Preface. After reading this book about the history of organized crime in Russia, I thought surely Russia must be the most corrupt nation in the world.  But amazingly there are 47 countries that are ranked even lower of the 180 nations listed at transparency.org’s 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index.  A score of 100 is squeaky clean, 0 is highly corrupt. The top score is 88 (Denmark, New Zealand, Finland). Russia scores 29. The USA rates a dismal 67, down from 76 in 2015.

Nor surprisingly, there’s a strong correlation between corruption and life expectancy.  The least corrupt nations have longer lifespans on average (https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/). The U.S. is the only developed nation that doesn’t offer universal health care, and ranked at #46, shameful since the U.S. is the richest country that has ever or will ever exist.  Russia ranks 113^th.

Corruption is perhaps another reason mighty Russia has lost thousands of soldiers in their fight against puny Ukraine so far in 2022. After reading this book, it’s impossible not to imagine that vast amounts of Russian war money is being diverted into private bank accounts rather than food and supplies for the front lines.  Tanks are running of gas, soldiers loot stores for food. Conscripts are poorly trained or motivated, so morale is low.  This can be seen with an astounding seven Russian generals killed so far, since they have to go to the front lines to make soldiers fight. On top of that many generals are incompetent, achieving that rank through loyalty.

Even if Russia backs out of Ukraine, in the long run they’ll win — with their vast natural gas reserves they can demand high prices and concessions from Europe.  The U.S. can’t possibly come to the rescue since 7 of the 8 fracked oil & gas basins are in decline, and the Permian has perhaps 5 to 10 years left (Saputra W et al (2022) Forecast of Economic Tight Oil and Gas Production in Permian Basin. Energies.) Not to mention years to build LNG facilities and $250 million LNG ships.

We can only hope that this war doesn’t go nuclear, the greatest existential threat, since even a small nuclear war could kill over a billion people.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Galeotti, M. 2018. The Vory. Russia’s Super Mafia. Yale University Press.

About the only thing which could transform Volodya into a relaxed, open and even animated human being was the chance to enthuse about his Dragunov sniper’s rifle and his kills. He always had money to burn at a time when the majority were eking out the most marginal of lives, often living with parents or juggling multiple jobs. It all made sense, though, when I learned that he had become what was known in Russian crime circles as a torpedo, a hit man. As the values and structures of Soviet life crumbled and fell, organized crime was emerging from the ruins, no longer subservient to the corrupt Communist Party bosses and the black-market millionaires. As it rose, it was gathering to itself a new generation of recruits, including damaged and disillusioned veterans of the USSR’s last war. Some were bodyguards, some were runners, some were leg breakers and some – like Volodya and his beloved rifle – were killers.

I never found out what happened to Volodya. He probably ended up as a casualty of the gang wars of the 1990s, fought out with car bombs, drive-by shootings and knives in the night. That decade saw the emergence of a tradition of monumental memorialization, as fallen gangsters were buried in full ‘Godfather’ pomp, with black limousines threading through paths lined with white carnations and tombs marked with huge headstones showing idealized representations of the dead. Vastly expensive (the largest cost upwards of $250,000, at a time when the average wage was close to a dollar a day) and stupendously tacky, these monuments showed the dead with the spoils of their criminal lives: the Mercedes, the designer suit, the heavy gold chain.

Before we knew it, chief constables in the UK were predicting that Russian mobsters would be having gunfights in leafy Surrey suburbs by 2000 and scholars were talking of a global ‘Pax Mafiosa’ as organized-crime gangs divided the world between them. Of course, this didn’t happen, nor did the Russian gangs sell nuclear bombs to terrorists, buy up Third World countries, take over the Kremlin or accomplish any other of the outlandish ambitions with which they were credited. The 1990s were the glory days of the Russian gangsters, though, and since then, under Putin, gangsterism on the streets has given way to kleptocracy in the state.

I’ve watched it rise and, if not fall, then certainly change, becoming increasingly tamed by a political elite far more ruthless in its own way than the old criminal bosses.

The tsarist police record for Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known by the revolutionary codename ‘Koba’ and, later, rather more so as Stalin. While no bank robber or highwayman himself, Stalin played a crucial role in working with the vory to raise funds for the Bolsheviks. This early willingness to find common cause with the underworld would later be applied to his management of the Gulags.

Of course, all criminal subcultures have their own languages of sorts, spoken and visual.2 The Japanese yakuza sport elaborate tattoos of dragons, heroes and chrysanthemums. American street toughs have their gang colors. Every criminal specialism has its technical terms, every criminal milieu its slang. These serve all kinds of purposes, from distinguishing insider from outsider to demonstrating commitment to the group. However, the Russians are truly distinctive in the scale and homogeneity of their languages, both spoken and visual – striking evidence not just of the coherence and complexity of their underworld culture but also their determination actively to reject and even challenge mainstream society.

The tattoos were the mark of a vor, the Russian word for ‘thief’, but a general term for a member of the Soviet underworld, the so-called ‘thieves’ world’ or vorovskoi mir, and life in the Gulag labor camp system. Most of the tattoos were still recognizable and an expert on ‘reading’ them was summoned; in this case, a former prison warder turned police investigator. Within an hour, they had been decoded. The leaping stag on his breast? That symbolized a term spent in one of the northern labor camps. They were known for their harsh regimes and thus survival was a mark of pride in the macho world of the professional criminal. The knife wrapped in chains on his right forearm? The man had committed a violent assault while behind bars, but not a murder. Crosses on three of his knuckles? Three separate prison sentences served. Perhaps the most telling was the fouled anchor on his upper arm, to which a barbed wire surround had clearly been added later: a navy veteran who had been sentenced to prison for a crime committed while in service.

The vory subculture dates back to the earlier, tsarist years, but was radically reshaped in Stalin’s Gulags of the 1930s to the 1950s where criminals adopted an uncompromising and unapologetic rejection of the legitimate world, visibly tattooing themselves as a dramatic gesture of defiance.

Over time, the code of the vory would change, as a new generation were enticed by the opportunities in collaborating with a cynical and vicious state on their own terms. The vory would lose their dominance, taking a subordinate role to the barons of the black market and the corrupt Communist Party bosses, but they did not disappear in the grey 1960s and 1970s, and as the Soviet system began to grind towards its inevitable collapse, they emerged anew. Again, they reinvented themselves to meet the needs of the moment. In post-Soviet Russia, they blended in with the new elite. The tattoos disappeared, or were hidden beneath the crisp white shirts of a rapacious new breed of gangster-businessman, the avtoritet (‘authority’). In the 1990s, everything was up for grabs, and the new vory reached out with both hands. State assets were privatized for kopeks on the ruble, businesses forced to pay for protection that they might not need, and, as the Iron Curtain fell, the Russian gangsters crashed out into the rest of the world.

Since the restoration of central authority under President Vladimir Putin from 2000, the new vory have adapted again, taking a lower profile, even working for the state. In the process, Russian organized crime has become at once an international bugbear, a global brand and a contested concept. Some see in it an informal arm of the Kremlin, with Russia airily dismissed as a ‘mafia state’. To others, the descendants of the vory are just an inchoate collection of troublesome but unremarkable gangsters. Watch Western media representations, though, and you would be tempted to see them as a global threat in every arena, the most savage of thugs, the most cunning of hackers, the most skilled of killers. The irony is that almost all of these perceptions are true in some ways, even if often misleading or mobilized for the wrong reasons.

