MOSCOW -- The Bloody Sunday of June 9 took Moscow by surprise. Nobody expected a mob of soccer fans, upset by the performance of the national team, to launch a drunken rampage barely 100 meters away from President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin residence. The outburst of violence lasted for several hours, leaving people beaten up, cars destroyed, high-end shops vandalized and Muscovites bewildered and angry.
Not that it was the first soccer riot in Moscow. Back in the Soviet days, the fans of the Spartak soccer team caused trouble after each spectacular victory or defeat of their club. Yet in comparison with the June 9 mob, the Spartak fans were almost peaceful. They would clog an entrance to a subway station chanting "Spartak is number one!", then march in without paying the fare and maybe haze a group of fans of a rival team. Their raving would disrupt commuters for an hour or so and that would be the end of it. The police, who prepared for every important Spartak match, regarded its fans as a major nuisance but knew that their aggression could be easily controlled. On June 9, the Moscow police encountered a new breed of soccer fans. Whereas the Spartak boys had been silly, the June 9 attackers were vicious.
It is hard to say what made the riots so brutal. The amount of alcohol consumed by youths watching an outdoor broadcast of a World Cup match? But Moscow had seen drunken mobs before. Every year, Paratrooper Day and Navy Day see a drinking frenzy all over the city, and the drunken soldiers and sailors routinely devastate a kiosk or two before crawling back home to their angry wives and girlfriends. Yet, they have never crossed the borderline between debauchery and rioting.