Lion? Lion, brutalize

How followers of Tesak drive young people for the sake of rollers in social networks

On the evening of June 14, participants in the Leo Again project, opposing drinking and smoking in public places, came to the pit on Khokhlovskaya Square. Their raids, reminiscent of police, are almost always accompanied by conflicts and mass fights using peppers. This time, OMON fighters connected to the activists, who, at the direction of the project leader, Mikhail Lazutin, began indiscriminately and harshly detain vacationers - even those who simply came up to photograph. The correspondent of Novayaya tells why the activity of the Leo Against is illegal.

"Leo" against the "hill"

A crowd of short -haired, pumped up guys - almost all as one in sports T -shirts, shorts, Adidas sneakers and with wardrobes on the belt - wraps in a large Spasoglinishchevsky lane and goes to the hill park with a hard step. A handful of teenage girls with multi-colored hair, heading for McDonald's, stops with a screech, opens Instagram and begins to remove the story.

- Why are we following them? - one of them asks perplexedly.

- Because it's fun!

The guys stop in front of the park, in a businesslike examination of the terrain. The leader of the group Mikhail Lazutin, a young man with a thick beard, dressed in a white shirt, enters the first - in seconds with shouts “Leo arrived!” Almost half of the vacationers flows to him.

Athletes with cameras and voice recorders go to three guys sitting with beer on a bench, and ask them to throw alcohol.

Young people implicitly fulfill the requirement, after which the lion, squeezing through the crowd of croaking teenagers who are trying to make a selfie, confidently goes to the next “victims”.

- Hooray! The gathering of the fans "Leo against" began! - the girl shouts cheerfully.

“The circus has begun,” the guy answers her grimly.

Indeed, the arrival of the Leo Against project resembled a more circus performance on which a heated beast rushes about the arena than the struggle with alcohol and smoking in public places. Namely, this, according to the project participants, they are engaged.

Behind the crowd, which has grown up to about 50 people, three police officers go a little to the side. Passing by a bench, on which a woman with a jar of beer sits quietly with two friends, the youngest of the police in a whisper asks her to “get rid” of alcohol.

A fair -haired guy catches up with the police and asks them to deal with the young people who came, who had a week earlier provoked a fight using pepper cans.

- Do you want us to accept you too? - the policeman muttered, turning away from the guy.

“Lazutin arranged a stir, and then he simply sprayed with pepper into the crowd. I also got pepper. The crowd began to rage, negative, beat bottles, screaming various unpleasant things. And they turned on the cameras to show that we are supposedly to blame, ”Student Michael shares with me. - I had a fight with one of his “guards”. They surrounded, such cabinets, went on us, pushing us. I pushed in response. He grabbed me by the scruff. Then the brawl began. ”

At this time, “Lions” surround two minor guys. In the backpack, one of them find a bottle of Blazer. And the whole crowd under the hooting and screams “Leo -* [fool]” go to Avtozaka.

In two hours of raids, police officers under the supervision of athletes are detained by several more teenagers who were caught by drinking, after which the project participants dissolve. Teenagers diverge from their companies into different corners of the park, a break dance on the upper platform, someone lies on the lawn and looks at the sky-there is a beer hidden during the raid.

"Leo" against the pit

A pit is a public space on Khokhlovskaya Square, which appeared two years ago on the site of a pit dug for underground parking. It is an amphitheater, Muscovites come to the steps of which in good weather, taking alcohol and pizza from a neighboring cafe.

“A pit is a collective image of youth, who strives for community, for a cheerful joint pastime. The fact that people drink there does not affect criminogenicity. The agenda of the pit is positive - this is a place for relaxation, which does not touch even the police, ”one of the visitors to the pit tells me.

On May 31, the tranquility of the vacationers was also violated by the participants of the Leo Against, who arranged the next Friday raid “against alcoholics and drug addicts”, who, in their opinion, come to the pit.

The persistent requirements of athletes to remove alcohol and extinguish the cigarettes were met by resistance from several Muscovites. As a result, a brawl began, ending with a real fight, throwing bottles and sprayed throughout the area with a pepper.

According to Lazutin, the first to began visitors to the pit. In the video published on the project’s YouTube channel, in particular, there are fragments where a man throws bottles into the crowd. At the same time, there are other personnel on which the guy goes in the center of the square on the video, a “lion against” participant runs to him and jumps from the spray can directly in the face.

