Moscow youth sub-culture keen on weight-training

Press, 2 April 1987, Page 37

Moscow youth sub-culture keen on weight-training

By

Helen Womack

NZPA-Reuter Moscow In a network of cellars under the grey apartment blocks of the Moscow suburb of Lyubertsy, groups of youths dedicated to upholding the “Soviet way of life” are practising body-building. Intense speculation has focused on the “Lyuberites” since the official weekly magazine, “Ogonyok,” said that some were beating up punks, hippies and other young people influenced by Western trends.

A police chief said the “Lyuberites” had been invented by journalists. But the number of young people walking down the streets of Lyubertsy wearing distinctive checked trousers testifies to the existence of a youth subculture in the suburb of 360,000 people, about 20km south-west of the city centre. One such teenager, Pasha, aged 16, told Reuters he was a Lyuberite and led the way through a maze of apartment blocks to a small metal door painted with the figure of a bodybuilder and marked “Malysh” (Infant). “Come this way. The

trainer and the older guys are working out now,” he said.

Behind the door, narrow steps led down to nine cellars converted into a weight-training club where Misha, Semyon, Sergei and other youths aged between 16 and 22 were lifting dumb-bells in time to the music of the Russian rock group, Mashina Vremeni (Time Machine).

Misha, aged 22, a sports instructor and member of the Komsomol (Communist youth league), who has just finished military service, has been involved in the club for six years, although it was founded illegally 10 years ago. Now in charge of the centre, he said he had put it on a legal footing by getting official backing from the local authorities last year to run an independent club. He proudly showed the nine little rooms fitted out with all kinds of weighttraining apparatus which members had paid for themselves.

Some 20 youths trained regularly at the club while others, less committed, drifted in and out, Misha said. Five similar cellar clubs were func-

tioning in the immediate area.

He objected to the article in “Ogonyok,” saying it gave a false impression that youths from Lyubertsy were violent “Our group is only interested in sport in making the male body strong and beautiful,” he said. “We do not go into Moscow to beat up punks and hippies although we do not like them.” But he said that the club could not control an unknown number of youths who had latched on to the culture surrounding body-building and travelled by suburban train into Moscow, sometimes getting into fights with other gangs in the capital’s discos and cafes. Apparently one such youth was Igor, aged 16, who spoke to Reuters while standing in a department store with his tartan-clad girlfriend choosing checked material for a new pair of trousers.

“I am into sport — boxing, athletics and other kinds,” he said.

“Sure, we go to Moscow sometimes.”

Asked why gang members beat up punks and hippies, he said: “So they

do not insist on their rights.”

The police chief who denied Lyuberites existed. Major General V. Goncharov, of the Interior Ministry Criminal Investigation Department, said recently that youths from Lyubertsy accounted for 1.6 per cent of Moscow’s crime, which he called a relatively small contribution.

At the end of last month, 500 young people demonstrated in Moscow against what they called the violent behaviour of gangs from Lyubertsy. School authorities in Moscow warned parents to keep their children indoors one week-end recently as rumours swept Moscow that rival gangs would fight street battles. But the police registered no incidents, the weekly “Literatumaya Gazeta” said.

For the boys from Malysh, defending the Soviet way of life means clean living, hard work, loyalty to Russian rather than Western rock groups and alcohol only on special occasions.

Semyon, aged 18, who is going into the Army in May, said 18 months of body-building had given

him self-confidence and dignity as well as the rippling arm muscles which he cheerfully flexed for the camera.

“Now I want to prepare myself so it will be easier to do my military service,” he said.

Semyon said that he was a strong supporter of the Kremlin Leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, because "he is attacking drunks and parasites who will not work.”

Some analysts, seeking to explain the mystery of the Lyuberites, suggested that they could be organised by elements in society opposed to cultural liberalisation taking place under Mr Gorbachev.

A Moscow artist said recently that two busloads of Lyuberites had been taken to an exhibition of paintings which had been previously banned. The youths were told, by those who sent them, to write negative comments in the visitors’ book.

The young men from Malysh said, although they could not speak for other Lyuberites, their philosophy towards’these they disagreed with was “live and let live.”