Stenka (Russian Wall Fight)
Стеношный бойThe Russian folk mass fist fight at Shrovetide; two lines of men against each other and the rule that a downed man is not struck.
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About Stenka (Russian Wall Fight)
Stenka na stenku, literally wall against wall, is the Russian folk mass fist fight. Two lines of men take up position against each other, usually from different villages, streets or banks of the same river, and try to push the other side out of a marked area. Fighting most often took place at Shrovetide and on other holidays, frequently on a frozen river, where the ground was flat and the boundary clear. Beside the mass form there were also one-against-one bouts and a free melee without lines. The rules were never written down but were exact and generally known. A man on the ground is not struck, no blow may be delivered from behind or below the belt, no object may be carried in the hand or in the glove, and anyone who bleeds or sits down is out of the game. It is precisely the ban on striking a fallen man that passed into Russian as a proverb and is still used far beyond the context of a brawl. Militarily the practice made sense in holding a line: the men learned to keep formation, to cover the neighbour and to advance together, which is closer to infantry discipline than to individual combat. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the tsarist administration repeatedly tried to regulate the mass fights and finally banned them; revival came only in the 1990s, when folklore and reconstruction societies brought them back. No founder and no year of origin are documented, and this page therefore gives neither.
Similar styles
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