Hilary Pilkington, Elena Omel’chenko, and Al’bina Garifzianova. Russia’s Skinheads: Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives. London: Routledge, 2010

Abstract

This book is based on intensive fieldwork conducted in 2006–2007 in the city of Vorkuta in the far-northern Komi Republic, where the three authors—a British sociologist and two colleagues from Russia—got deeply mixed up in the lives of a “friendship group” of young people who called themselves skinheads.
The authors’ coordinates are as follows. Hilary Pilkington, currently at the University of Manchester, used to be associated with the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham, where I myself was inducted into Soviet Studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. More to the point, she is one of the best Western specialists in Russian youth subcultures (not excluding the mysterious gopniki). Elena Omel’chenko and Al’bina Garifzianova are citizens of Russia and sociologists based at the “Region” Research Centre in Ulyanovsk.