RUSSIA APES UK HOOLIE SCENE

Russia's most violent fan gangs are the Red Blue Warriors of CSKA Moscow and Flint's Crew of Spartak Moscow, named after the redoubtable pirate Captain Flint. They attend matches where George Cross and Union Jack flags are sold from makeshift stands along with badges reading "English and proud" and "F*** the Germans". They consider Chelsea and Millwall's most thuggish fans "models of football hooliganism", one expert told yesterday's Today Programme.

They may not speak English, but they chant it ("Are you watching?", "You're sh** and you know you are"). They surf the net from site to site. They buy pirated, dubbed video copies of a seminal BBC documentary on Chelsea's hooligans from the Macintyre Undercover series, and at the Metro station bookstalls, where their parents once bought cheap translations of Jack London, they buy equally cheap translations of books on the nether life of the British hooligan by the brothers Eddie and Dougie Brimson. Books such as Capital
Punishment and England, My England.

"They may not paint Union Jacks on their faces, but they wear them in their hearts," says Aleksandr Bogomolov, a journalist with Novye Izvestia newspaper who has followed the rise of Russian copycat hooliganism.