner gave exact instructions on how an object can be destroyed using a gas canister. He wrote that only 10% of commissions had failed so far, adding that there would not be a "real punishment" if the young saboteurs were arrested by police.
According to Russian authorities, on 21 September 2024, a Mi-8 helicopter at a military base in Omsk was set on fire by a Molotov cocktail. In the same month, a civilian helicopter of the same type was burned at the Noyabrsk Airport in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. Two young people were arrested on the spot, found with burns on their faces and hands from setting the helicopter ablaze. They said they had received the commission to commit the deed via Telegram. The youths said they had found a flyer with a QR code in the toilets at their school. Using the code, they had contacted the unknown person who promised them money for doing the sabotage. According to media reports, similar flyers had been found in several Russian regions, including in Volgograd, Voronezh and Ryazan.
Minors involved in anti-war railway sabotage in Russia have primarily targeted crucial yet vulnerable parts of the network's signaling and power systems. The specific types of railway infrastructure most often targeted include relay cabinets. These metal boxes house essential equipment for railway signaling and interlocking mechanisms. They contain fiber-optic and other cables that relay safety information to drivers and control train movements. Arson attacks on these cabinets are a common tactic, as damaging them can disrupt the organization of train movement on a significant section of tracks and cause considerable delays to both civilian and military logistics.
These "nerve centers" are targeted because they are often more accessible and less guarded than bridges or the main lines themselves, and damaging them at key junctions can cause widespread disruption across the network. Ukrainian intelligence services and local partisan groups view these actions as a way to hinder Russian military logistics and supply lines to the front.
The idea that “hooliganism is a distinctively Russian malady” is rooted more in history and rhetoric than in any empirical truth about Russian society. The term khuliganstvo entered Russian public discourse in the late imperial period and became a formal legal category in the Soviet era, where it referred to a wide range of disorderly behaviors. Authorities used it not only to describe street violence or vandalism but also to signal moral or ideological deficiency. Over time, the label acquired a strong cultural charge, positioned as evidence of poor upbringing, social backwardness, or a failure of socialist discipline. This political and moral framing gave hooliganism a specifically Russian coloration even though the behaviors it described were common across industrial societies.
Despite this, hooliganism itself is far from unique to Russia. Youth gangs, public disorder, and drunken street culture can be found in London, Berlin, Chicago, or Buenos Aires. In fact, the English word “hooligan” originated in nineteenth-century London. What is distinctively Russian is not the phenomenon but the way the state and public discourse treated it. Soviet authorities frequently used the charge of hooliganism to depoliticize dissent, applying the term to activists and artists whose actions would have been recognized as political expression elsewhere. This practice reinforced the idea that hooliganism reflected a kind of social illness rather than a political or structural problem.
The persistence of the phrase reflects deeper narratives about Russian social identity. Russian intellectuals and officials have long expressed anxiety about disorder, drunkenness, and the unruly behavior of young men in urban settings. By labeling such behavior a “malady,” commentators cast it as a symptom of societal weakness that required discipline or reform. The concept thus became a symbolic shorthand in discussions about modernization, moral decay, and the challenges of governing a vast and diverse population.
In reality, describing hooliganism as uniquely Russian says more about the cultural and political uses of the term than about Russians themselves. The behaviors associated with hooliganism are widespread, but the Russian tradition of moralizing, politicizing, and legally codifying them gives the concept its particular flavor. The phrase functions as a rhetorical device—an expression of historical anxieties and ideological narratives—rather than a literal diagnosis of national character.
With the exception of Polish hooligans, Russian football hooligans are the most consistently violent around. Usually, Spartak or Lokomotiv Moscow would be trying to take the scalp of city rival CSKA — kingpins of Russia's hooligan world along with Zenit. The world hooligan was first found in British newspaper police-court reports in the summer of 1898, almost certainly from the variant form of the Irish surname Houlihan, which figured as a characteristic comic Irish name in music hall songs and newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s. The term was internationalized in teh 20th century in communist rhetoric as Russian word khuligan, a term of opprobrium for "scofflaws, political dissenters, etc."
