The Night Wolves, Russia's largest motorcycle gang, are led by their president the Surgeon and backed by their country's president, Vladimir Putin.
The president of Russia's most infamous motorcycle club emerges from a purifying swim in the still waters of a former slurry pond. He cuts a striking figure: tall, tattooed, plated with muscle. His hair, a leonine mane, clings to his back in dark ringlets. A silver crucifix dangles from his neck. "He goes to the lake, swimming for an hour, to maintain himself in a moral state," says one of his lieutenants, a stout, chain-smoking Kazakh named Arman.
I had traveled to Russia in July to learn about the vision of the Surgeon and his fellow Nochniye Volki. A charismatic showman with a penchant for provocative bombast, the motorcycle club's leader is perhaps Russia's most recognizable nationalist star. Over the past decade, he has transformed a once-underground biker gang into a self-styled vanguard of patriotic holy warriors, reportedly 5,000 strong, with close ties to the Kremlin. In the Russian media, he can regularly be heard trumpeting the country's greatness while warning that its enemies — America, Europe, homosexuals, liberals, traitorous "fifth columnists" — intend to undermine Mother Russia. He and the other Night Wolves often hold motorcycle rallies to promote Russian patriotism and Orthodox Christianity, making rumbling pilgrimages to churches and holy sites. He has vowed to defend the Kremlin from Maidan-inspired protesters and has pledged to die for Vladimir Putin, the country's president. He has famously declared that "wherever the Night Wolves are, that should be considered Russia." Recently, the club held a three-day anti-NATO rally in Slovakia. Lately, the Surgeon has taken to praising Stalin.
Western reporters have dubbed the Night Wolves either "Russia's Hells Angels" or, because of their muscular patriotism, a crucial source of "Russian soft power." But such descriptions fall short. In late February 2014, at the beginning of Russia's takeover of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, the Surgeon was spotted on a flight to Crimea. On the day of his arrival, the Night Wolves were working alongside pro-Russia militias, setting up roadblocks in Sevastopol. In March, according to the U.S. government, they stormed a naval facility, with the Surgeon personally helping to coordinate "the confiscation of Ukrainian weapons with the Russian forces." On March 18th, Russia formally annexed the peninsula. Whether the Night Wolves' leader acted on his own initiative or on orders from Russian officials remains unknown, but it seems unlikely the Kremlin would not sanction, at least tacitly, an operation of such consequence. (The Surgeon soon received a medal for "the liberation of the Crimea and Sevastopol" in Moscow, Russian media reported.) After fighting broke out in eastern Ukraine weeks later, a Night Wolves chapter joined pro-Russia militias battling the country's army — a grinding conflict that continues and has killed nearly 8,000 thus far. The Night Wolves have been running "humanitarian convoys" into the region and, I witness, serving as a police force in Luhansk, one of two self-declared separatist republics.
"For the first time, we showed resistance to the global Satanism, the growing savagery of Western Europe, the rush to consumerism that denies all spirituality, the destruction of traditional values, all this homosexual talk, this American democracy," the Surgeon proudly declared in March.
The gang's rhetoric echoes both a growing wave of nationalism in Russia and a sharp rightward turn in the country's politics. Under Putin's tenure, the Kremlin has jailed journalists and opposition figures, banned "gay propaganda" and crafted ersatz political parties that provide a veneer of self-governance. It has deployed its vast propaganda apparatus — state-controlled radio and newspapers, but above all, television — to fan patriotic fervor. "Russia is like the Kingdom of the Crooked Mirrors," a liberal Muscovite tells me over dinner one night, referring to a Soviet-era fairy tale in which a king uses warped looking glasses to brainwash his people.
The Surgeon and his Night Wolves have flourished in this nationalist ecosystem. The club has reportedly received more than $1 million in grants from the Kremlin to support patriotic performances like the Sevastopol bike show. On several occasions, Putin himself has famously mounted a three-wheel Harley and ridden alongside the Surgeon. In 2013, Putin awarded the Night Wolves' leader an Order of Honor for his "patriotic education of youth." In June, the Russian press announced a cosmonaut would carry the club's flag into space. Putin, according to Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert and NYU professor, turned the club into "auxiliaries of the state" as part of a broader push to turn potential adversaries into compliant allies. However true, these assertions shed little light on how a once-countercultural motorcycle gang has come to wield a position of such power and prominence in modern Russia — and, now set loose, what it hopes to achieve.
