Maria Butina greeted her guests with a gun in her holster and her hands on her hips. A pair of professional shooting earmuffs hung from her neck; a pair of yellow goggles pushed up her dyed-red hair like casually forgotten sunglasses.



“Welcome!” she said and explained to the gathered what they were about to do: shoot stuff. “I hope tonight will be an unforgettable night, and that you’ll come away with a feeling that you held something so powerful, so incredible, in your hands. So enjoy!” She added, “Oh! And there will be adrenaline.”

Butina, who was wearing an outdoors­man’s puffy vest over a striped shirt and jeans, scanned the four middle-aged men standing in front of her, gripping black Russian-made Viking pistols. We were in a shooting gallery in a basement under a shabby, mafia-ridden hotel complex built for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. On the way in, as we passed a sweating, balloon-bellied guard who had stripped to the waist, Butina told me the place had once been a KGB shooting range. It was scattered with white metal targets and tires clawed apart by bullets. Everything smelled vaguely of kitty litter.

At the age of 23, Butina is often the youngest person in the room at events like these and usually the only woman. I asked how it felt to be surrounded by all those armed men. “A woman can defend herself if she knows how to use weapons, and that’s all great, but it’s still nice to be protected by a man,” she told me in her tart, matter-of-fact way. “It feels great.”

It must feel especially nice because she is their leader. About a year ago, Butina founded an organization called Right to Bear Arms, in the process almost single-handedly inventing Russia’s gun-rights movement. The guys at the shooting gallery were her dues-paying members, all of whom believe the legal code should be amended to allow Russians to carry concealed handguns.