Let there be spiders

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“Let’s go outside, I’ll fuck you there, damn it. Let's go outside!" - this is how a guy in sweatpants refers to teenagers in black and white T-shirts and plaid trousers. He is about 18 years old. You have to shout over the shoulder of the security guard of the shopping center - he does not let the "athlete" to the "black and white" filming what is happening on the phones.

The skirmish takes place at the food court of the Aviapark mall in Moscow: the companies sat at adjacent tables and did not share chairs. After that, the “athletes” began to insult the “black and white” people for their clothes and long hair and called them to the street to “sort it out”. The swearing continued until one of the sports guys started a fight. Less than a minute later, the participants were separated by a security guard and visitors to the shopping center, and the police who arrived at the scene had a conversation with the “athletes”. But an hour later they returned with reinforcements and began to pursue informals - young people with long hair and in black and white clothes who remained in the shopping center.

Videos from Aviapark went viral on Tiktok and VKontakte in just a couple of days, gaining hundreds of thousands of views. Inspired by the fact that they rebuffed the "gopniks", the "black and white" began to mount videos to epic music, write ironic posts about it and offer news to major telegram channels and the media. There, they did not delve into the irony and seriously published posts and notes about the new youth movement "PMC Redan". Thus was born the most amazing myth of recent months.

Dead inside

In 2020, the designer with the nickname Hikikomori Kai created his own brand of black and white clothing. In the brand's group on VKontakte, he publishes photos of customers and writes personal posts. Almost 80 thousand people have subscribed to the group - many of them are well described by the phrase "grandfather insider".

This is how some fans of video games and anime call themselves, who are united by a general, sincere or ironic, feeling of dissatisfaction with life. The name comes from the anime "Tokyo Ghoul", the main character of which Ken Kaneki, after transplanting the organs of a deceased person, himself becomes half dead ("ghoul") and learns to live with this sensation.

“These are not necessarily sad people. Many people just like the same memes, the same musicians, similar clothes, ”Hikikomori Kai explains to the Kholod correspondent. At the same time, the “ghouls” have neither organization nor rules: this is not a movement, but rather a cultural phenomenon, with a stretch - a subculture.

Hikikomori's clothes in his VKontakte group received hundreds of positive reviews. One of the lines of his brand - T-shirts, long sleeves and hoodies with a large spider on the back - Kai called "Redan". This is a reference to another anime, Hunter x Hunter, whose characters include members of the criminal organization "Genei Ryodan", also known as the "Phantom Troupe" or "Spider". Hikikomori Kai has been selling items from this collection for the third year already.

In April 2022, the popular rapper and streamer Shadowraze played a concert at the IZI club in Moscow. His friends and acquaintances came to support the musician, among whom was Hikikomori Kai. There he met other friends of Shadowraze - musicians, designers, artists. Some came from other cities. They turned out to have a lot in common: music, love for design, common jokes and memes.

After the concert, they continued to communicate - discussing music and new "drops" of clothes, playing video games and just talking after couples at universities or colleges. They also gathered at the concerts of Shadowraze and other musicians, during which they even went on stage - they helped sing songs, supported the performer and entertained the audience.

At general gatherings, acquaintances almost always gathered in clothes from the Redan series from Hikikomori Kai, and therefore soon many in the company began to call themselves spiders.

Let's go to fight in Redan

In the general get-together, local memes were born. For example, in September 2022, immediately after the start of mobilization in Russia, friends joked that now they would also be called up, and they would go to war in Redan clothes.

“Some of the spiders filed and created a public: like a war, and we are creating our own private military company Redan. It was just a stupid joke,” says Hikikomori Kai. In the group, where mostly memes, pictures and songs were posted, completely different people gathered - acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances. The administrators, which included friends from concerts, joked with each other, posted ironic pictures and songs, and also sold merchandise - for example, cowards with spiders .

According to the administrators, no more than 300 people subscribed to the Redan PMC public in five months. The group would have continued to remain a topic “for their own”, if not for a fight in a shopping center on Khodynka field.

The video, in which the informals unexpectedly successfully fight back against the "gopniks", was also published in the PMC Redan group. The entry was accompanied by a comment from one of the admins: "Death to bald fuckers in hell." The comment was soon deleted, but in a few hours several thousand people signed up for the group, and other users picked up the remark.

in the media and telegram channels The video was already cut off - and after such editing it was difficult to understand how and why the fight started. Because of the video sequence and captions, it seemed that aggressive teenagers were attacking people, and in the media retelling , the conflict over chairs and clothes turned into an action by a group “that beats up skinheads, “ofniks” (“near footballers”, football fans, provoking conflicts and fights), people with a non-Russian appearance and arranges fights in Moscow shopping centers. All teenagers in the shopping center were recorded as "members of the gang" - both informal people and their opponents. The public with memes "PMC Redan" suddenly acquired a new status - it turned into a community of a non-existent movement.

Return to the past life

The first "anti-Redan" communities appeared almost immediately after the first news about the "PMC". In numerous groups of several tens or hundreds of people, people, offended by slogans about "bald people in hell", began to publish memes about "spiders". At the same time, the story gained popularity in right-wing telegram channels to the Aviapark shopping center in Moscow began to come , and spider hunters . They crowded around teenagers with long bangs, a spider T-shirt, or simply in black and white clothes - many of the victims did not even consider themselves to be any "spiders". Informals were beaten , humiliated, forced to apologize on camera and had their hair cut by force.