The challenge of Russian organized crime is a formidable one. At home, it undermines efforts to control and diversify the Russian economy. It is a brake on efforts to bring better governance to Russia. It has penetrated the financial and political structures of the country and also tarnishes the ‘national brand’ abroad (the Russian gangster and corrupt businessman are ubiquitous stereotypes). It is also a global challenge. Russian or Eurasian organized crime – however this may be defined – operates actively, aggressively and entrepreneurially around the world as one of the most dynamic forces within the new transnational underworld. It arms insurgents and gangsters, traffics drugs and people, and peddles every criminal service from money laundering to computer hacking. It is as much a symptom as a cause of the failure of the Russian government and political elite to establish and empower the rule of law, while much of the rest of the world remains willing, indeed often delighted, to launder the gangsters’ cash and sell them expensive penthouse apartments.

There are 3 key themes of this book.

1. Russian gangsters are unique, emerging through times of rapid political, social and economic change – from the fall of the tsars, through Stalin’s whirlwind of modernization, to the collapse of the USSR – which brought specific pressures and opportunities. While on one level a gangster is a gangster throughout the world, and arguably the Russians are becoming part of an increasingly homogenized global underworld, the culture, structures and activities of the Russian criminals were for a long time distinctive, not least in their relationship to mainstream society.
2. The second central theme is that the gangsters hold up a dark mirror to Russian society. Exploring the evolution of the Russian underworld also says something about Russian history and culture, and is especially meaningful today, at a time when the boundaries between crime, business and politics are important but all too often indistinct.
3. Russian gangsters have not only been shaped by a changing Russia, they have also shaped it. Part of the value of this book is, I hope, to address the myths about criminal dominance of the new Russia, but at the same time to look at the ways that its ‘upperworld’ has been influenced by its underworld. As tattooed ex-convicts are replaced by a new breed of globally minded criminal-businessmen, does this represent the house-training of the gangsters or the criminalization of Russia’s economy and society? Is this a ‘mafia state’ – and what does that even mean?

Do the gangsters run Russia? No, of course not, and I have met many determined, dedicated Russian police officers and judges committed to the struggle against them. However, businesses and politicians alike use many methods that owe more to the vorovskoi mir than legal practice, the state hires hackers and arms gangsters to fight its wars, and you can hear vor songs and vor slang on the streets. Even President Putin uses it from time to time to reassert his streetwise credentials. Perhaps the real question, with which this book ends, is not so much how far the state has managed to tame the gangsters, but how far the values and practices of the vory have come to shape modern Russia.

Vanka Kain, gangster, kidnapper, burglar and sometime informant, was the scourge of Moscow in the 1730s and 1740s. When Princess Elizabeth seized power in a coup in 1741, she offered amnesties to outlaws willing to turn on their colleagues. Kain eagerly seized the opportunity to wash away the taint of almost a decade’s crimes. While officially becoming a government informant and thief taker, Kain actually continued his crimes, corrupting his handlers at the Sysknoi prikaz, the Investigators’ Bureau. But such relationships acquire their own consuming dynamic. He began by simply gifting them a share of his loot, usually imported luxuries such as Italian scarves and Rhenish wine. Over time, his handlers grew greedier and more demanding, and Kain was forced into increasingly daring and dangerous crimes to satisfy them. Eventually this came to light and Kain was tried and sentenced to a lifetime’s hard labor. Kain became a romantic hero in Russian folklore. Of course, the criminal as hero appears in popular culture throughout the world, from Robin Hood to Ned Kelly. But unlike Robin Hood, the Russian thief is not fighting against an exploitative usurper. He is not misunderstood, not a victim of a deprived childhood, not a good man in a bad spot. He is just an ‘honest thief’ in a world where the only distinction is between those thieves who are honest about what they are and those who hide their self-interested criminality beneath boyars’ capes, bureaucrats’ uniforms, judges’ robes and businessmen’s suits, whichever best fits the times. Kain’s story could be that of a twentieth-century vor, or even today’s: the gangster whom the authorities think they can control, yet who ends up corrupting them. Swap horses for BMWs, and fur capes for tracksuits, and Kain’s story could be played out in post-Soviet Russia without a hint of anachronism.

Some criminals revel in their history, even if it is typically mythologised, romanticised or simply invented. Thus, the Chinese triads represent themselves as the descendants of a centuries-long tradition of secret societies struggling against unjust tyrants. The yakuza claim their roots are not in the bandit kabuki mono (‘crazy ones’) who terrorized seventeenth-century Japan or the hired thugs of gambling and pedlar bosses, but the chivalrous samurai warrior caste and the public-spirited machi yakko (‘servants of the town’) militias formed to resist the kabuki mono.3 By contrast, modern Russian organized crime seems to revel in its very ahistoricity, lacking even a folklorish interest in its past. Eschewing memorialization of its culture (as opposed to its current members4), it places itself firmly in the today and turns its back on its history. Even the traditional criminal culture of the vorovskoi mir, rich in gory and brutal folklore and customs generated and transmitted within the Gulag prison camps, is being put aside,

One of the lessons of the historical evolution of Russian organized crime is that it emerged from a society in which the state has often been clumsy, threadbare, deeply corrupt – but also fundamentally ruthless, unconstrained by the niceties of legality and process, and willing to use often extravagant amounts of violence to protect its interests when it felt challenged. In the 1990s, it may have seemed for a while that the criminals were in charge. However, under Vladimir Putin, the state has re-emerged with a vengeance, and this has affected both crime and perceptions of crime.

There were, arguably, two ways Russian organized crime could have evolved, two potential precursors, one rural and one urban. In the 19^th century, rural banditry looked as if it might have the greater potential. After all, this was a country almost impossible to police. By the end of the 19^th century, tsarist Russia covered almost one-sixth of the world’s landmass. The population of 171 million (1913) overwhelmingly comprised peasants and was scattered across this huge country, often in small, isolated villages and communities. Simply for orders or warrants from the capital, St Petersburg, to reach Vladivostok on the Pacific coast could take weeks, even by horse relay. The railway, telegraph and telephone were to help, but the size of this country has been an obstacle to effective governance in many ways. Furthermore, the empire was a patchwork of different climates and cultures incorporated largely by conquest. Lenin dubbed it the ‘prison of nations’, but the Soviet state willingly accepted this imperial inheritance and even today’s smaller Russian Federation is a multi-ethnic conglomeration of more than a hundred national minorities.

The empire embraced some 200 nationalities, with Slavs accounting for two-thirds of the whole. Law enforcement had to deal with a wide range of local legal cultures, often espoused by peoples to whom the tsarist order was an alien and brutal occupier, as well as the practical challenges of apprehending criminals who could travel across jurisdictions. This might have been mitigated if adequate resources had been deployed to this purpose, but this was a state that policed on the cheap. After all, Russia’s state has historically been relatively poor, inefficient in its revenue collection and perched upon an often marginal economy. Spending on the police and the courts tended to take a distant second place to the military.