The tendency to hooliganism is not abnormal in human behavior. In fact, it is only when it extends beyond acceptable limits that it becomes reprehensible. The borderline between high spirits in a group of young people and rowdyism leading to actual violence is small. Many group impulses for demonstration are natural, and it is only when they get out of hand that they are unacceptable to society. Drunkenness does not play a large part, especially in football rowdyism among youths.
There seems to be a tradition in some forms of violent behavior, as is shown by the antagonism which exists between supporters of certain football teams. Though rugby and cricket are the center of much less hooliganism than is soccer owing to the different type of spectators at rugby matches and the less exciting pace of cricket, yet scenes of near hooligan behaviour have been witnessed at both.
Hooliganism can in fact occur among any class in the community, but the magnitude of the crowds at football matches undoubtedly produces more scope for them to get away with their antisocial acts. These may vary from gang fights to frightening and molesting frail and ageing people who cannot protect themselves.
The bully boys have existed in all ages and cultures, and the behavior patterns have similarities. The great popular insurrection of AD 532 shook the throne of Justinian in the fifth year of his reign and laid in ashes the imperial quarter of Constantinople. Among the most singular and disgraceful follies of the Eastern Empire were the factions of the circus, which resulted from the colors worn by the charioteers who competed for the prize of swiftness. The narrative of Procopius is full and circumstantial, it sets forth the causes of the revolt. The White and the Red were the most ancient of these factions, but the Blue and the Green were the most remarkable for their inveterate hostility. All these factions obtained a legal existence, and the Byzantines willingly jeopardized life and fortune in behalf of their favorite color. The Emperor Justinian was a partisan of the Blues; and his favor toward them provoked the hostility of the Greens, and gave rise to a series of disturbances at the close of the war with Persia just alluded to, known as the “Nika riots,” which almost laid Constantinople in ashes.
Much of the crowd behaviour at football matches, such as singing and scarf waving, is innocuous, but with a small minority it is the prelude to violence or vandalism which tends to bring excessive disrepute to many gatherings of people. The 50,000 soccer fans who go home quietly after the match are not news, but the dozen skinheads who have a fight make the headlines. But at the end of the day there are almost invariably victors, as mass hooliganism is effective only so long as the gang and its ringleaders are together. Once the members are separated the emotional stimulus rapidly diminishes.
Hooliganism was defined as anti-social behavior. Social crimes, under which many forced laborers were sentenced, were covered by an assortment of Soviet statutes. Various legal degrees of gravity were defined: minor hooliganism, hooliganism, and malicious hooliganism. ”Hooliganism" - defined broadly as actions violating public order and expressing a disrespect for society — was the most common crime in the Soviet Union in terms of sentencing. Parasitism, also listed as a crime against public order, covered vagrancy begging, and evasion of work over an extended period.
Soviet life produced a variety of social problems that, theoretically, should never have arisen in a Communist society or should at least be on the decline at this stage of its development. However, as Soviet authorities themselves complained, many of these troublesome problems seemed to be on the rise.
One category includes the dodging of "socially useful labor," widespread alcoholism, and the growth of crime and "hooliganism," the last ranging from theft of state property to crimes cf sex and violence, often involving gangs of wayward youths. Particular concern was expressed by representatives of the Soviet "establishment" over a category of problems, perhaps best described as tendencies among the younger generation that reflected the young people's alienation, in one form or another, from present-day Soviet society. These tendencies, some of which seemed akin to the questioning of established ways and values by youth elsewhere, included indifference to Marxism-Leninism as a repository cf answers to the main problems of life.
A early as 1940 the Central Committee Plenum recognized the need to incorporate in the RSFSR Penal Code amendments which would harden the punishments so that employees guilty of minor theft, regardless of the amount, as well as those guilty of hooliganism at the enterprise, institution or in a public place, even if it was committed for the first time, would be punished under a sentence of the people's court by imprisonment of a period of at least 1 year.
