The General Characteristics of Extremism and Analysis of the Current State of the Fight Against Extremist Crimes
Authors: Biryukov Svyatoslav , Bobovkin Mikhail , Shmatov Mikhail 
Published: August 2020

Introduction: the Constitution of the Russian Federation and other Federal laws in this country guarantee the protection of the population against crimes, including criminal attacks of extremist orientation. However, recently there has been a steady trend towards an increase in the number of committed crimes of extremist orientation, which determines the need to improve the quality of protection of individual rights, and along with them, the constitutional framework of the state, since demonstratively committed extremist crimes cause a great public response and contribute to the undermining of state power. The crime statistics show a significant increase in the number of extremist crimes; there is a natural tendency to spread the ideas of extremism among the population. Unfortunately, only some of the extremist crimes are counted as such in the official statistics. The crimes of this category are often registered without taking into account the qualifying feature – the motive of national, racial, religious hatred or enmity, and, as a result, are not considered in the group of crimes of extremism. Another reason for not fully accounting for these crimes is their latency: not all victims of such criminal actions declare this for various objective and subjective reasons. The public danger of crimes of the group in question is due, on the one hand, as usual, to their group character, and on the other hand, such illegal actions incite interethnic and other hatred, which is very harmful in the context of the efforts being made to build a civil society. Currently, the legislative bodies do not clearly pay enough attention to the organization of counteraction to extremism as an anti-social phenomenon. For example, over the past ten years, the problems of countering extremism have been resolved through the adoption of only four normative legal acts of a national nature. In this regard, the authors aim to give a general description of such a phenomenon as extremism and the state of the fight against such crimes. Methods: the methodological framework for this research is a set of methods of scientific knowledge, among which the main ones are the methods of information processing and logical analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction and generalization. Results: the authors’ content of the general characteristics of extremism and analysis of the current state of the fight against crimes of extremist orientation actualizes the problem of the need to improve the state of the theoretical base, prepare recommendations based on it, which would contribute to improving the efficiency of the state authorized bodies in the fight against various manifestations of extremism, and primarily in order to solve and investigate crimes of extremist orientation. Conclusions: the study has given the general characteristics of extremism and the analysis of the current state of the fight against extremist crimes in order to inform law students, and the teaching staff of law schools and practitioners to better understand the characteristics and dangers of this phenomenon.