Successive tsars tried and failed to police their country. From the Razboinaya izba or Banditry Office established by Ivan the Terrible (reigned 1533–84) to the rural and urban forces established by Nicholas I (reigned 1825–55), all proved unequal to the task and the state’s grip on the countryside was always minimal, largely confined to suppressing uprisings, and dependent on the support (and hired guards) of the local gentry. The police – both urban and rural – tended to be an entirely reactive force, suffering from a lack of people and resources, poor training and morale, high turnover, endemic corruption (all in part symptoms of salaries worse than an unskilled laborer’s11) and minimal popular support. Furthermore, they were burdened with a whole range of additional duties which distracted them from policing, from the supervision of church worship to organizing military recruitment. The standard ‘summaries’ of police duties published in the 1850s ran to some 400 pages apiece!

Russian officials were often implicitly expected to practice what in medieval times had been called kormleniye (‘feeding’). In other words, they were not expected to live off their inadequate salaries, but to supplement them with side deals and judicious bribe taking. Legend has it that Tsar Nicholas I told his son, ‘I believe you and I are the only people in Russia who don’t steal.’ The first government inquiry into corruption was not conducted until 1856 and its view was that anything less than 500 rubles should not even be considered a bribe at all, merely a polite expression of thanks.  At this time, a rural police commissioner was paid 422 rubles a year.

Russia has faced widespread rebellions at times, such as the Pugachev Rising of 1773–4 or the 1905 Revolution, but more common were localized cases of violence, such as the depredations of outlaws or the visitations of the ‘red rooster’ (slang for arson, a crime used by peasants as ‘an effective weapon of social control and a language of protest within their communities, as well as against those they deemed outsiders’).

Order in the village was largely the preserve of samosud (‘self-judging’), a surprisingly nuanced form of lynch law, whereby the members of the commune applied their own moral code to offenders, regardless or even in defiance of the state’s laws.  This sometimes brutal form of social control was essentially geared towards protecting the interests of the community: those crimes which threatened the survival or social order of the village were dealt with most harshly. In particular, that meant horse theft, which threatened the very future of the village, by depriving it of a source of foals, power, transport and, in due course, meat and leather. Death was the usual penalty, and often in some notably painful and inventive way.

The state resented and feared the notion of peasants taking the law into their own hands, but there was very little it could do, given the strength of the peasants’ own moral code and the practical difficulties of mounting day-to-day policing of such a huge country. The police were thinly stretched across the countryside, did not seem able to promise real justice or restitution (tellingly, only around 10% of stolen horses were recovered) and rarely made great efforts to win themselves friends in the village.

The internal control mechanisms of the village – tradition, family, respect for the elders and ultimately samosud – ensured that the absence of effective state policing did not mean outright lawlessness. The most common rural crimes, beyond petty interpersonal squabbles of the kind usually resolved by the commune itself, were those such as poaching or theft of wood from the landlords’ or tsar’s forests, with which the peasants’ moral code saw nothing wrong. These offenses accounted for 70% of male property convictions in late tsarist Russia.  The landlord had more than enough wood for his personal needs. Serfs had to be ‘on guard against their masters, who were constantly acting towards them with open and shameless bad faith’, and so they in turn would ‘compensate themselves by artifice what they suffer through injustice’.

The real problem was in the countryside. There, 1,582 rural constables and 6,874 uryadniki were expected to patrol Russia’s immense rural hinterland and keep almost 90 million people in line. On average, each was thus responsible for some 55,000 peasants! As a result, the countryside was open to settled or wandering bandit gangs, sometimes rooted in a community and preying on outsiders, otherwise happy to rob from anyone and everyone. This was hardly new: banditry has long been a feature of Russian life.

The horse thief lived a violent, dangerous life, at risk from both the police and peasant lynch mobs. He would typically form a gang and take over a village, then establish complex networks for trading stolen horses into other regions where they would not be recognized. These horse-rustling gangs had to have the numbers, strength and cunning to evade not just the authorities but, far more dangerous, the peasants themselves. In some cases, they numbered several hundred members.

One investigator  wrote of the gang led by a Kubikovsky, which included almost 60 criminals and an underground cavern where they could hide as many as 50 horses.  The gangs – much like modern car thieves – needed to be able to conceal their original ownership (typically by selling them to a horse trader who could rebrand them and hide them amongst his regular stock) or else resell them far enough away from their original owner that it would be impossible for them to be traced. In some cases, the horse thieves operated as primitive protection racketeers, demanding tribute in return for leaving communities’ horses alone.

Faced with the very real threat of attacks and the economic costs to the community of having to mount constant guard on their precious horses, as well as the absence of effective state police, many regarded paying such ‘tax’ – or hiring a horse thief as a herder, which also gave him the opportunity to hide stolen horses amongst those of the village – as the lesser evil. Horse thieves were sometimes caught, whether by the peasants or the police, but overall they prospered, growing in numbers in the years leading up to the Great War as part of a wider tide of rural crime. While this was a specialized form of rural banditry, in their rough-and-ready way the horse thieves did represent a kind of organized crime. They operated with a clear sense of hierarchy and specialization, possessed distinct turfs of their own, maintained networks of informants, corrupted police officers, visited retribution on those who resisted or informed on them and traded stolen horses with other gangs and corrupt ‘legitimate’ dealers. The more successful ones operated for years, and while they may have developed links with local communities, whether through extortion or as neighbors and protectors, they undoubtedly were not of the community, and in many cases recruited broadly, drawing on runaways, ex-convicts, deserters and petty outlaws.

The First World War made dealing in horses difficult and dangerous, given the extent to which they were being bought and requisitioned for the army, and the chaos of revolution (1917), and the consequent civil war (1918–22) and famine (1920–2), further disrupted their commercial networks. Rural gangs were able to thrive for a while in this period of relative anarchy, a few becoming virtual bandit armies. In some cases individual bandits or even gangs ended up being coopted into the military or administrative structures of one side or another: just as Vanka Kain for a while worked for the state, so too did notorious criminals such as St Petersburg’s Lyonka Panteleyev, who for a while served in the Cheka, the Bolshevik political police, before likewise returning to a life of crime (and being shot in 1923 for his pains). However, as the Soviet regime began to assert its authority over the countryside, these bandits faced unprecedented pressure from the state.

In the whirlwind of Stalinist terror and collectivization rural criminality once again became a serious challenge.

Not 20 minutes’ walk from the Kremlin was the Khitrovka, perhaps the most notorious slum in all Russia. It was a magnet for newly arrived hopefuls and dispossessed peasants, at once desperate for a place to seek work and prey for urban predators of every kind. The urban gangster was a product of the slums of a rapidly urbanizing late-tsarist Russia, the so-called yamy, where life was cheap and miserable. It was in the drinking dens and dosshouses of the yamy that the subculture of the vorovskoi mir emerged, the ‘thieves’ world’. Its code, of separation from and contempt for mainstream society and its values – nation, church, family, charity – became one of the few unifying forces within this milieu, and would become a central part of the macho beliefs of the twentieth-century Russian vory. It was a realm of runaway serfs and army deserters, impoverished soldiers’ widows (who often became fences, buying and selling stolen goods) and opportunistic bandits.

Russian towns were reshaped by rapid industrialization and expansion as waves of migrant workers flocked in from the villages. It was characterized by massive turnover in populations, anomie, a loss of old moral norms and a sense of invisibility amongst all these new faces.

As Russia’s population grew, the proportion of landless peasants almost trebled. For many, moving to the city for a season or even to start a whole new life was simply an economic necessity.

