‘Half-naked in Moscow, demanding their rights’

How Russian pro-war activists began targeting K-pop fans for their ‘pro-Western’ dances

In late spring, an unlikely subculture found itself the latest target of attacks by Russian pro-war activists: amateur K-pop dancers. Aggressive war supporters disrupted filming sessions of videos by women’s K-pop dance cover groups on Moscow’s Nikolskaya Street three times in May alone, including one incident in which the attackers broke the dancers’ camera equipment and one in which a man physically assaulted a dancer. Nikolskaya is the city’s most popular site for K-pop dances, but fans of the genre have become fearful about performing there. Alya Kachalova, a journalist for the independent outlet Novaya Vkladka, looked into the attacks. Meduza is publishing an abridged translation of her report.

‘You don’t belong here’

“I’ll rip your throat out!”

“Stop! Call the police!”

“You’re the U.S., you’re the West. You’re gender prostitutes! A heartless people! Our brothers are dying, children are dying…”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“You’re streaming all of this!”

“I’m not streaming anything. We’re recording a video.”

On May 21, women from a K-pop dance cover group called GeneSIS had just begun filming a dance to the song Queenscard by the K-pop group (G)I-dle when two men, both visibly older than 40, approached them from behind, yelling angrily.

“Various people often come up to us when we’re filming: some of them are just messing around, some of them lecture us about morality, and some might just shout insults at us. We thought the same thing would happen this time, too — that they would yell something and then leave,” one GeneSIS member said.

Instead, the attackers broke the dancers’ cameras, accusing them of “offending the feelings of believers.” Grabbing the camera operator’s neck, the men shouted about debauchery and the war before snatching the camera and crushing it, breaking its stabilizer. According to one Moscow news channel on Telegram, the equipment was worth about 200,000 rubles (about $2,200). The dancers immediately called the police. By the time they showed up, however, the attackers were gone.

GeneSIS uploaded a video of the incident on the Telegram channel where they usually post clips of their K-pop dances. The men turned out to be Dmitry Sobolev, an activist from the ultranationalist National Liberation Movement, and Ramzan Khalitov, a veteran of both the full-scale war in Ukraine, and the Chechen War.

According to members of the dance group, before the assault, the men were often seen “patrolling” Nikolskaya and other nearby streets. That same day, before the incident with GeneSIS, they had tried to drive one other K-pop dance cover group out of the area, berating their camera operator as well:

“This is unacceptable with the special military operation going on,” said one of the men. “There’s a war — you don’t belong here in these outfits.”

“Did Putin ban it?” the cameraman asked.

“People can’t just dance here, in the center of Moscow, half-naked. What are you, a pimp?” one of the attackers responded.

At that point, the dancers left the area. Ramzan Khalitov then spoke directly into the camera:

They came out half-naked in the center of Moscow, plus they’re demanding their rights… This is what the U.S., that Western LGBT movement, has twisted into their brains. Here’s a living example of the consequences of their propaganda, a study into their deceitful, hypocritical democracy.

‘We don’t see what this has to do with politics’

“We didn’t understand a single thing they said about the war, because we have nothing to do with that stuff. We don’t see any link between our favorite activity and politics, and we would never want there to be such a connection,” said one GeneSIS member.

According to the dancer, nobody intervened during the attack on Nikolskaya Street; people simply walked on by as the men continued yelling and destroying the group’s equipment. Video footage of the incident confirms her account.

The attack was filmed by other dance groups who were filming cover videos nearby at the same time. GeneSIS’s camera operator filed a property damage report with the authorities. The group is now awaiting a decision. On June 20, GeneSIS wrote on Telegram that they still had yet to receive a response, despite the fact that the maximum amount of time allowed by law had already passed.

The dancers’ social media post about the attack spread rapidly through the dance cover community and beyond. Sympathetic readers offered to donate money, and GeneSIS was ultimately able to replace the destroyed camera.

The group finally released a video of their dance to the song Queenscard on June 23, having filmed it in a half-empty shopping mall. One member told Novaya Vkladka that the group no longer feels comfortable filming dances in public, but that they’ll do their best to overcome their fear.

