The day that Denis Nikitin, a Russian neo-Nazi who claims he once kept a framed photograph of Joseph Goebbels in his bedroom, took part in his first street fight, his mother made him a packed lunch. During the past 12 years, the Moscow-based MMA fighter has become a rising star of the far right, after brawling his way up through the ranks of one of Russia’s top hooligan firms. But on that day, Nikitin says, he was like a schoolboy on his first field trip; his mother, who thought her 22-year-old son was going to watch a football match, filled his rucksack with food and warm clothes.

Nikitin took a six-hour bus ride to the match, but he had not bought a ticket. (His fellow hooligans joke that, in the past decade, he has been inside a football stadium fewer than five times.) Since his family had moved from Moscow to Germany a few years earlier, his interests had narrowed to far-right politics and violence. Nikitin’s local “team” was visiting Hamburg – a city whose left-wing supporters were a favourite target of the far-right Cologne hooligans. Nikitin’s hobbies just happened to intersect at football.

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At around midnight, as two buses carrying Cologne’s supporters approached Hamburg, someone shouted: “They’re here.” Through the window, Nikitin saw around 30 Hamburg hooligans in front of the vehicle. It seemed odd – the 90-odd Cologne hooligans on the buses greatly outnumbered the men outside. It would not be a fair fight. Nikitin disembarked, ran to a nearby bush, and set his rucksack beneath the branches. Then he looked up. On the guardrail of an overlooking footbridge he saw a line of silhouettes – at least 70 men, to add to the 30 in front of the coaches. An ambush, then.

Nikitin remembers running toward the Hamburg hooligans. He picked out his first target and, from behind, landed a flying punch. As the man twisted in shock, Nikitin realised he had struck one of his own side. “Oh, fuck,” he shouted, “sorry, sorry, sorry, man.” The fight was chaotic; in the dark it was difficult to pick out team colours, badges or scarves. With the panic of a person who wants to immediately put right a wrong after it is made, Nikitin jumped on another silhouette and began striking him in the head. This, too, was a Cologne supporter.

Blushing under his balaclava, Nikitin waited for some kind of sign. Moments later it came. One of the Hamburg hooligans came running at him, screaming abuse. Nikitin, wearing gloves lined with metal pellets, landed a sucker punch on the screamer. As the man fell to the ground, Nikitin readied a follow-up blow. Before it connected, a rival supporter pulled off Nikitin’s balaclava, and began pummelling his face. Nikitin broke free and started running for the buses, over ground scattered with fallen phones and wallets. Back at the road, only one vehicle remained; the other driver had fled.

As the remaining bus pulled away, Nikitin looked at the men around him, their faces streaked with browning blood, and felt a surge of euphoria. It had not gone unnoticed that he was one of the last men to get back on board. In his leaders’ nodding approval, Nikitin experienced the first flush, not just of belonging, but of something close to a calling. “The media pretends that people like me will end up alone in prison, or as an alcoholic, or depressed,” he told me last year. “This is considered your inevitable fate as a Nazi football hooligan. It is a lie.”

In the summer of 2016, the Russian football hooligan, previously a provincial sort of bogeyman, padded on to the international stage at the European Championship in France. On 10 June, an estimated 150 Russians descended on Marseille’s Old Port. They moved in orderly phalanxes, greeting any England supporters they ran into with extravagant violence. One England fan had his Achilles tendons sliced. Two English men were left in a coma, one of whom was left paralysed on the left-hand side of his body (his alleged assailant, wanted for attempted murder, was arrested in Germany in February). Another man reportedly travelled home on the Eurostar with glass from a shattered bottle still lodged in his neck.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russian supporters attack England fans after a European Championship match in Marseille, 2016. Photograph: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP

“It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Ch Supt Steve Neill, of Northumbria police, one of several officers deployed from England to aid French police that day, told Sky News. “The Russians came with serious intent to carry out barbaric violence. They were highly organised, very effective. We saw football hooliganism on a different level.” One Russian hooligan who took part in the fighting later told a French news agency: “The English always say they are the main football hooligans; we went to show that the English are girls.”

Some Russian politicians claimed their country had been disproportionately singled out by the media and authorities (two English fans were jailed for their part in the violence). The deputy prime minister, Vitaly Mutko, then Russia’s sports minister, went so far as to call it a “set-up”. Other Russian public figures praised the hooligans for promoting a powerful, unassailable vision of their country to the world. “I don’t see anything wrong with the fans fighting,” tweeted Igor Lebedev, deputy chairman of the Russian parliament. “Quite the opposite: well done lads, keep it up!”

