“If I was white, I might even use it, too,” he said, shrugging. Players of all races, he added, simply accept that a large segment of ultras will use racism as part of their chants; when Ntirubuza was 18, he recalled, he played with Spartak Moscow’s youth team and even heard monkey noises from fans of his club. “My teammates were like, ‘Wow, now you’re a star,’ ” he said.

Bananas — thrown on the field or simply held out by fans in the stands — and monkey noises are common forms of racist taunting in Russia and elsewhere in Europe. They are also one of the schism points in the debate about racism in Russia, as outsiders are almost universally offended by any such incident while Russian officials often play them down.

Yevgeny Selemenev, a longtime fan of Spartak Moscow and a former member of one of the club’s most famed groups of ultras, said many of the most racist aspects of ultras’ behavior had faded in recent years. There are still online shops where ultras can buy Nazi-branded clothing, he said, but members have taken steps to self-police in recent years and now limit plainly racist or fascist banners.

Monkey chants, he added, are a lingering aspect of what he called behavior from an “older time,” and he contended that the chants often came from younger fans who were simply repeating what they had heard from their fathers or uncles.

“All fans have different levels of cultural education,” Mr. Selemenev said. “I did monkey chants when I was 15 or 20, and the average age of fans in present Russian stadiums is about that age, and they do what they remember. They do it because it was done before and because they don’t know any better.”

He added, “I think a lot of the people who do monkey chants during the game go to try and take photographs with the players they shouted at after the game.”

Mr. Tolkachev, the antiracism official, said that in his opinion, “monkey chants are difficult to classify, as it is something that is not spelled out anywhere,” but he allowed that the Russian government was “inclined to consider it as a demonstration of racism.” Separately, he disputed Fare’s inclusion of the imperial Russian flag on its list of discriminatory symbols, saying that flag was “part of our country’s history.”