‘Satanists’

On the evening after the attack, the National Liberation Movement posted a video on YouTube titled “Insulting participants of the special military operation in central Moscow. Pro-American project to corrupt the youth.” As of this article’s publication in Russian, the clip had 29,000 views and more than 600 likes.

In the video, GeneSIS’s attackers, Dmitry Sobolev and Ramzan Khalitov, talk about how dances on streets that face churches are “offensive to the feelings of believers.” They refer to the K-pop routines as “American provocations” linked to the “events in Ukraine.”

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One user writing under the name Sofia Morozova commented: “Citizens, everyone who’s not indifferent, file statements with the police against these depraved young dancers! Demand their removal from the streets of Moscow! Protect our comrades! Support the National Liberation Movement!” The activists pinned the comment right under the video itself. Most of the other commenters, however, shamed the men for harassing the teenagers; some said they should seek medical treatment.

The same account also posted footage of a second clash between pro-war activists and dancers that occurred on the same day as the GeneSIS attack; this clip was titled “Half-naked girls don’t understand what they’re doing.” As of this article’s publication, it had garnered 39,000 views and more than 600 likes. Unlike in the case of the first video, many of the commenters expressed support for Sobolev and Khalitov, thanking the activists for putting a stop to the project and accusing the women of “ruining lives” and setting a bad example for the younger generation.

Sobolev and Khalitov did not respond to Novaya Vkladka’s requests for comment.

‘There’s no politics — just dancing’

A week later, on May 27, yet another confrontation occurred between K-pop dancers and a war supporter on Nikolskaya Street when an intoxicated man interrupted a dance shoot by a group called Daize. Shouting pro-war slogans, the man struck one of the dancers and demanded the women “get off the street.”

“The girls were stylishly dressed, they were dancing well, and they had drawn a crowd. People were filming them and applauding,” said the blogger freilson, who happened to be passing by during the incident and managed to film it. “As far as I remember, they managed to film two takes. After which I said, ‘Well, I hope nobody breaks the camera this time.’ And the very next second, a drunk man came out of the crowd looking unstable, to say the least.”

The man’s wife and child were with him. After moving in front of the camera, he cried out, “Thanks everyone! Thank you for the special military operation!” According to observers, his wife made no attempt to try to stop her husband. When one of the dancers pushed the man out of the way, he responded by striking her and threatening to hit another member of the group.

“He grabbed me by the neck and flung me, you could say. Fairly hard,” recounted the woman, who asked to go by the name Nara. “Was I expecting it? Of course not. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. I was shocked; I didn’t know how to react. I just froze. I also fell victim to his racist statements. The attacker said, word for word, ‘You, black plague, get out of here!’”

This time, observers immediately intervened. Some of them called the police, while others tried to apprehend the man to keep him from leaving the scene of the incident. He justified his behavior by claiming he had stopped some kind of illegal activity.

A video posted to Telegram by freilson shows the altercation between the observers and the couple. After one person tells the attacker to “be a man” and admit his mistake, his wife responds: “You were provoking him yourselves!” When the witnesses ask how they were provoking him and whether he physically abuses her and their child, the woman says he doesn’t abuse them but is unable to explain how he was provoked.

Nara later filed a report with the police, who said they would not open a criminal case. The man who attacked her also filed a report, in which he explained his view of the situation. According to him, he saw the dancers and decided to “congratulate them for the success of the special military operation,” but “received a strike from behind and responded by pushing away the person who attacked him.” A police officer wrote in the refusal that the incident was a matter of private prosecution that should be settled in court.

Despite the attack, Daize managed to finish filming their dance cover and uploaded it to YouTube the same day.

“I’m a warrior; I managed to stand on my own two feet. I decided that this incident shouldn’t spoil the thing we’d worked so long and so persistently for,” said Nara. She declined to share her political opinions, citing her position as a public figure, but did say that she is “for peace.”

“These people have something wrong with their heads. They think it’s necessary to find fault with everything and to constantly bring up the special military operation,” she told Novaya Vkladka.

Neither our dancing on Nikolskaya nor dance covers in general has anything to do with what’s happening in the world. We dance for ourselves, because it’s our hobby. There’s nothing political about it at all. It’s something people are passionate about, and some even make a living out of it. These dances are a way to distract yourself from everything that’s happening in the country and in the world as a whole.