At first, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, smirkingly questioned how 200 Russian supporters could see off “a few thousand Englishmen”. But the Kremlin was also aware that these same men could embarrass the nation if mass violence erupts at the 2018 World Cup, a tournament Russia will host for the first time – and the government belatedly tried to distance itself from the hooligans. After a meeting with the leaders of his own security agencies, Putin publicly stressed “the need to learn from the French experience”. Russian police gained new powers that class even minor offences, such as setting off fireworks at football games, as acts of terrorism.

According to Russian newspaper reports, in December 2016, more than 100 police officers and members of the FSB, Russia’s security service, raided hooligans’ homes. Arrests duly followed, including that of Alexei Yerunov, the leader of the FC Lokomotiv firm Vikings, who had already spent several months in a French prison before returning to Russia. In all, more than 200 hooligans have been issued with court orders banning them from football matches till the end of the World Cup.

Hooliganism came relatively late to Russian football, emerging in the early 1990s as a self-conscious copy of the decades-old English example – with its vicious firms, favoured clothing labels and racist chants. In a country emerging from the Soviet gloom in search of a new, assertive identity, hooliganism seemed to offer young men like Nikitin a shot of steadying nationalism, as well as a hypermasculine community that provided status and belonging. Hooliganism also presented something of a career path through the ruins of the post-Soviet economy. Politicians, especially on the far right, saw Moscow’s football thugs as a possibly forceful group of disenfranchised voters – and began to court these young men, laying on free transport to away games, paying members to work as bodyguards or street muscle, and even offering the occasional well-paid role as a party official.

In time, imitation of the English developed into a new culture of thuggery. In Among the Thugs, the defining book on England’s hooliganism, published in 1990, the writer Bill Buford characterised the football yob as the “fatty manifestation of gallons and gallons of lager and incalculable quantities of bacon-flavoured crisps”. The Russians, by contrast, set down their beers and began training in earnest, not only at the gym, but also in covert fights staged in local forests, where young hooligans from rival teams would scrap in the dawn mist.

It was at one of these gatherings, after an invitation from a fellow gym-goer, that Nikitin met his first hooligans, and began to learn the art of the mob brawl, first through observation, then participation. Like many of his peers, as Nikitin grew in confidence, he began to compete in and even organise MMA tournaments. Collectively, the Russian hooligans were becoming more professional. “At some point, Russian hooliganism shifted away from amateurism,” he told me when we met last autumn. In turn, fights became more deadly: in November 2017 a 30-year-old man died after his neck was broken during a clash between hooligans affiliated to teams Sibir Novosibirsk and Yenisey Krasnoyarsk.

It was this well-trained force that debuted with such brutality on the international stage in Marseilles. And as the World Cup draws closer, pressure on Russian hooligans has intensified further. The Kremlin panicked after the broadcast of a BBC documentary last year called Russia’s Hooligan Army – in which the then-leader of the Spartak firm, Gladiators, Vasily “The Killer” Stepanov, was secretly filmed saying that the Moscow hooligans were Putin’s foot soldiers. Some of the men interviewed for the programme said it contained factual errors (Nikitin was assigned to the wrong firm, for instance, and Stepanov claims his views were misrepresented) – but in Russia, as one senior hooligan told me, it was “like a bomb had gone off”.

Russian police issued a call for anyone featured on the documentary to report to local stations in order to sign forms stating that they were coerced by the BBC to lie on camera. (At a match the following month, Spartak fans unfurled a panoramic banner that mimicked the BBC logo, alongside the words “Blah Blah Channel”.) Last year, the Kremlin assigned an FSB agent to each of the 11 clubs in Moscow, where they work with a fan liaison officer – usually a senior hooligan from each firm – in an attempt to control their members.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spartak Moscow fans with an anti-BBC banner during a game against Lokomotiv Moscow, 2017. Photograph: Tass/PA

For hooligans who have for years had the backing of the authorities, both tacit and explicit, this reversal feels like a betrayal. “For 10 years we were supported by the government,” said Alexander Shprygin, who took part in hooligan fights starting in 1994, and who chartered a plane and flew a cadre of Russian hooligans to Marseille in 2016. “After France, the government stopped supporting us.”