Odessa was ‘perhaps the most police-ridden city in a police-ridden Russia’ and certainly it proved a dangerous environment for revolutionaries – and yet it also became a byword for crime of every kind. The explanation for this seeming paradox is that the police, in Odessa and elsewhere, concentrated on political crimes and securing the well-to-do parts of the cities. In the poor neighborhoods, they chose largely to turn a blind eye to many offences, unless the crimes were especially serious or impinged on the interests of the state or wealthier classes. Mass brawls between rival gangs or workers’ groups were quite a frequent and almost ritual occurrence, for example, and they were often allowed to play themselves out to their usual bruised and bloody conclusion: only when they were staged in the center of town were they likely to be broken up.

There came a time of creeping martial law, as the tsarist state increasingly sought to side-step its own legal system by relying on emergency powers, through the declarations of ‘extraordinary guard’. These gave governors and gradonachalniki sweeping powers but they were largely used in the suppression of protest, not in extending their role or redefining the notion of the maintenance of public order.

Moscow had one officer per 276 citizens, comparing well with Berlin (325:1) and Paris (336:1).  More than half of its police posts unmanned. The figures also include ‘dead souls’ introduced by fraudulent commanders (so that they could pocket those ringers’ pay) as well as policemen who never pounded the beat but were actually permanently appropriated by senior officers to act as their messengers, cooks and batmen. Weissman suggests that in the towns and cities beyond Moscow and St Petersburg, the ratio was often 700:1 or even worse, a situation exacerbated by rapid urbanization.

Not only were there not enough police, but the Russians failed to make the best use of them, keeping them badly trained and inefficiently deployed. Street cops rarely patrolled like their European or North American counterparts. They simply manned guard posts, each generally within earshot of the next, and waited for trouble to be reported to them or nearby. This passive approach made police more like security guards  than active public protectors.

An artel was a voluntary group pooling its labor and resources to a common end. Sometimes it was made up of peasants from the same village who migrated together to seek work in the cities, sometimes a work crew paid collectively for their overall production. In this way, the artel was a way of recreating the mutual support of the peasant commune, but in smaller and more mobile form. Typically, an artel would have an elected leader, a starosta (‘elder’ – although this was an honorific rather than chronological term), who negotiated with employers, handled common arrangements (such as renting accommodation) and distributed any profits. Artely typically had their own customs, rules and hierarchies, often reflecting those of their home villages.

Within the yamy, a new generation would be born into a life of crime. The children of the cohorts of prostitutes would, for example, be rented out when new-born babies as usefully heartstring-tugging accessories to the city’s beggars, before eventually graduating into begging themselves. At least they had a parent and perhaps even a home: many of the uncared-for children lived on the streets, sleeping in rubbish bins or fighting over a discarded barrel for shelter. The children would play ‘thief’, a common and popular game, before in due course moving into more active participation in the underworld, from standing as a lookout to becoming one of the wily and agile children used to wriggle through open windows to carry out burglaries.  There was a bewildering array of such specialisms, from the pickpockets to the common burglars and those who snatched travelers’ bags from the tops of carriages. With specialization also came hierarchy, as underworld professions became increasingly differentiated.

The taverns of Odessa’s port district acted as virtual labor exchanges, at which contractors and artel bosses could recruit whoever they needed for that day or week, so too did the drinking dens of the yamy become places where loot and information were exchanged, muscle hired and deals struck. Meanwhile, tavern keepers cultivated profitable sidelines in their own right, as fences and bankers to their shadowy clientele.

A rigidly hierarchical tsarist society, in which officials from clerks to station masters had their uniforms and place, was reflected in an underworld which not only had its own castes and ranks but also learned to turn the characteristics of the ‘upperworld’ against itself. The fraudsters were the acknowledged aristocrats of the vorovskoi mir, because they could pass as the well-to-do or even aristocrats, and then rob their betters blind. They were typically smart, sometimes very well educated – just as modern Russian organized crime includes people with PhDs – and demonstrated that the corrupt, oligarchic nature of tsarist Russia meant that, if you could persuade people that you had power, you could get away with anything. T

he parallels with modern Russia are striking, especially as these conmen also acted as patrons, bankers and brokers for the thuggish gangsters, just as many contemporary Russian businessmen can, when they need to, whistle up a corrupt cop or judge or a handful of leg breakers in leather jackets.

Stalin was not a product of the university or the salon. He rubbed shoulders with outlaws and gangsters, and as a revolutionary he was a key figure in the campaign of ‘expropriations’ – violent bank robberies – to raise funds for the Bolshevik Party. More than just a bloody page in Russia’s thoroughly gory revolutionary history, this underlines a key phenomenon: the extent to which the Bolsheviks – and Stalin in particular – were willing to use criminals as allies and agents. In the process, they would not only bargain away the soul of the revolution for immediate gain, they would also set the scene for the transformation of the country’s underworld, a process that would even help shape the Russia that emerged from seventy years of Soviet rule in 1991.

If Lenin had shot more criminals and hired fewer, we might have seen a very different Soviet Union.

When the Provisional Government committed itself to continuing to fight, the Bolsheviks’ slogan of ‘Peace, Bread, Land’ offered enough to the soldiers, workers and peasants so that at the very least they saw little reason to stand in their way. Lenin’s Red Guard seized the main cities and declared a new government – and then the real problems began. Although able to negotiate, at terrible cost, an end to Russia’s involvement in the Great War, the new government would soon find itself embroiled in a vicious and confusing civil war. Against the Reds (and sometimes against each other) fought a motley array of monarchists, constitutional democrats, nationalists, anarchists, foreign forces, warlords and rival revolutionaries. The Russian Civil War of 1918–22 was the formative moment for the Bolsheviks and in many ways their abiding tragedy. Their reformist impulses and idealism were sacrificed in the name of survival, and, while the Reds won the war, they lost their soul. What was left was a brutal, disciplined and militarized regime, in which the cynical and the ruthless would rise fast and far.

No wonder that all manner of bandits and thugs joined the Bolshevik cause, and took to professing Marxism in the name of career opportunity. Even many Bolsheviks were alarmed to see the Cheka, their first political police force, becoming, in the words of Alexander Olminsky, a haven for ‘criminals, sadists, and degenerate elements from the lumpen proletariat’.  In 1918, robberies and murders were 10 to 15 times the prewar level.

Lenin himself was not immune to the lawlessness of the period. He, his sister Mariya and his sole bodyguard, Ivan Chabanov, were being driven in his official Rolls-Royce when they were flagged down by men in uniform.  These men turned out to be the notorious gangster Yakov Kuznetsov (known as ‘Yakov Purses’) and his associates, who needed a suitable car for a robbery. When asked ‘What’s the matter? I am Lenin’, the gangster replied, ‘So what if you’re Levin? I’m Purses, and I’m the boss of this city at night.’ So Kuznetsov simply appropriated the car, various documents and Chabanov’s gun. Shortly thereafter, looking through the papers, he realized he had passed up the chance to bag a valuable prize, and doubled back with the thought of taking Lenin as a hostage. By then, though, Chabanov had spirited him away. What followed was a massive manhunt, with Kuznetsov repeatedly slipping through the authorities’ fingers, before finally falling to a hail of bullets in July. Here is his claim to fame, as the man who could have changed the course of Soviet history, had he only known who Lenin was.

