{"id":95569,"date":"2017-01-03T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-03T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/breaking911.com\/?p=95569"},"modified":"2017-01-03T17:00:02","modified_gmt":"2017-01-03T22:00:02","slug":"right-wing-militia-trains-russians-fight-next-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/breaking911.com\/right-wing-militia-trains-russians-fight-next-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Right-wing militia trains Russians to fight the next war"},"content":{"rendered":"
ST. PETERSBURG – In a half-lit basement on a side street in St. Petersburg, 18 men holding reproduction Makarov pistols were fumbling through an exercise, racking the slides, taking aim and firing. Click, click, click, click, click. Repeat.<\/p>\n
Denis Gariev, the instructor, called out to pause the training.<\/p>\n
He was not about to air his political views, an ethnic nationalism so raw that he is far to the right of Russian President Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n
He was about to rail against a society that had gone soft.<\/p>\n
“Nowadays everyone tells the boys starting in kindergarten, ‘Don’t act so aggressive, be smarter,’ ” he said in a mocking baby voice. “And we turn into these unaggressive vegetables.” Gariev aims to restore the aggression.<\/p>\n
“By and large, we are learning how to kill,” he told his charges, who had come to the “Reserve” military-patriotic club for a one-week paramilitary course called “Partisan.”<\/p>\n
“We hope that it will never happen to us and we’ll never harm a living creature. But if we have to, then we should be ready.”<\/p>\n
The “cadets” listening to Gariev were largely white-collar and self-employed workers from cities across Russia, men motivated less by an ideology than by the siege mentality that has surged here since the wars in Ukraine and Syria and a conviction that the modern Russian man should be combat-ready.<\/p>\n
They signed up to train for 12 hours a day or more in a week-long, military-style course that promises to raise one’s chances of survival “in case of a war or total collapse of modern society.”<\/p>\n
“The storm clouds are gathering,” said Alexei, 38, a former Greco-Roman wrestler from the Volga River city of Samara, who, like several others in the course, did not give his last name. He said that he was motivated by feelings of instability because of the threat of terrorism and the conflict in Ukraine. “If there is ever a mobilization, then I will be ready, not the kind of person to be given a rifle, yell ‘Hurrah!’ and make it two or three steps before I am shot down,” he said.<\/p>\n
Much of the training course takes place outside the city center, in abandoned lots and buildings used for a game called airsoft, similar to paintball but played with guns that fire plastic BBs.<\/p>\n
To handle a gun you must be “maximally aggressive,” Gariev said.<\/p>\n
The men learn to fire a Kalashnikov rifle and Makarov pistol, apply a tourniquet and storm a room in tactical formation. They learn to rappel down abandoned buildings and hold their rifles steady, ready to fire, while charging across a swampy field. During short breaks they pose for selfies in balaclavas, keepsakes from their week away from the daily grind.<\/p>\n
Political discussion is purposefully left out of the courses, Gariev said. But he thinks that his cadets will be natural allies in a coming clash of civilizations.<\/p>\n
That’s why he refuses to train Muslims.<\/p>\n
“Victory is about spirit. It’s been like that since, hell knows, since Akhenaten, all the way up to Putin and (Barack) Obama. Nothing has changed,” he told the men in the basement.<\/p>\n
The speech had its effect. The men straightened their backs. Eighteen pairs of hands went back to work, now with purpose. Click, click, click, click, click.<\/p>\n