But the obsessive focus on violence at the World Cup – not least from UK tabloids – has overshadowed the real significance of Russian hooliganism. For two decades, Russia’s firms have been a machine for recruiting and radicalising young men to the far right, which has seeded racist ideology at the centre of the country’s football culture. They may have been forced underground, but Russia’s powerful firms are not likely to vanish – and their influence will take decades to erase. “After the summer,” Shprygin told me, “everybody will forget about us.”

Shprygin was turned away from his first football match at the age of nine. He had come to watch his team, FC Dynamo, play at the Central Dynamo Stadium in Moscow, but unaccompanied children were denied entry. So the next week, he convinced an older man outside the gates to pose as his father. Once inside, he recalled, Shprygin was immediately attracted to the loudest and most fanatical supporters – the ultras – and began to regularly sit among them.

Young, isolated and with few career prospects, Shprygin was the ideal hooligan recruit. In August 1993, when he was 14, one of the older men approached him with news of a plan to found one of Russia’s first firms: Blue White Dynamite. As its membership grew, BWD’s members began to seek out and attack rival ultras. At first, these clashes, usually staged in Moscow’s vaulted subway stations, were modest. But when fans of Moscow’s best-known club, Spartak, formed a rival firm, the violence escalated in both severity and scope; skirmishes sometimes involved 500 participants. “By 1995, every Moscow football club had a firm,” recalled Shprygin. “The fights became much larger.”

As the numbers swelled, smaller firms broke off from the larger groups, creating a network of distinct, yet interlinked gangs. Today, the largest of the Russian capital’s 11 football clubs, Spartak Moscow, has three major firms – Union, Shkola and Gladiators – each with an associated youth division. Beyond these, a constellation of smaller splinter groups operate under the Spartak umbrella. One senior hooligan estimates that there are as many as 500 active members of Spartak-affiliated firms. By collaborating with one another as the need arises, Spartak’s firms are able to raise a small army under their team’s banner.

This collective power was first demonstrated in 1999, when Spartak played an away game against Saturn Ramenskoye. When Spartak conceded its first goal in the 23rd minute, violence began to bubble in the stands: jostling grew into a few fistfights and, eventually, a full-scale riot. For the first time in Russian football history, the match was stopped due to fighting in the stands. Footage of the event shows some police beating Spartak fans in the head with batons, while others struggle to pull their colleagues away.

In August 1998, Shprygin, who was by then editor of Dynamo’s fan magazine, claims he received a message on his pager asking him to call a mysterious number. It was a meeting request from a prominent rightwing opposition politician. The next day Shprygin claims he visited the State Duma, the lower house of the federal assembly of Russia. In the lobby, he saw one of the hooligan leaders from Spartak Moscow. The pair were ushered into the politician’s office and offered jobs as his assistants.

Shprygin’s role was to act as a liaison between the politician and the firm, who would routinely provide security for his party. “We were never fists of the party, per se,” Shprygin explained, when we met in a football-themed pub in Moscow. But, he claims, they would provide the politician with security, and in return, his party would pay for buses and trains to take the hooligans to away fixtures. No money changed hands, but Shprygin says the expectation was clear: the fans would thereafter vote for the party in elections, and fight when called upon.

The arrangement proved useful for Shprygin’s career. In 2007, at the behest of the FSB, he says, he founded a group called the Union of Russian Fans. Despite his rising fortunes in politics at the time (Shprygin has been photographed with Putin on at least three separate occasions, before his alleged involvement in the Marseille violence led to his arrest) Shprygin continued to be actively involved in street violence. Shortly after founding the union, Shprygin and other members of his firm were invited by a far-right group of skinheads to meet up in a local park. The plan, it was explained, was to attack hip-hop concertgoers as they left a venue. “Rap is black music,” Shprygin told me, by way of explanation. “So we went to the park and we waited.” That night he took part in his first street violence aimed at people outside of football.

Shprygin’s progression is common. “Many ultras are sympathetic to radical nationalists and some even take part in their activities,” said Mikhail Akhmetiev, a professor at Sova, a Moscow-based thinktank that studies nationalism and racism in Russia. “The former head of Spartak’s Fratria fan community, Ivan ‘Combat’ Katanaev, and the head of the Gladiators firm Vasily ‘The Killer’” Stepanov are involved in ultra-conservative activities,” he said. In recent years there has been a marked increase in so-called “white wagon” attacks, where groups of racists wearing surgical masks and balaclavas board trains and attack anyone of non-Slavic descent. A 2014 report from Sova reports that white wagon operations are committed “at least partly by football supporters”, and are “more likely to occur on match days”. For young men who, like Shprygin, become entranced by the older fans at matches, the route to radicalisation is quick and clear, and there has been no shortage of political entities eager to co-opt and leverage these fans.