The bitter violence, chaos and hardships of the civil war were piled on the existing woes generated by the Great War. Millions were displaced by both wars, and for years to come the country roiled with individual and group migration. This created whole new opportunities for criminals: to lose themselves in the human tides, and to prey on people adrift, whom no one knew or would miss.

One particularly poignant challenge was what to do with the millions of homeless and abandoned children who often formed gangs simply to survive. There were already some 2.5 million of them by the start of 1917, but the perfect storm of revolution, epidemic, famine and war that then blew through Russia brought the figure to an extraordinary 7 million or more.  This continued through the 1920s, and bring with it the associated challenges of begging, theft and even violence. Tales abounded of gangs of teenagers or even younger children not only engaging in petty theft but mobbing and sometimes killing victims in gangs 10, 20, 30 strong. Too often the authorities had to turn to tough measures to round them up. Many of had become habitual drug users even before they were in their teens, and begun to emulate the adults of the vorovskoi mir by their use of tattoos and nicknames.

The rise of private enterprise also generated its own criminal opportunities, from fraud and tax evasion through to bandit predation on the new class of entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, they were having to cope with the consequences of the opening up of tsarist prisons and the loss or destruction of many records from the time. Violent gangsters walked free, only to reprise their old repertoires. The gang of Vasily Kotov and Grigory Morozov, for example, terrorized Kursk province in 1920–2. They swooped on isolated estates and farms, murdered everyone inside – Morozov himself favored an axe for this – and looted whatever they could find. In 1922, they came to Moscow and in a three-week orgy of violence killed 32 people before fleeing the city.

Once the immediate needs of the civil war began to recede, the Bolshevik state began again to take regular crime more seriously. Under the infamous Article 49 of the Criminal Code, introduced in 1922, people began to be rounded up on the basis of often quite petty crimes, such as shoplifting, or even their connections with what was called a ‘criminal milieu’, and banished from the six main cities

Famine and chaos in the countryside, as a result of Stalin’s collectivization campaign (effectively seizing control of farmland for the state), led to a resurgence of sending children as young as eight to the labor camps.

Stalin’s whirlwind of terror, industrialization and incarceration would revolutionize the vorovskoi mir. At the Gulag system of labor camps, millions of zeki convict laborers felled trees, dug canals and mined coal in the name of modernization. How many? We do not really know, but Anne Applebaum suggests a figure of 28.7 million through the Stalin era as a ‘low estimate’.  There was nothing secret about the arrests and the Gulag system, with convicts working even in the major cities (Moscow’s sublime metro system was built on the backs of this hellish modern slavery). The principle of arresting people in the early hours was not only a matter of practicality, catching them when they were likely to be home and at their most vulnerable. It was also part of this whole theater of terror: the arrival of a vehicle outside at a time when the streets were virtually empty except for the ‘black raven’ vans of the political police, boots echoing in the stairwell, a hammering on a door, the cries of children, protestations, the stern commands of the authorities. One person may be arrested, but a whole apartment block would be suffused with terror and the shameful relief that this time it was someone else.

Many zeki were ‘58ers’, political prisoners swept up by the infamous Article 58 of the Criminal Code on ‘counter-revolutionary acts’, which could be anything from telling a joke about Stalin to being associated with someone who had just fallen out of favor. Others were either petty criminals, or so-called bytoviki, ‘everyday-lifers’, whose crimes were just those everyone ended up committing, from getting to work late to filching a little food in the middle of a famine.

But then there were also the true criminals, the vory, and the existing culture of the vorovskoi mir was magnified and communicated as they were thrown together in the camps, in etap (prisoner transport convoy) trucks and train carriages, and in the transit stations along their routes. Prisoners were, after all, routinely moved around, whether to disperse dangerous concentrations, relieve overcrowding or meet new economic needs. Through this constant mingling of criminals from across the Soviet Union, the vorovskoi mir became ever more homogeneous and interconnected, a veritable ‘gangster archipelago’. In the process, the camp system strengthened and transmitted this distinctive subculture, at once enforcing and teaching underworld orthodoxy.

 

In its own vicious way, the Stalin regime was bringing about rapid urbanization and industrialization and, as during late tsarism, this generated increased specialization and stratification within the underworld, just as for the rest of society.  A key part of the job of a vor v zakone was to be both an exemplar of the demanding code of the thieves and responsible for policing it by fierce and exacting means. If a wannabe vor acquired a tattoo to which he was not entitled, he might be killed, or simply have the offending piece of skin cut from his body. Often, though, the discipline was internal. A thief in the Kolyma camp, for example, lost three fingers on his left hand because he had failed to make good on a bet (an almost sacred obligation within the vorovskoi mir).

 

The hard core of vory, a minority even amongst the criminals, contented themselves largely with preying on the petty and political prisoners. They terrorized and abused them, stealing their food and clothing, forcing them from the warmer bunks in the barracks, beating, even raping, with virtual impunity. Unsurprisingly, they also forced the other prisoners to do their work, as it was against the code of the vorovskoi mir to lift a finger for the state and feign illness, mutilate himself or as a last resort defy the clubs and guns of the guards before he bent before them.

 

These thieves who preyed on the ordinary convicts were soon preyed on by others, thanks to the culture spawned by Stalin.  If there was one crucial, and ultimately fatal, weakness in the code of the vorovskoi mir, it was the absolute ban on any form of cooperation with the state. This helped define the thieves and build their coherent subculture, but in an age of totalitarian dreams and massive state power, it was to prove increasingly untenable.

 

The answer was to co-opt the worst underworld elements as agents and trustees to keep the 58ers and the 49ers, the political prisoners and petty criminals respectively, controlled and working. There were, of course, still regular prison guards, but the lion’s share of managing the Gulag population was in effect subcontracted to inmates. Trusties were much more likely to be put into administrative roles involving contact with the outside world, or allowed to move around ‘de-convoyed’ beyond camp walls. To some, this was an occasional chance to forage for food, to loaf or even to snatch a quick drink. For others, though, it was a chance to build criminal networks between worlds.

 

When Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, many within the Gulags ended up in the Red Army, In the first three years of the war, almost a million Gulag inmates were transferred into the Red Army. The vory and regular criminals who had served in the army and were now considered to have broken their code were joined by maybe half a million former soldiers and partisans whose ‘crime’ had been to be captured by the enemy when Stalin expected – demanded – that they fight to the death. For them, ‘liberation’ meant an inglorious transfer from a foreign prison camp to a Soviet one. Over a third of a million Red Army soldiers ended up in the NKVD’s ‘verification and filtration camps’.  As the Kremlin closed its fist on central Europe, there were waves of Balts, Poles and others who ended up in the Gulag, whether because they had fought against the Soviets or simply because they were patriots whose presence would be inconvenient as new puppet regimes were installed.

 

In terms of the big picture, the collaborators won, for a variety of reasons. They often had numbers on their side, and the ex-soldiers brought with them military experience: the blatnye might be tough individually, but so were their enemies, and many of them were used to fighting as units. Perhaps most importantly, the suki had the support of the regime. The authorities found a variety of ways to tilt the balance, whether by allowing them to dominate camp careers such as cook and barber – which meant knives and razors – or by giving them access to work tools such as axes and shovels. They could also move groups of prisoners like armies in the field, concentrating them in individual camps until they had wiped out the blatnye there, and then moving them on to the next.  Nonetheless, win they did, and reshaped the vorovskoi mir in their own image. They retained most of the code, and the culture of brazen and merciless dog-eat-dog predation, but they rewrote the prohibition on collaboration with the state. It now became permissible, so long as it was in the criminal’s interest.