- The video recorded only two out of ten people who threw bottles. If they want to bring us to justice that they sprayed someone with a pepper can, this person can go and write a statement, Lazutin admits.

The police, who arrived in the pit on the scene that day, took several people to the autozak for drinking in the wrong place. Among the detainees there was not one of the participants of the “lion against” provoking the riots.

A week later, the raid repeated, but did without mass fights and pepper, since, like in the Park Gorka, he took place under the supervision of the police. In addition, people appeared in the pit, calling themselves “boys for”. They began to distribute beer and information leaflets to vacationers for free on the illegality of the Leo Against.

“The main task of the show is to popularize basic knowledge in the field of law,” says Osminin, initiator of the “boys for” Nikita. “If people know that Misha does not have the right to select their property, and everyone will act according to the instructions, sooner or later he will have to leave the pit, because the videos where people refuse to give bottles and are not conducted on provocations, you won’t lift the dough.”

The next morning after the raid, a member of the Moscow City Duma Commission on Health and Public Health Olga Sharapova instructed to verify the activities of Leo Again: “Who gave them the right to beat and apply pepper cans in relation to the inhabitants of our city? Yes, in Moscow it is impossible to smoke and drink alcoholic beverages in public places, but we have police officers who must identify such offenders and monitor compliance with the law. ”

The leader of the project rejected the accusations of beating, and the use of physical force explained as follows: “Good can be with fists if it protects someone. In this case, we protect ourselves. ”

"Leo" against pedophiles

23-year-old Mikhail Lazutin was born in the Moscow region. By education - a specialist in the protection of information technology. He is a believer, he has a young wife and a little son named Leo.

Lazutin began to engage in "social activities" in 2013. His project “Leo against pedophiles” copied the activities of the creator of the “Occupy-Pedophilay” movement of the nationalist Maxim Martsinkevich (Tesak). Lazutin caught pedophiles on live bait, hardly interrogated them at a meeting, humiliated them, painted his face with a marker, and at the end of the video showed the Tesak’s corporate sign - a large bent finger.

According to Lazutin, he was not engaged in beating (“We have a maximum of personnel when they gave a slap in the face”), and on the video where he douses the victim with urine, orange juice was allegedly used. Lazutin claims to be stupid and that he was ashamed of his actions. “I had to shoot content, make a video that we caught him, that we would humiliate him for all these things that he wants to do,” he explains in a conversation with the New Gazeta.

In 2014, Lazutin suspected of the theft of money and a cell phone from a “caught” man, but the court justified him without finding grounds for detention.

“All relatives, mom, relatives almost cried, said that all this is horror. It is how we behave, how we do, ”says the young man. “Gradually, the brains began to go in order, we corrected this activity, but precisely because it is difficult to put them in prison.”

"Leo" on the budget

Reducing the name of his project to the laconic “Leo Against”, Lazutin switched to the fight against alcohol and cigarettes. For some time, young people collaborated with the Stopham movement (it opposed, as they affirmed against violations by drivers of parking and road rules), but soon ceased due to disagreements related to presidential grants.

In 2014, Lev v. Received 5.2 million rubles from budget funds, in 2015 - 7 million rubles.

Lazutin himself denies that the project received grants: “Of course, we were helping, perhaps from these grants, as I understand now. But it is basically unknown where this money went. The maximum we received about 300 thousand rubles for all the time. I turned to Putin's person to understand this situation. There was no answer. ”

More than 1.7 million people have been signed on the Leo Against YouTube channel. Channel monetization is the only source of Lazutin’s earnings, according to him. Rollers, staining with catching headings such as “mass battle on the pit”, “soda and homorrah”, “crowds of alkozobi in Moscow”, on average about 700 thousand views are gaining, sometimes more. For this, Lazutin was reproached with the famous YouTube blogger Nikolai Sobolev: “You constantly provoke people, all the time you insert clicks into the name. Your emphasis is constantly on fights. ”

However, Lazutin does not hide what works first of all on the Internet audience, and the personal effect on alcohol drinking alcohol for him is a secondary thing: “We do this (raids.-Ed.) Not so that this particular person stops drinking. We do this, I constantly repeat in the videos, as an example for young people, children, people, no matter what age. ”

Lazutin believes that his work to combat alcohol is very effective. “About 10–20 thousand children and youth representatives who watch the Leo Againrs did not even begin to drink alcohol.” (How Lazutin defined this is difficult to say.) The leader of the project calls them "saved souls who did not go to marketers who tried to prostrate them."