Stern measures of State coercion were deemed necessary in respect to agents of imperialistic States who have been sent into the country, alsoin respect to those who maliciously broke the legal norms of the socialist community and did not yield themselves to indoctrination, and an respect to thieves, murderers, large speculators, malicious hooligans, and other dangerous criminals. It was precisely in this manner that the criminal laws adopted on 25 December 1958 were to have solved this problem. On one hand they specified narrowing and mitigating criminal responsibility for actions which did not present great danger to the State and to society, but on the other hand they provided for strict responsibility for the most serious crimes against the State and also against the life and health of citizens. It seemed to some that there was a difference between the concepts of hooliganism and sophisticated, well-planned banditry. Some anarchists, for example, put forward the slogans of freedom and attracted gangsters, parasites, hooligans, and prostitutes.
According to Pravda, August 13, 1959, the Republic Conference on Ideological Questions, called by the Uzbek Communist Party, revealed tendencies toward private ownership, theft of Socialist property, hooliganism, drunkenness, and all else that goes under "survivals of the past." The Tashkent Party Committee secretary, F.Hodzhaev warned the conference that nationalist survivals were especially dangerous in the economic field where "for the sake of local interests, state interests were relegated to oblivion." Taking the cue, the conforence emphasized the urgency of the Soviet and Uzbek people choosing cadres on the basis of their technical qualifications and without nationalistic prejudices.
The vast majority of forced laborers were sentenced for purely criminal acts - theft of state and personal property as well as crimes against persons and destruction of personal property were the most prevalent crimes following hooliganism. The number of persons convicted and arrested, however, for certain crimes, such as hooliganism, often depended on the Soviet attitude toward combating the crime at a given time or on the need for laborers in a particular industry. An emigre lawyer stated that the need for workers in the Estonian oil shale fields in the late 1960-7, for example, led directly to many more arrests for hooliganism and subsequent sentences to forced labor in that industry.
Political activists and dissidents were prosecuted for serious crimes against the state — anti-Soviet slander was one of the common charges — as well as for lesser offenses. They often fell prey to catchall applications of hooliganism and parasitism laws. An analysis of data on the number of persons sentenced by type of crime during 1976 in the Soviet Union identifies 'hooliganism,' or disorderly behavior, as the number one crime. Examples of misconduct under this category purport to show its uniqueness as a Soviet crime. Hooliganism is a crime mainly characteristic of young males in urban areas, and it is a distinctive barometer of the climate of Soviet society. Hooliganism also highly correlates with alcoholism. Crimes against the person are the second highest category of criminal behavior and include murder, rape, and serious bodily assault.
Soviet adolescents commit a significant share of these crimes, which are mostly committed on days off, holidays, and on the occasion of family festivals and ceremonies. Convictions for theft of State and public property and crimes against citizens' personal property rank third and fourth, respectively, in number of convictions. Other lesser categories include motor vehicle crimes, economic crimes, official crimes (criminal negligence and abuse of power), and crimes violating law and order.
Soviet crime statistics did not include about 1 million criminal cases reviewed each year by 280,000 comrades' courts and do not estimate the amount of white-collar crime, which is believed to involve as many as 20 million people. Soviet statistics on prisoners reveal that in January 1977 over 1,600,000 persons were serving sentences in corrective labor institutions. On a per capita basis, this was about 3.5 times greater than the US prison population.
Although the MVD organs hd sufficient forces and means, the effectiveness of the struggle against law violations on the streets remained low. In 1988 in one district, hooliganism accounted for 26.5 percent of all street crimes.
During the first nine months of 1989 the internal affairs organs and the procuracy registered 1,750,794 crimes, which is 437,321 (33.3 percent) more than during the same period in the previous year. As formerly, a considerable number of illegal acts took place in streets, squares, parks and public gardens. A total of 215,431 crimes were committed here, or 16.5 percent of the total number of those registered within the country. Street crime was growing at the highest rates in the Estonian and Lithuanian SSRs, the Mari and Tatar ASSRs, Kamchatka Oblast, and the cities of Leningrad and Moscow. The battle against street hooliganism was intensifying. In June of 1989, 8751 more crimes were exposed than during the same period last year, in August — 9918 more, and in September — 11,587 more.
Born into a poor family after the Great Patriotic War, Vladimir Putin’s childhood was marked by standard Soviet deprivation: cramped and paltry living conditions, food rationing, and isolation from the outside world - he was a self-described childhood “hooligan”.
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