The Surgeon trundles a golf cart toward a derelict four-story concrete building — the local chapter's headquarters — then disappears. He is due on a flight, business class, back to Moscow in two hours. Soon, the Night Wolves' leader re-emerges in full biker regalia: black boots, black jeans, black vest bearing the club's flaming wolf's head emblem. Dmitry Simichein, the leader of the Sevastopol chapter, ushers the Surgeon into a tricked-out pickup truck, and we race toward the airport. As Simichein veers in and out of oncoming traffic, occasionally flicking on blue lights on the truck's grille to bully slower cars from our path, I ask about Global Satan.
The Night Wolves' early members included a musician, a mechanic and a massage therapist. Zaldostanov had a residency as a dental surgeon at a Moscow clinic and lived a double life — staying out all night, then climbing into the back window of the clinic to change from leathers to medical dress. (Roos Turin, another founding father of Moscow's early biker scene, says Zaldostanov originally wished to be called "the Dentist," but then deemed it insufficiently menacing.) Early on, the club provided security for local bands and ran protection rackets for black-market businesses hoping to avoid shakedowns from police and gangsters — an enterprise the Surgeon casts in benevolent terms.
By the early 1990s, the Surgeon — who was charismatic and ambitious — had established himself as the Night Wolves' leader. He was considered the "king of the Moscow scene," according to Hilary Pilkington, a British sociologist who studied the city's counterculture. The Surgeon had been traveling between Moscow and West Berlin, where he found work as a doorman at the Sexton, a legendary rock club in the city. He lived in a squat and soon married a German woman. (They later separated.) He reveled in the rowdy, unrestrained underground world of Berlin and learned about motorcycle culture from members of the local Hells Angels chapter. "He loved the feeling of freedom here," the Sexton's former owner recently told a reporter. "In his soul, he was punk." By chance, Vladimir Putin — future president of Russia and Night Wolves patron — was working as a midlevel KGB agent on the other side of the Wall in Dresden.
Around 1991, the Night Wolves began to shed their outlaw origins. That August, members helped man barricades against tanks surrounding Russia's parliament building — part of a failed coup by Communist hard-liners against the reform-minded Gorbachev. His successor, Boris Yeltsin, awarded the Surgeon a medal for his efforts (an honor he now abhors). Soon after, the Night Wolves had a business manager and offers to star in advertising campaigns. "By the summer of 1991, Khirurg [Surgeon] himself was more often to be seen on youth television programmes, video clips and in the papers, than at his former notorious hang-outs," Pilkington wrote.
Motorcycle clubs are often a peculiar mix of anti-social defiance and democratic governance, with members making decisions as a group according to a system of voting rules. In the mid-1990s, the Sexton in Moscow burned down and, a few years later, the Surgeon — through a company he owned — acquired two buildings on the outskirts of the city that could accommodate a new club and biker headquarters. According to Russian journalist Nataliya Telegina, who investigated the deal, many members assumed the new space would be common property. But the Surgeon gave himself exclusive ownership, Telegina tells me. A former member says that the Surgeon also rewrote the club's charter, creating a centralized structure that gave him more power.
"It was like Hitler times in Germany — Hitler was a person who took power in a democratic way," says Ivan, a member of the Moscow Hells Angels chapter. "The same story was in the Night Wolves. What Khirurg asked from the club was special status to have not one, not two votes, but to have the vote to make any decision." (Rejecting these claims, a club spokesman states that the Surgeon is "very democratic.") Ivan, a stocky Angel who goes by the name Hippo, and another member named Sascha had agreed to meet at a restaurant in downtown Moscow. Both were former members of the Night Wolves and both had quit in 2001, outraged by what they viewed as the Surgeon's growing megalomania. Along with about eight other former Night Wolves, the two men soon formed the Hells Angels chapter in Moscow.
The Surgeon appears to have flirted with modeling the Night Wolves on the notorious Western motorcycle club — early on, they reportedly operated according to a word-for-word Russian translation of the Hells Angels' rule book. But he has now become an outspoken detractor of so-called outlaw clubs. In the Russian press, he has called them "arms dealers," "demons" and "drug cartels on wheels." In June, the Surgeon asked Russia's parliament to include both the Bandidos and Hells Angels on the government's new list targeting "undesirable" foreign organizations.
Since Ivan and Sascha's departure, the Night Wolves have entirely left behind their counterculture past. There were the Surgeon's appearances with Putin and financial grants from the Kremlin, but also regular rallies at Orthodox religious sites. There was a "Wolf" holding company providing security and plans for a youth competition combining motorcycles with elements of "combat in ruined buildings, martial arts, possession of firearms and bladed weapons." In January, the Surgeon helped co-found Anti-Maidan, a patriotic group to counter any pro-democracy movements that might take hold in Russia.