For Nikitin, hooliganism is inextricable from far-right activism. After he returned to Russia in the 2000s, radicalised by his time fighting in German hooligan circles, he became increasingly involved in violence against immigrants. He split his time between fighting hooligans and attacking minorities in the streets. When, during one of our meetings in Moscow last year, I asked Nikitin whether there was a difference between hooligan violence and racist violence, he told me to switch off my recorder. “If we kill one immigrant every day, that’s 365 immigrants in a year,” he said, after agreeing that I could record again. “But tens of thousands more will come anyway. I realised we were fighting the consequence, but not the underlying reason. So now we fight for minds, not on the street, but on social media.”

Football, with its tribal communities and martial symbolism, has long been a battleground for minds. A draft Home Office paper on English football hooliganism, published in October 2000, described the atmosphere at England’s international fixtures as like “watching a football match during a Nuremberg rally” – a hostile climate that was decades in the making. In 1981, for example, the National Front published a magazine about music and sport that included a section titled the League of Louts, in which football hooligans were invited to compete to have their club labelled the most racist in Britain. Readers were encouraged to hurl bananas on to the pitch whenever a black player was fielded. As Derek Holland, an organiser for the far-right group, once put it, the aim of targeting football fans was to “win the hearts and minds of young people”.

“The old National Front thing was that you didn’t count England goals that were scored by black players,” explains Mark Perryman, a British academic and author of Hooligan Wars. “In the 70s there was a generalised racism and xenophobia which was a reflection of the popularity of the National Front, which had a strong base in certain clubs.” Some football hooligans became members of neo-Nazi organisations at the time, such as Combat 18, while, in the early 1990s, members of the Headhunters, one of Chelsea’s best-known firms, would provide muscle for fascist events. It was only following sustained anti-fascist campaigns at English clubs that racist violence around football began to subside.

In Russia, hooligan racism did not generally face this kind of organised ideological opposition. “There were far more of them than there were of us,” says Maxim Solopov, a journalist who took part in anti-fascist clashes with Russian hooligans between 2006 and 2010. Without the intervention of police, anti-fascists like Solopov took the fight to the streets, placing informants in each of the different fan groups. “They would tell us where their groups were going to appear,” he said. “The first rule was to engage first. We were always trying to instigate the fights, to give us an advantage.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maxim Solopov. Photograph: Pete Kiehart

The first street fight Solopov attended, in autumn 2006, took place in central Moscow, outside the offices of the ministry for internal affairs. “We had girls acting as lookouts,” he recalled. “When the hooligans arrived, a row of antifa approached them with gas pistols.” Solopov, who was standing in the second line, broke a bottle over the head of a neo-Nazi. “Time collapsed,” he told me. “Ten seconds felt like for ever. I could see everything that was happening, every tiny detail.” The far-right hooligans, he says, were wielding knives. “The hooligans were attacking people not merely to scare, but to kill,” he said.

Without any concerted challenge from clubs, rightwing extremism in Russian football has endured. Nazi imagery remains rife on the terraces, according to a 2017 report from Fare, a network of groups set up to combat discrimination in and around the game: “Football fans use other neo-Nazi symbols such as the Celtic cross, SS Totenkopf and the symbols of rightwing Slavic neopaganism.” Sightings of historical Nazi slogans, such as “My honour is loyalty” – the motto of the SS – and “Jedem das Seine” (“To each what he deserves”, a German proverb written above the gates of the Buchenwald concentration camp) are also common.

The same report notes that, during the 2015-16 season, xenophobic attacks at matches “increased significantly”. In May 2017, the head of the Russian Football Union disciplinary committee, Artur Grigoryants, claimed there had been “no racist manifestations” during the 2016-17 season – but the authors of the Fare report clarified that “in fact he meant that there were no monkey chants”. (If true, even that moratorium was short-lived: last month there were monkey chants directed toward black French players at a friendly match in St Petersburg.)