 

The way would be open for a new generation of vory to collaborate with dishonest Party functionaries when they felt it was in their interests. This was Stalin’s toxic legacy to the Soviet Union.

 

The evidence suggests that the distinctive culture of the vorovskoi mir did not die out in the 1960s, but certainly became far less powerful and ubiquitous, only to be recreated as the vory reinvented themselves from the 1970s onwards. As such, their folkways would be a pallid and half-remembered reflection of the powerful, vital and brutal culture of the vory’s heyday.

 

For some of Stalin’s Gulags, those deep in the northern wastes or thick Siberian pine forests, the final layer of security was not the barbed-wire fences, not guards’ guns, not the specially bred dogs, not even the local indigenous people paid handsome bounties for runaway prisoners. Instead, it was the very remoteness of the locations, the prospect of days and days on the run, often in the most trying conditions, without finding human habitation, anywhere to buy, beg or steal food. Hence in some cases blatnye desperate to escape would befriend a fellow prisoner outside their culture and invite him to flee along with them. Unbeknown to him, the companion’s actual role was to be a walking larder, eventually to be killed and eaten when needs must, in a grotesque piece of inhuman pragmatism that truly put the vor into ‘carnivore’.

 

Even in the early 20^th century, the Russian language spoken by commoners was still fragmented, branched into countless local dialects. Yet both the spoken and visual languages of the vorovskoi mir were largely universal, promulgated not just in the yamy and the drinking dens but perhaps most importantly in the prison system. Thieves’ tattoos drew often upon traditional visual themes, not least religious iconography. However, given that classic motifs included naked and voluptuous Virgin Marys and angels enjoying oral sex, the intent was clearly deliberately sacrilegious. Later, new forms of blasphemy became popular: Nazi swastikas or obscene caricatures of Marx, Lenin or Stalin had a similar consciously iconoclastic intent.

 

The most extreme tattoos, such as barbed wire across the forehead or ‘don’t wake’ on the eyelids, could hardly be hidden – and that was intentional. The extensive tattooing, often done in the Gulag with makeshift needles sanitized simply by being passed through a flame and using ink mixed from soot and urine, was done to symbolize not just a permanent commitment to the vorovskoi mir, but also manliness. It was painful and carried the risk of septicaemia. The aforementioned ‘don’t wake’ tattoo involved sliding a spoon under the eyelid before starting the inking. You needed to demonstrate your willingness to endure pain and risk your life, as well as your separation from the world to be a true vor.

 

Tattoos on the shoulders, for example, expressed a commitment never to wear epaulettes – symbols of military rank and also of the voyenshchina – while stars on the knees symbolised a refusal to kneel before the authorities.  Gulag tattooists were a privileged group, prized not just for their skill and their ability to scrounge and assemble the necessary ink and implements, but also their almost sacral role as the chroniclers on the flesh of thieves’ identities, accomplishments and ambitions. Inmates with this talent might find themselves protected even if they were muzhiki or politicals. This was, for example, the saving grace for Thomas Sgovio, an American Communist who moved to the USSR, buoyed by a sense of mission, and who was then arrested in 1938 when he tried to reclaim his US passport on seeing just how this workers’ paradise was turning out. Sent to the Kolyma labor complex, he was fortunate enough to be able to demonstrate his skill as a tattooist, which helped win him food and protection from the criminals around him.

 

 

Rituals, games and tattoos were not the only identifiers of this subculture. Senior vory often affected particular styles of dress. In the Gulags, demonstrating that you could still find and retain particular items of clothing had a particular significance, as it attested to your authority, protection, connections or outright toughness.

 

Their culture was an often horrifically misogynistic culture, exalting a caricature of manliness in which women were confined to the roles of idealized mother, wanton prostitute, helpless victim, gangster’s moll or excluded outsider. From the portrayals of women in their tattoos – typically naked and sexualized – to the sentimental stanzas of their songs, the thieves might affect to revere or despise women, but never to respect them.

 

Although efforts were made to keep male and female prisoners apart, camp memoirs are depressingly packed with accounts of not just one-off rapes but women forced, through violence, intimidation or the prospect of slightly better – more survivable – conditions, into sexual relationships with blatnye, officials and those whose occupations gave them even a slight degree of privilege and impunity.

has ever sent so much as a kopek to his mother or made any attempt to help her on his own.’

 

It is a perverse irony that the true midwives of organized crime in today’s Russia are to be found in an unlikely and disparate trinity of Soviet general secretaries: Stalin the tyrant, Brezhnev the manager and Gorbachev the reformer. Stalin created the collaborator-criminal willing to work with self-interested elements of the elite. Brezhnev presided over a Soviet Union characterized by corruption and the black market, turning the new vory increasingly towards the informal economy. And Gorbachev shattered the state, but also unleashed new market forces that the vory would prove best placed to exploit.

 

The black market in Moscow had grown exponentially, and the tsekhoviki, the ‘shopmen’, who ran it were doing well for themselves. Gangs run by Karkov in the late 1960s and early 70s were the terror of Moscow’s black market magnates and began to burgle the tsekhoviki’s apartments, confident that their victims could not go to the police lest they had to explain how they had accumulated the cash and luxuries that were taken. Then, they graduated to extortion, demanding payment in return for a peaceful life and kidnapping those who refused or who had hidden away their ill-gotten gains.

 

Having taken to wearing police uniforms to access people’s homes without question, Karkov’s men also began using the same tactic to seize their victims. The tsekhoviki would then be driven out of town, typically into the woods or to abandoned houses, and tortured with sadistic ferocity until they broke: burned with hot irons; hung from trees and only cut down when nearly asphyxiated; even nailed into a coffin, which the burly, drug-addicted thug bearing the imaginative nickname ‘The Executioner’ would then begin to saw in two, as if in a magic trick.

 

Meanwhile, with the rise to power of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, the corruption of the Communist Party and the pervasiveness of the underground economy only deepened. Karkov was the first seriously to appreciate the extent to which the rise of the black market, facilitated by the corruption of the Party, was creating a new class of underground entrepreneurs who were cash rich but protection poor, such that they were ripe for exploitation.  Karkov’s true legacy was not just a new generation of vory but also a whole new criminal world in which they would operate. This alliance would be crucial in the 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s quixotic reform program would in practice doom the state and empower the gangsters.

 

On 5 March 1953, Stalin succumbed to a stroke, cardiac hemorrhage and paranoia (the last because his suspicion of potential assassins meant he forbade unauthorized entry into his rooms and so lay dying for hours before anyone realized). The Soviet Union he bequeathed to his successor was a perverse collection of paradoxes. It was an unquestioned superpower, a nuclear one at that, with an empire in eastern Europe. It had industrialized and electrified, brought literacy to the masses, made the steppe sprout grain and the tundra give forth gold and timber. Yet this had been on the basis of murderous mass terror, and it left the countryside scarred with Gulags, prisons and mass graves, and the Soviet psyche shadowed with habits of collaboration, opportunism and automatic defensiveness.

 

If everyone owned everything, then surely no one owned anything, and how could it be theft if no one owned it? Everyone stole what they could, and even if they could not steal goods, they stole time, disappearing from work to queue up for food, or moonlighting off the books.