"We don't consider them a motorcycle club," Ivan says. "We don't have political organizations. There is quite famous phrase in Russia: If you heard the word patriotism, it means that someone steals something.
The Night Wolves' Moscow headquarters sits on a desolate river flood plain outside the city, where Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev once dreamed of building a Russian Disneyland. The Sexton has become a mecca for Russian bikers, and the property contains a dance club, several bars and a restaurant serving sushi and "Crimean Tea." The Surgeon, I had read, sleeps on a pullout sofa somewhere in the sprawling compound.
Several Russian journalists, however, have identified another member, named Alexey Weitz, as most responsible for the Night Wolves' turnaround. A former theater actor, Weitz joined the club in the mid-2000s while also working for a nationalist think tank, and later became an apparatchik for Right Cause, a political party with a self-proclaimed "patriotic bias" that is supported by the Kremlin. According to British journalist Peter Pomerantsev, Weitz helped give form to the Surgeon's religious and patriotic impulses. As the Kremlin initiated its widespread campaign to quash dissent while mobilizing nationalist fervor, it found an ideal partner in the motorcycle club. "The country needs new patriotic stars, the great Kremlin reality show is open for auditions, and the Night Wolves are . . . helping the Kremlin rewrite the narrative of protestors from political injustice and corruption to one of Holy Russia versus Foreign Devils," Pomerantsev writes in his recent book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.
Later, Weitz shows me a large painting in the Sexton featuring a 14th-century Russian Orthodox monk named Alexander Peresvet. By some accounts, Peresvet died in a heroic duel with a soldier from the Mongol empire. But in a larger battle that followed, a small Russian force defeated the Mongols' much-superior army — a victory whose importance is disputed by historians but trumpeted today by Russian nationalists as the opening skirmish that freed the country from the Mongol "yoke." Other Night Wolves had mentioned Peresvet, and I had even seen his image on one member's T-shirt. He was, it seemed, their ur-patriot and patron saint. In the Sexton's painting, Peresvet sits astride a horse — the gallant warrior-monk preparing to vanquish invaders and return the motherland to glory. The artist, however, gave the horse a strange feature: The shadow it casts is not equine but that of a stalking wolf.
In the summer of 2014, the ukrainian military advanced on the pro-Russia militias that had taken control of the cities of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbass region. Hundreds of civilians were killed in the subsequent fighting. In Luhansk, electricity failed and water taps ran dry. Food became scarce. Many residents moved into their basements to avoid shelling, while others made tunnels between apartments to keep from venturing outside. A mortuary keeper in the city lived off chocolate bars and pig fat and played Thelonious Monk's " 'Round Midnight" on his saxophone to put his mind off the war.
Several months later, officials from Ukraine and the self-declared separatist republics signed a cease-fire agreement, but the fighting quickly resumed. The U.S. and other Western countries allege Russia is supporting the rebels with men and supplies, a claim Putin has denied despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In late 2014, the Ukrainian government established an economic blockade of both breakaway republics, a move intended to break the rebels' grip but one that also made food and medicine scarce for the already-suffering civilian population. In addition to killing thousands, the ongoing war has displaced more than a million residents in Ukraine and devastated entire neighborhoods and villages.
"It's a good soundtrack for propaganda worker," he quips.
I had made the long journey to Luhansk to learn about the city's Night Wolves chapter, which had largely avoided the media exposure of their comrades in Moscow. A few intriguing scraps had slipped out: On its sanctions list, the U.S. government alleged the motorcycle club had recruited fighters for the rebel militias and deployed members to the front lines of Luhansk and Kharkiv. Several, including a member named "Vampire," were reportedly killed. The Night Wolves in Luhansk appeared to have crystallized into a more militant form — a modern incarnation of the warrior-monk Peresvet.
In 2014, as the Ukrainian military closed in on Luhansk, according to Vitaly, the Night Wolves helped blockade the city. They later fought in at least four villages and, backed by Russian tanks, laid siege with other rebels to the Luhansk airport held by the Ukrainian paratroopers — a devastating battle that left the facility in ruins. Around 40 Night Wolves took part in the war and at least three were killed. A member named Sergei Koptev was killed by a mortar. Another, nicknamed "Bison," stepped on a mine. "Vampire" died in a burning tank. Photographs of the dead men, along with about 100 other rebels, were now memorialized in a glass display case in downtown Luhansk.
