1312, Among the Ultras by James Montague

Author:James Montague [Montague, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473559653
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Below were the pictures of two men. Biletsky, the party leader, and Filimonov. Filimonov was sure he would be on the party’s list. True change, he believed, could only come from being on the inside. But Filimonov seemed happiest on the street, whether it was in football or politics. When he was young, he said, his options were either a life of crime or being a sportsman. He was a good wrestler, so it was only a matter of time before he was propositioned to try his hand at fighting in the okolofutbola scene. He enjoyed it, and so began his association with the ultras. There are fewer fights at home, of course, as the war truce between the different ultras groups had more or less held since 2014. ‘Except Chornomorets [Odessa],’ explained Filimonov as he found a video on his phone, ‘because they have stayed friends with [the ultras of Russian team] Spartak Moscow. But we fight in the forest.’

He showed me a video of the last fight, a brutal 60 vs 60 affair against Eintracht Frankfurt which Dynamo won convincingly. The next video was in an open field, taken a few days before, involving Dynamo’s ‘Youth’ team and their friends Metalist Kharkiv in an open field. A group of around a dozen men run forward and smash into their opponents. Most of the Kharkiv firm are wearing red T-shirts with a swastika in the middle.

Metalist went out of business in 2016 after the oligarch that funded the team, Serhiy Kurchenko, fled the country following Maidan. All that was left of the club today was its firm.

Do you like football?

‘I think no,’ Filimonov replied. ‘I don’t know the names of our players at Dynamo.’ It was all about the fighting. Another video came up, this time of a fight with GKS Katowice in Poland. ‘When we came to Poland, to Katowice, we found the Polish ultras, and we said, “Let’s fight”,’ he recalled. But there was a hitch. ‘They said: “We can’t, we have a fight with our enemy.” Warsaw or Kraków, I can’t remember. “Today you are our friend. What do you need? Cocaine? Girls?”’

But that wasn’t for him or the rest of the Rodychi. ‘Fanatics,’ Filimonov said, ‘don’t like cocaine or alcohol.’ The scene involves hard training. ‘Our guys like marijuana,’ he said. And with that Maliar took out a knife and silently constructed a homemade bong out of two plastic Sprite bottles, then lit the pipe.

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