To change the international perception of Russian football fans, the Kremlin has hired PR agencies that have planted so-called gentle fans who distribute sweets, warm tea and blankets at matches and post cheery selfies on Instagram. Despite these public displays, some believe that the government continues to support hooligans in private. “It’s true that the government is trying to clean up the image of football ahead of the World Cup,” says Solopov. “But they are far more concerned that something like the Ukrainian revolution might happen here, and that, if it does, the rightwing hooligans will take to the streets against the authorities. So in private, they still support violent fan groups. I believe that political power remains in the hands of the rightwing fans.”

The appointment of a so-called fan liaison officer in every club shows that the Kremlin believes it can control the hooligans. “The clubs appoint real hooligan leaders hoping they can keep the hooligans under control at important matches,” says Pavel Klymenko, who works for Fare. It is not clear the extent to which the system is effective, or even how it works.

It may be difficult for the state to control what it earlier turned a blind eye toward. “The state believed that [hooligan groups] were an organised force that could be used to maintain order,” said Yuri Abrashov, a former police colonel who is now the executive director of Event Safety, a government body that organises stewarding at sporting events. “But these groups made promises that were not being fulfilled.”

Despite the FSB monitoring, the bans and other efforts to crack down on far-right hooligan activity, there is still a legitimate risk of violence at the World Cup. “There might not be any pre-planned organised attacks because the hooligans are afraid of the security services,” says Klymenko. “But the way their structures work means it is not that easy to control everyone.”

On a drenched October afternoon, 40 minutes outside the centre of Moscow, near the dour Rostokino train station, I accompanied Nikitin along the railway tracks and down a slicked incline, into the woods, to a popular location for hooligan forest fights. Though bareknuckle fistfights were outlawed by the Bolsheviks in 1917, in recent years hooligans have resurrected the nationalistic tradition of Russian forest fighting, known as Stenka na Stenku. The practice, which provides a relatively low-risk entry point for young fighters to join the hooligan ecosystem, has spread throughout Europe, and forest fights are now part of hooligan culture from Ukraine to Switzerland. “You sometimes hear of fatalities,” says Nikitin. “But I don’t believe anyone has died. That said, I recently had to help a guy whose lung had been punctured.”

When Nikitin first heard about forest fights, he had no interest in football or violence (he was, he admits, “into breakdancing”). “It seemed so stupid,” he says. “Surely it’s just idiots who have nothing better to do.” Then, when he was 23, a friend at his local gym invited Nikitin to a forest fight. “He seemed like a normal guy, so I become interested. I started asking him questions and he told me that it’s the best hobby anyone can pursue.” Nikitin, who says he rarely fought at school, was a natural. “I liked the atmosphere, the adrenaline, the need to be alert.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A field and stand of trees used for ‘forest fights’ on the outskirts of Moscow. Photograph: Pete Kiehart

Nikitin is broad-set and with a network of scars on his forehead. As we walked, he kept one hand in the chest pocket of his bomber jacket, where he kept a knife. We tripped along a mud path till eventually, a few hundred metres past the treeline, Nikitin stopped and gestured toward the clearing we had come to look at.

Here, Nikitin explained, every few weeks in the early morning, 30 or so men will gather. They arrive in separate groups, divided according to the football team they each support (in chaotic street fights the hooligans use a codeword to show which side they are on), and huddle at either end of the clearing to discuss tactics. After a while, the men form two opposing lines, 20 metres apart. Some limber up on the spot; others hold tins of ammonia to their noses, to heighten their senses. Around the clearing stand other, older men, their arms crossed, watching what’s happening with the keenness of talent scouts. Some will film the action, to be reviewed later – footage occasionally appears on YouTube.

A whistle blows and the two groups pad toward each other. They move slowly at first, clapping their hands to show that they are not carrying weapons, before speeding to a sprint. The lines smash into each other, before peeling off into one-on-one skirmishes. Some fighters go down easily, perhaps hoping to avoid serious damage. Their lack of ambition is noted by the watching scouts; they will never again be invited back. Others crumple with real injuries. After just a few minutes, it becomes clear which side still has fighters standing, and has won. Some limp home or off to hospital. Those who have proven their talent for violence in the forest may be invited into the firm, and, from this boot camp, on to the street.

When his family returned to Russia in the late 2000s, Nikitin began to look for a new team and firm. The owner of a clothing store, to whom Nikitin sold Thor Steinar clothing, a German label closely associated with neo-Nazi groups, asked if he would like to join a Spartak firm, which was due to fight another team from St Petersburg. “But before that fight took place, another of my friends invited me to fight for another team, CSKA,” he recalled. “So I just started fighting for the other side. I never gave a shit about football teams, you know?”

