“The enemies of Holy Russia are everywhere,” says Ivan Ostrakovsky, the leader of a group of Russian Orthodox vigilantes who have taken to patrolling the streets of nighttime Moscow, dressed in all-black clothing emblazoned with skulls and crosses. “We must protect holy places from liberals and their satanic ideology,” he tells me. “The police can’t cope with the attacks ... crosses have been chopped down, there’s been graffiti on church walls.”

There is something of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Ostrakovsky’s fervor. Like the disgruntled main character of Scorsese’s epic film Taxi Driver, the vigilante sees himself in a fight against cultural degradation. “When I came back from serving in the Chechen War, I found my country full of dirt,” he says. “Prostitution, drugs, Satanists. But now, religion is on the rise.”

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