An unusual way to tackle violence

Appeals to curb Russia's rising football violence are about to be made by the leaders of the hooligans.

Ahead of a crucial game between Spartak and Zenith, the top teams of Moscow and StPetersburg, gang leaders are readying a joint plea to dampen the violence.

The appeal, which will be posted shortly on the fans' websites, falls some way short of what Russia's police would like: it encourages the fans to fight, but urges them to leave their weapons at home.

Even calls for this limited control are likely to go unheeded by increasing numbers of angry young men, however.

"It doesn't make a difference," said one fan close to the leaders of the St Petersburg hooligans, who gives his name only as Sasha. "Spartak fans will arrive with knives and with irons , I'm sure 100per cent."

But it is a measure of the desperation felt even by many of the hooligans as the violence escalates. Tensions have been high since the football season opened in March with a record number of arrests after a clash between Spartak and their fellow Moscow giants CSKA. More than 660 people were arrested and 27 hospitalised, many of them innocent bystanders, in street battles before the game.

The biggest clashes took place around a pretty city-centre park, well away from the stadium, in a battle the hooligans had arranged via the Internet.

"The leaders all know each other," says Sasha. "They communicate by e-mail and mobile phone. They set up the fights. It is very well organised."

Appeals for calm are regular. When a St Petersburg fan, a 50-year-old making only his second trip to a match, was killed last year, a Moscow newspaper summoned hooligan leaders to a "summit" in its offices. But as with another meeting, organised last month by a St Petersburg television station, the violence continued.

Russia's police can't afford the sophisticated methods that Western countries use to curb football violence.

"They would like to do something, but they don't have money even for the computers to keep records of the bad fans," says Mihail Milnikov, a sports commentator for NTV in Moscow.

Now far-right political groups are getting involved, with the ultra-nationalist Russian National Unity group well represented among the hundreds of skinheads who support Moscow's Dinamo team.

But Sasha, a computer operator who says he long ago lost his urge to fight, thinks the problem lies deeper, with the poverty and alienation felt across Russia.

"It's because our society is ill. A lot of people have no work, no money, especially young people. They see people with lots of money and they feel frustration, and it is making them angry."