Once a hooligan has chosen his team, however, there can be no switching. When one Spartak hooligan switched sides a few years ago, his previous firm threateningly unfurled a giant banner bearing his name and face at the next match. At CSKA, Nikitin soon began to rise through the ranks. In 2016, he received his pin, a badge of honour awarded for long and effective service that, he estimates, only 20% of the team’s hooligans have received.

While we waited for a car back to central Moscow, as night fell, Nikitin claimed that a forest fight would often be the mere start of the day’s violence. “After a forest fight, I would often say to the guys: ‘OK, who wants to go kick some immigrants?’” he recalled. “Most of them would reply: ‘Yeah, we can do that.’”

A few days later, at a Viking-themed restaurant in central Moscow, his knife resting on the table, Nikitin explained that, in recent months, his interest in street violence has lessened as he has come to realise it is an ineffective way to disseminate and implement his views. “Across Europe hooliganism is on the extreme rise right now,” he says. “But in Russia, it’s in decline” – thanks in part to the unwanted attention of this summer’s World Cup.

To help inspire a new generation of football hooligans, Nikitin launched his own clothing label, White Rex, which is marketed to hooligans and neo-Nazis. (In 2013, a convicted criminal who calls himself Tesak wore a White Rex shirt in a video he filmed of himself attacking a gay man.) From the gym, to the forest, to the street, Nikitin’s far-right ideology has been nurtured and intensified by football hooliganism. And now through his own business, he’s promoting these values to younger men, some of whom he hires to model his clothes.

Just as racism’s grip on English football has slowly loosened since the 1990s, attitudes may eventually shift in Russia as well, but it could take decades to undo what the hooligans have helped create. A few people suggested to me that attitudes among the youngest fans may already be starting to change. “Some are losing interest in the rightwing movement,” says Solopov, the former anti-fascist demonstrator turned journalist. “They want to just follow football. It’s happening slowly, but they are becoming apolitical.”

But these young fans will grow up in a footballing culture steeped in nationalist racism and promiscuous violence. The present crackdown on Moscow’s hooligans may halt the violence that put Russia’s firms in the spotlight. But the obsessive fixation on whether English fans will be met by gangs in Volgograd risks missing the much larger story: the hooligans, with the opportunistic backing of the government that’s now trying to bring them under control, have promoted and normalised the racism of the far right.

On a lazy, sunny October afternoon, Spartak’s second team jogged on to the field to face off against Luch Vladivostok. A couple of haggard sports journalists squinted unsmilingly at their notepads. In front of them, a seated line of elderly men in identikit beige sports jackets sipped from water bottles. Behind the Vladivostok goalkeeper, a platoon of young Spartak fans, arranged in neat rows, started up a braying chant.

There were maybe 15 boys here, between the ages of 12 and 17; trainee ultras who showed up to support the trainee-players on the field. The Spartak fans cycled through about five chants. Some of the precariously held tunes I recognised as English football chants, rewritten with loosely scanning Russian words. Others sound like old Soviet folk-songs. The singing was led by Arkady (not his real name), a boy with an unlovely yet muscular voice and a Beatles-ish mop. He rocked on his heels, head back, eyes closed, almost prayerfully, while the other boys followed his cues.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fans chant during a game of Spartak’s second team. Photograph: Pete Kiehart

The half time whistle blew and, finally, the Spartak boys fell quiet, and settled into their plastic chairs. An announcer politely asked, through the crackling tannoy, that supporters refrain from shouting racist slogans. Arkady is, by his own admission, a Spartak superfan. “I stand in the apolitical part of the stadium,” he said. “The firms and forest fights aren’t for me. Too many of those guys have been banned from coming to matches.”

But boys like Arkady have learned what it means to be a football fan in a climate defined by men like Nikitin and Shprygin. In the second half, Spartak’s standout player was Sylvanus Nimely, a 19-year-old striker from Liberia, one of only two black players on the field – who showed untiring commitment even after his side was reduced to 10 men. At one point, when Nimely streaked forward with the ball, a Vladivostok player slid in from behind and the Liberian international crumpled to the ground, rolling in agony on his back as his teammates clustered around. Arkady whispered something conspiratorial to his crew. Then he leaned back and emitted a low “Ooooooh.” The note gathered and grew in volume as each boy in turn added his voice to the crescendo. And then, in unison, with faces as clean as cherubs, they began to sing a racist song.

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