Experts surveyed by the “new”, on the contrary, believe that the activity of the “Leo Against” does not affect the alcoholism in Russia, and regard their actions as a banal PR. “They made a completely incorrect conclusion that we have alcoholism in our country and that it is necessary to deal with it by force,” says Mikhail Smirnov, editor -in -chief of the alcohol.ru portal. -Firstly, for more than a hundred years, the level of alcohol consumption in Russia is lower than in European countries. Secondly, roughly speaking, we have fewer alcoholics than drug addicts. Thirdly, you see, strength methods are stupidity. ”

Help: Vigilants
Vigilants are people who are fighting public “vice”, often using forceful methods by analogy with the police. But their functions can only be called police officers conditionally, since the Vigilants are not guided by the law, but by their own understanding of justice and the desire to punish the “violator”.

The vigilants include Neo -Nazi Tesak, from whom Mikhail Lazutin took an example. In addition to the Occupy-Pedophilay project, Tesak was the creator of the Restruk movement, which was also allegedly engaged in the fight against pedophiles. Its participants were tried for extortion, blackmail, robberies and harm to health. Tesac himself is serving a 10-year term on charges of arousing hatred and hooliganism.

Among the vigilants are non -profit organizations associated with the “ours” that had rested in Bose. For example, the same “Stopham” or “Piggy against”, who fought with poor quality service in station wagons and supermarkets. Both projects (now they do not exist) received solid presidential grants to support their activities.

"Leo" against the law

- Why did you take on the powers of the police?

- And what exactly?

- Eliminate offenses.

- Any citizen is obliged to eliminate offenses.

- Suppose, but as a result, much more serious problems, fights are obtained ...

“But this happens without us.” They ( drunk . - Ed. ) And they attack police officers, and just on people. A large percentage of crimes is intoxicated. A police officer can detain and draw up a protocol. We do not do this.

According to Lazutin, the Federal Law “On the Participation of Citizens in the Protection of Public Order” allows them to inform the internal affairs bodies about threats to public order as representatives of the civil society, to demand from citizens to terminate illegal acts and take measures to protect the scene.

Participants of the “Leo Against” insist - their actions are absolutely legal, but this is not so. The law really says that citizens have the right to inform about crimes and offenses (Article 8). However, only law enforcement officers, as well as the emergency officers of the police and people's warriors, have such a right to demand and take measures in their competence. Activists of the Leo Again are neither the first, nor second, nor third.

“In modern society, the activity of citizens can be regulated only from the point of view of what is permissible and what is not,” Asmik Novikov, the sociologist of the Public Verdict of the Public Verdict, explains. - “Leo against” crosses the boundaries, because he uses the method of violence and forces people to fulfill their requirements. Citizens in relation to other citizens do not have a coercion function. The police have it. ”

The actions of the Lion Against members can be regarded as arbitrariness, however, by law enforcement agencies there is no adequate and proper reaction to them.

“The question arises, what is it connected with? With some agreements, or, perhaps, the police are not up to them, or the police do not understand what is the difference between activists and vigilants, ”Novikova suggests.

Last weekend on Khokhlovskaya Square it was still crowded. The only thing that gave out the alerts of vacationers after the above events was a small white sign at the entrance to the hole, which read:

“The lion is no longer opposed - he sits and peacefully drinks beer on the pit. The police are no longer needed - there are no criminals. Russia and the United States have reconciled. Freedom of speech everywhere. The country is legalize - everyone goes on a smile. Salaries have grown. The army is no longer needed. Everyone is happy. And then I woke up. "

After a couple of hours, the plate also disappeared.

The material was prepared with the participation of Daria Kozlova, especially for the "new".

Public verdict
The Human Rights Fund "Public Verdict" is conducted by a specialized study on vigilants in Russia. If you consider yourself affected by vigilants, you can contact the fund for legal help.