ST. PETERSBURG — In a half-lit basement on a side street in St. Petersburg, 18 men holding reproduction Makarov pistols were fumbling through a shooting exercise.
Denis Gariev, the instructor, called out to pause the training.
Gariev espouses a brand of ethnic nationalism that is to the right of President Vladimir Putin, but he was not about to air his political views. Instead he railed against a Russian society that he thinks has gone soft.
‘‘Nowadays everyone tells the boys starting in kindergarten, ‘Don’t act so aggressive, be smarter,’ he said in a mock baby voice. ‘‘And we turn into these unaggressive vegetables.’’
Gariev hopes to restore the aggression.
‘‘By and large, we are learning how to kill,’’ he told his charges, who had come to the ‘‘Reserve’’ military-patriotic club for a one-week paramilitary course called ‘‘Partisan.’’
‘‘We hope that it will never happen to us and we’ll never harm a living creature. But if we have to, then we should be ready.’’
The ‘‘cadets’’ listening to Gariev were largely white-collar and self-employed workers from cities across Russia, men motivated less by an ideology than by the siege mentality that has surged since the wars in Ukraine and Syria and a conviction that the modern Russian man should be combat-ready.
They signed up to train for 12 hours a day or more in a weeklong, military-style course that promises to raise one’s chances of survival ‘‘in case of a war or total collapse of modern society.’’
‘‘The storm clouds are gathering,’’ said Alexei, 38, a former Greco-Roman wrestler from the Volga River city of Samara, who, like several others in the course, did not give his last name. He said that he was motivated by feelings of instability because of the threat of terrorism and the conflict in Ukraine.
‘‘If there is ever a mobilization, then I will be ready, not the kind of person to be given a rifle, yell ‘hurrah,’ and make it two or three steps before I am shot down,’’ he said.
The men learn to fire a Kalashnikov rifle and Makarov pistol, apply a tourniquet, and storm a room in tactical formation. They learn to rappel down abandoned buildings and hold their rifles steady, ready to fire, while charging across a field. During short breaks they pose for selfies in balaclavas, keepsakes from their week away from the daily grind.
Political discussion is purposefully left out of the courses, Gariev said. But he thinks that his cadets will be natural allies in a coming clash of civilizations.
That’s why he refuses to train Muslims.
Gariev, a graduate in history from St. Petersburg and a former soldier in the strategic missile unit, has been training Russians to fight for a long time. In 2009 he grew disenchanted with purely political activism and began urging Russian men to buy guns legally and start training to use them together. Soon, he was holding courses for civilians.
When the war in Ukraine began in 2014, he started training Russian volunteers to fight alongside the Imperial Legion, the paramilitary arm of the Russian Imperial Movement, a right-wing political group united around reverence for the Russian Empire and the czar.