 

Much of the dramatic increase in lawlessness across the Soviet Union – 552,281 recorded crimes in 1953, 745,812 by 1957 – was accounted for by the inevitable chaos when 5 million convicts were suddenly dumped into the country, with minimal assistance.

 

Outside the labor camp system, though, the biggest gang in town was undoubtedly the Communist Party and the opportunists who had risen under Stalin. David Remnick calls it ‘the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known’, a view shared in the underworld. As the professional pickpocket ‘Zhora the Engineer’ put it, ‘there certainly is a Soviet mafia. And it’s organized a hell of a lot better than the American mafia. But it has another name. It’s called the Communist Party. We wouldn’t dream of trying to compete with it.’

 

The state was authoritarian and possessed – in the form of the militsiya (police) and the political police (from 1954 known as the Committee of State Security, KGB) – the undoubted capacity to crack down on the gangsters if ever they became a challenge or an embarrassment.  Organized crime was atomized back to relatively small-scale ventures and, despite continued sporadic cases of armed robbery and the like, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the vory were very much kept in their place, and the general consensus is that the gangs which had first emerged in the 1950s were largely dismantled.

 

Without a critical mass of members, spread as they were now across the country, without the Gulags as forcing houses for a new generation, and without the ability to operate openly, the vorovskoi mir as a distinctive subculture began to die. Of course, there was still much crime, a great deal of it organized. But the vory’s strong sense of being separate from the rest of the population, of their status as the only true lyudi (‘people’), began to fade, along with the transmission of the code and folklore of the vorovskoi mir.

 

For perhaps 20 years, the thieves’ world would fade, gaining a mythological status at the expense of authenticity and power. It had adapted to Stalinism, though, so it would be revived, reinvented and reinterpreted again in the later Brezhnev and Gorbachev years, from the 1970s. It would re-emerge in an underworld dominated by the opportunities to be found in the informal economy and corruption, but also one with far fewer opportunities to use violence openly without incurring the wrath of the state.

 

The so-called ‘Kazan phenomenon’ – because it was first properly recognized in that city – followed a classic pattern, as adolescents clustered around territorial divisions, particular affiliations (such as following the same football team) or even large factories, to hang out and brawl. Indeed, this had been a staple of village life until the 1960s, and was simply transposed into the cities.  Sometimes, street gangs evolved into organized crime groups, monetising muscle by turning it into territorial control, or at least the capacity to extort rents from the local informal economy.

 

Even in its most primordial forms, organized crime endured, and it had a chance for a revival in the 1970s – to a large extent, ironically, thanks to the government that had tamed it. For all that it had the laws, the men and the guns, the state was also riddled with corruption and increasingly dependent on the black market to satisfy the needs of ordinary Soviets and elites alike. A second shadowy trinity emerged, of corrupt officials, gangsters and black marketeers. The Party was facing a prolonged period of stagnation and decay. Under General Secretary Brezhnev (1964–82), the scale of corruption within both the Party and society expanded dramatically. As the planned economy began to grind to a painful halt, the underground economy grew to compensate.  This was a natural by-product of the failures of the system: people turned to bribery, the black market and the economy of favors to fill in the gaps.

 

The institutionalized corruption of the Soviet elite not only increasingly made the state dysfunctional and ungovernable – and, as Gorbachev was to discover, unreformable – but it also contributed to the corruption of society as a whole.

 

James Heinzen has suggested that the Second World War was ‘a largely unrecognized turning point in fueling the kind of corruption that proved to be a hallmark of later periods of Soviet history’. With their careers and bonuses dependent on the unrealistic demands of the Five-Year Plan, managers and officials used illegal methods to meet their quotas (or at least to appear to). Most enterprises had their ‘fixer’, whose job it was to use his connections to get the labor, raw materials, spare parts, transport or whatever else was needed to reach the targets.  Within the workplace – from labor camp to government office – those with power also demanded tribute from those beneath them, for promotions, perks or just a quiet life.  Ordinary Soviet citizens paid bribes to get what they were entitled to but which was in short supply, and also to get other goods, services and opportunities to which they were not.

 

While on a micro-scale they empowered the individual, overall they simply passed wealth upwards, to the gatekeepers who could control access to defitsitny goods (ones in short supply), grant a job or a promotion, or approve a medical treatment. The so-called ‘socialist’ system actually became a pyramid of predation, as those at the bottom paid those at the top, often for what was no more than their legal due.  The dependence on clientelism, the lack of independent checks and balances, and the pervasive culture of illegality allowed rings of officials, especially in the regions, to organise schemes which would plunder the greatest piggy bank of all: the state itself.

 

Perhaps the crowning glory was the Uzbek cotton scandal, wherein local Party boss Sharaf Rashidov and a slate of Party and government officials in the central Asian republic of Uzbekistan, including the local KGB, were involved in a decade-long scam that embezzled some three billion rubles in payments for cotton that was never harvested, from fields and farms which did not exist. Claiming uncharacteristic efficiency and discipline, reports flowed back to Moscow of new irrigation networks dug, new fields planted and productivity records shattered. No wonder cotton was known as ‘white gold’, as thanks to the connivance of co-conspirators in Moscow – including Brezhnev’s son-in-law and deputy interior minister, the grossly overpromoted Yury Churbanov – they were able to conceal the minor detail that none of this alleged harvest actually existed.

 

In an era when even the most powerful and highly praised figures within the system were deeply and enthusiastically involved in corruption to maintain their privileged existences, is it any surprise that ordinary citizens, experiencing a relative decline in their standards of living, likewise turned to illegal means?

 

Black-markets could not have developed as far as they did without close ties with corrupt Party officials who needed these connections not just for their own survival, but often to gain access to raw materials, facilities and labor.  The greater part of the underground economy was domestic goods, whether diverted from official production or made in underground factories.

 

Many of those who built up business empires, which often prospered for years, did so working inside state structures and, frankly, making up for the failures of the planned economy. Mmost dangerously for the regime, they demonstrated the failings of the planned economy compared with the dynamism of the market, and encouraged widening networks of corruption and compromise. Such networks could, and did, reach to the very pinnacles of the system, but they often lacked the means to convert that into the money and consumer goods they craved. With their protection, the magnates of the underground economy could smuggle in foreign luxuries, deal in high-demand goods and set up workshops and factories to produce everything from counterfeit jeans to cigarettes. In the process, they became rich – but could not risk spending their ill-gotten gains unless they retained that protection. So the gangsters then became their middlemen. Through the 1960s and 1970s, they were in many ways the weakest of the three: they needed the black-market businessmen’s money and the Party bosses’ protection. But they also became indispensable, and knew how to parlay that into greater leverage and freedom.

 

The more they dealt with entrepreneurs, the more they had to come to understand the market and respond to new opportunities; the more they dealt with the state, the more they had to understand politics and demonstrate the capacity to resolve disputes and maintain discipline. From being the outcasts of the Gulags, the vory were moving closer to the heart of the Soviet system. And Gorbachev, alas, would unwittingly let them all the way in. His perestroika (restructuring) reforms would position them well to benefit from the very collapse of the USSR that his campaign would accelerate.