At first, I take Vitaly's notion of resurrection to mean restoring local parks — nation building writ small. But it becomes clear the sweep of his dream is much grander. The mission of Night Wolves, he declares, "is to resurrect the motherland — to connect the pieces that were killed off. We're one land, one people. We were artificially divided. We have Night Wolves divisions in territories of former Soviet Union. Our mission is to bring the patriotism, orthodoxy, love for motherland and reunite." There are, I suggest, a great deal of people in these republics with no wish to reunite. "Everyone has his own right to think different," he replies. "And for those who don't want to reunite, I have a question: Why do those countries keep them?" Vitaly's vision of reintegrating former Soviet states is both bold and provocative, and sure to alarm these governments — at least one of which had already begun preparing militarily along its border for such an outcome.
As the Ukrainian military sought to reclaim Donbass from the pro-Russian rebels in the summer of 2014, a village outside Luhansk called Novosvitlivka saw some of the most devastating fighting. Small but strategically important, the town is situated on a highway connecting Luhansk to the Russian border about 20 miles to the east — a conduit between satellite and mothership. The Night Wolves, along with other rebels, battled the Ukrainian army for two weeks for control of Novosvitlivka. In the process, half the town was razed — scores of homes, a kindergarten, the hospital. The town's House of Culture, whose facade bore a 60-foot mosaic panel called "Tree of Life," was bombed into ruin. At least 100 civilians were killed.
During the fighting, many residents hid in the buildings' cellars. "The Ukrainian army was there," says Tamara, a retiree with hair dyed the color of an eggplant, pointing at a nearby area. "The pro-Russian side was shelling to make them leave." She and her husband, along with other residents, spent three weeks living in a dank warren of rooms in her building's basement. Several soiled mattresses still lie on the dirt floor. "It was very cold. We ate what we had in our houses," she says. Emerging from the basement one day, Tamara continues, she discovered a man sitting in his car. He had been decapitated by shrapnel from an artillery shell. "Sometimes we buried locals here in the garden, and after we transferred them to the cemetery," she says, looking at a tangled bed of morning glories. But someone mined the cemetery, and so she and the others often left the bodies buried where they were.
One afternoon, Taras and I drive into the rolling farm country outside Luhansk to an Orthodox church perched atop a hill. It had been built by Nikolai Tarasenko, an enigmatic Russian archaeologist who, inspired by divine instruction, had quit his profession in the 1990s to build a "temple" in the Donbass. The site has since become famous and, according to Taras, Tarasenko is also known as a hermit philosopher and sometime prophet who might offer tidings of the war. A member of the Cossacks, the legendary horsemen who once guarded the Russian empire's remote frontier, he has been fighting since the beginning of the conflict.
"Before the war, we prayed and built," says Tarasenko, who is in his late sixties with few remaining teeth and a rheumy eye, sitting at a long kitchen table. "And when war came we took the weapon, and now we are praying and fighting." He has spent the past 20 years building the church, but it remains unfinished — the conflict appears to have entirely subsumed his work. Every week, a small detachment of locals — often including Tarasenko himself — travels to the front line about 40 miles away. The war has passed some point of no return, Tarasenko feels, and he cannot stop fighting. Kiev has "special teams" that would kill him and has deployed mercenaries — a story widely disseminated by Russian propaganda.
German panzer tanks and columns of SS soldiers appeared. They mercilessly executed several men and herded Russian women and children onto flatbed trucks. Then, from the shadows: a Red Army brigade. Firing their rifles and machine guns, they advanced forward. The SS began to fall one by one. There was a triumphant yell, a surging charge by the Russians. A Soviet T-34 tank, a museum piece brought in from Volgograd, rumbled forward. The Germans were finished.
Various dignitaries from Crimea, including the governor of Sevastopol, watched from a VIP platform. The Night Wolves had invited Putin, but he chose not to attend. The president's absence was perplexing, given his staunch support of the Surgeon, though the Russian press hardly mentioned it. Shortly after, however, Russian marines and tanks were spotted at a Syrian air base. Within weeks, Putin unveiled a major diplomatic push — more military aid, a possible peace plan for Syria — to shore up the country's embattled president, Bashar al-Assad. Syria's dire circumstances, many analysts speculated, had presented Putin with an irresistible gambit: bolster an ally and divert attention from the conflict in Ukraine, while also allowing Russia to once more reassert itself as a forceful presence on the global stage.
The spectacle reached its stirring climax. Fireworks erupted in the sky. A contingent of Night Wolves rolled out to greet the large crowd cheering for the performance that was a looking glass reflecting a Russia as it had been, as they might be persuaded to see it once more: unbowed, undiminished, fearsome. At least 100,000 people on the show grounds, with millions more watching the live broadcast on state television, looked upward as a gilded coat of arms bearing a Soviet star, a czarist double-headed eagle and ears of wheat — a heraldic nationalist symbol of the Night Wolves' own creation — rose high above the crowd in Sevastopol. It was an empire production.