After that, in the comments of Redan, reprisals against athletes began to be demanded even more actively. Some members of the public began to draw themed comics about the battle of "spiders" with "athletes". In informal groups, a video was published with the date February 23 - this battle was allegedly supposed to take place on this day. And in different cities of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, their own small groups began to appear with the name "PMC Redan". Friends involved in the original Redan claim they have nothing to do with it. In their opinion, Internet trolls, who themselves did not plan to go anywhere, were doing all this as a joke.

It is not clear how many people who associate themselves with "spiders" took the calls seriously and decided to come to the mall. However, on the evening of February 22, the security forces became interested in the fights of teenagers , and social networks still filled out evidence of violence . Most often - against informals, but there were exceptions. So, teenagers dressed as "spiders" stuck to a drunk man and recorded it on video.

On the same day, Tiktoker Zhenya, who was hit in the face during the first clash on February 18, recorded a video message in which he said that unknown persons followed him and his friends from the Detsky Mir food court to the metro. His girlfriend was hit and his friend was pepper sprayed in the face.

The teenagers managed to fight off their pursuers only with the help of the police on duty in the subway. In his appeal, Zhenya noted that he is not a member of any organization, he does not consider himself a “spider”, he has nothing to do with Redan and just wants to hang out with friends and wear clothes that he likes. At the end of the video, Zhenya called on everyone to stop the violence: “And now to the Redans and others. Why the fuck do you climb up to each other and start to kindle something? Stop all this bullshit. Go back to your past life."

On February 24, the police detained more than two hundred teenagers near the Aviapark shopping center. According to eyewitnesses, they grabbed everyone.

Ban everything you can

After mass detentions, personal threats and attention from the security forces, the administrators of the Redan public decided that they needed to influence what was happening. In groups and channels associated with the "spiders", began to appear posts calling for an end to the violence. Comments began to be moderated, and for the most aggressive - to ban. On February 22, the administrators publicly apologized , and after the arrests, they published a video with their version of what was happening and called for peace.

The abbreviation PMC was also removed from the name of the group. “Because it has become more than a local joke. People started taking the joke seriously,” explains a 19-year-old boy from Bryansk, who asks to be called Alice.

Alice tried for several days not to delve into the Redan story, but every second post in his feed was about teenage fights. “I read what they write in the media, and wrote to a friend that the “spiders” somehow did not behave very well,” he says. “Then I only had information from Telegram channels.”

Alice himself walks with long hair. In the past, he bought merchandise from Hikikomori Kai and went to the same concerts as the "spiders". So what happened was irritating him. Trying to figure it out, he got into a conversation with the company, from which the group with the Redan memes grew up.

“I came with a negative attitude, but I decided to help them. I liked that the guys wanted to solve the problem. They took [the] responsibility to explain everything, although they had nothing to do with it,” says Alice. For the past few days, he has actually been acting as the press secretary of the initiative group: he answers endless messages in the group, helps to contact journalists, mounts videos. And he also moderates the "tribunes" - open press conferences, at which the guys from the party, which once took the name "Redan", now explain for several hours a day that no PMC exists. Just like movement in general.

“People just played Dota together and went to concerts, and the admin of the group was selling panties with a spider on their ass. Well, what PMC? It’s just a walking meme,” Hikikomori Kai’s answers in the “tribune” sometimes betray his emotions.

Those involved in the non-existent Redan are worried about the check of the Investigative Committee: “Their goal now will not be to figure it out, but to punish the first ones who come across,” says one of the most active speakers, musician and clothing designer Sergey (name changed) .

Friends blame the media for everything, which distorted reality in pursuit of clicks: now they need to convey the truth to as many people as possible. The head of the Safe Internet League, Ekaterina Mizulina, also blames the media for everything. “No one has done more to popularize this informal subcultural and rather local phenomenon than the media and social networks. From a local trend in a few days, it became an all-Russian one, ” Mizulina wrote in her channel.

Another enemy of Mizulina is TsIPSO, a division of the Armed Forces of Ukraine that deals with cyberattacks and allegedly manipulates children and fuels the conflict. At the same time, teenagers in shopping centers have begun to be persecuted in recent days, including in Ukraine and Belarus: dozens of people were detained in Gomel in Kiev, about two hundred . Ukrainian media separately note that the “subculture” came from Russia, and police representatives express suspicions similar to Mizulina that with the help of Redan, Russia may try to “destabilize the situation in the country.”

18-year-old Dmitry from Zaporozhye, who is also a member of Redan conferences, told Kholod that there are no wall-to-wall fights in his city. Only "athletes" seek out people in unusual clothes and with long hair. Dmitry himself also got it because of the hairstyle. “Yes, it was an ordinary redneck, well, you can see it directly from them,” he sums up.

Informals have long been accustomed to such attacks. They have to explain themselves for years because of their appearance. Under the videos and posts about Redan, you can often find comments with a similar thought: “Why did they themselves go there in such clothes? Didn't they know what was happening now? They provoked them themselves, it turns out.”

***

“But this is absurd,” one of the conference participants is surprised, having learned where the “PMC Redan” came from (and that it actually did not exist).

— Absolute. A very stupid story,” one of the speakers replies.

The conference ends almost three hours later. Most of the listeners are disconnected, but a few members remain on the server: they are going to watch anime together.