 

Three key aspects of the Gorbachev era were crucial in revolutionizing organized crime:

1. His well-intentioned but ill-conceived anti-alcohol campaign did for Soviet gangsters something a little like what prohibition did for their North American counterparts.
2. A limited liberalization of the economy and the creation of a new form of private business (the so-called cooperatives) provided the criminals with new victims for extortion and opportunities to launder all the cash they were making through alcohol sales.
3. The collapse in the authority of the state meant that just at the time when they were acquiring unprecedented financial and coercive resources – money and muscle – the criminals also faced no serious controls. They no longer had to rely on the payments of the black-market barons as they had their own sources of income; the corrupt Party bosses now needed their protection rather than the other way round. In short, the pyramid upended itself, leaving the gangsters on top for a while.

 

The anti-alcohol campaign was a naïve and mishandled attempt to address a serious issue: the levels of drunkenness that were reducing labor productivity and burdening the health system. Soviet citizens were the world’s heaviest drinkers, on average consuming the equivalent of 11.2 liters (3 gallons) of pure alcohol a year, and by 1980 the typical family spent up to a half of its household budget on drink.

 

There were some successes, to be sure. Time lost through alcohol-related disabilities fell 30% between 1984 and 1987, and drink-driving deaths fell by 20%. However, for too many Soviet citizens, alcohol had become an increasingly important, though destructive, escape from the drabness and hopelessness of everyday life. Already accustomed to using the black market to make up for the shortfalls of the legal economy, they turned nalevo for drink too.

 

Organized crime networks, which had for years become used to the ways of the informal economy, exploited the gap, gladly supplying imported, homebrewed, black market and stolen drink of every kind.

So great was the upsurge in illegal production of alcohol that it led to a nationwide shortage of sugar, which was needed for the process.  The vory played a key role in using their contacts to divert alcohol stocks from those factories which still ran to sell for inflated black-market prices, or even in some cases selling on drink that had been earmarked for destruction. Sometimes this was stolen by the gangsters themselves, or more often corrupt officials would write it off, but as they needed help getting it onto the black market, they had to turn to the vory.

 

For most people, the first time they ever knowingly encountered the vory was not as predators but as suppliers. The gangsters found themselves making more money than ever, in the unexpected role of friend and ally.  Because of course that is what they were. The criminals who first sold people alcohol were connected to wider black-market networks that allowed them also to supply other goods, from clothes and cigarettes to household goods and medicines, at a time of increasing scarcity and rationing. Furthermore, their connections to corrupt officials meant that they could also broker deals. It was not, after all, as though ordinary Soviet citizens had not had connections with black marketeers before, or that they had not used corruption to ease their lives. Instead, the obstacles had more to do with networks and trust. Did a particular person know whom to bribe for a particular service, did they have access, did they know the ‘right’ rate, could they trust the recipient?

 

The gangsters emerged as ad hoc brokers able to make the necessary connections and also, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, guaranteeing the transaction. They had a reputational stake in the deal going smoothly, not least as future business would depend on this.

 

People encouraged gangsters to diversify, after buying booze might ask about cigarettes or getting their daughter into a clinic. It became both enriching and a source of unexpected legitimation and revelation as they began to appreciate the new opportunities Gorbachev was unwittingly opening up to them. In an effort to tap the energies of the market, Gorbachev opened up the economy to cooperatives, small-scale private enterprises such as restaurants and services. A new generation of kooperativniki emerged,

in a way a legal counterpart to the black market’s tsekhoviki.

 

This new generation of would-be entrepreneurs represented a challenge to both an ossified orthodoxy and also the sweetheart deals on which the elite had come to rely. Whatever the Kremlin may have wanted for them, the kooperativniki faced hostility from the public, obstruction from local authorities and a willful refusal from the police to offer proper protection.  Looking for places to launder and reinvest their new-found wealth, and with the capacity to easily intimidate these vulnerable entrepreneurs, the gangsters were able to move into this sector on a massive scale. Protection rackets were rife. Many businesses were taken over or driven into the ground. By late 1989, the criminals controlled or were being paid off by an estimated 75% of cooperatives.

 

Criminals who until recently had depended largely on the black market and on black marketeers for their revenue found themselves increasingly financially solvent. Even these gangster-businessmen needed muscle, though, and amongst all the expressions of the grass-roots entrepreneurialism of the Gorbachev era, few were as pernicious as the rise of the professionals of coercion. Russian sociologist Vadim Volkov called them the ‘violent entrepreneurs’, who monetized their muscle, turning the will and capacity to use or threaten force into a resource. Groups with a particular and credible capacity to deploy violence became the basis for organized crime gangs. Three particular examples were sportsmen, unofficial bodybuilders and afgantsy, veterans of the Soviet Union’s ten-year (1979–88) war in Afghanistan.

 

At first, the police and authorities seemed to turn a blind eye to much of their violence. They saw in them a potential weapon against anti-government agitators, but by 1987–8, the police were beginning to crack down on them, but that only accelerated a trend that had already begun: the recruitment of these young toughs into organized crime gangs.

 

As for the afgantsy, they were typically marked by their experiences not only in war, but also in peace. Veterans of a conflict Moscow did not want to acknowledge (in the early years, the state flatly denied that there were Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan and veterans were ordered to keep quiet about it), they were often scapegoated by society and neglected by the state. Promises of proper medical attention, of jobs, of decent housing, all tended to be broken. This was less because of any real prejudice against them than because they were a politically marginalized group competing for resources in a time of extreme scarcity. Nonetheless, for many this led to a degree of ‘shadow socialization’ in which they actively turned against mainstream society and its values.

 

Cooperatives run by Afghan War veterans were, needless to say, rather less amenable to gangster shakedowns. The police also sought to recruit veterans, especially for their new OMON riot police units and similar special forces.

 

In many ways the most dramatic development was the collapse of the Communist Party thanks to Gorbachev’s liberal reforms. Glasnost, a new openness about contemporary affairs and past horrors, knocked away much of the legitimacy of the Party, and the economic hardships produced by botched economic reforms ate away at the rest. Facing growing resistance from an alarmed and self-interested elite, Gorbachev was simply radicalized, and turned to a limited democratization campaign to give himself a power base independent of the Party, shattering its fragile unity. This liberalization also encouraged local nationalist movements which, in turn, threatened the very existence of the Soviet state.

 

Officials who once had held the literal power of life and death over the vory were generally too busy to be bothered with them. Sometimes they found themselves needing their services, whether getting out the vote or, more often, helping them amass the money they would need when their positions were no longer guaranteed. Even the central Communist Party, worried that it was seeing the writing on the wall, began salting away funds. In 1990, a secret Central Committee decree ordered the KGB to start building a network of businesses and accounts covertly connected to the Party for the day when it might not be able to count on state funds. An unknown amount of money – billions of dollars – was spirited from the coffers of a state which could scarcely afford it and into hundreds of these accounts.

 

Organized crime was increasingly powerful, wealthy and self-confident. From around 1988, for instance, the division in Moscow between the Slavic gangs and those of the ‘Chechen brotherhood’ and their allies from elsewhere in the north Caucasus was visible.

Just as the 1990s saw Russia go through financial and political crises as it tried to define itself and its place in the world, its underworld spent most of the decade expanding rapidly into every corner of the economy and society but also getting involved in running turf wars as gangs rose, fell, united, divided and competed. This was a decade of drive-by shootings, car bombs and the virtual theft of whole industries, in which the forces of order seemed powerless. In 1994, President Yeltsin declared that Russia was the ‘biggest mafia state in the world’. He almost sounded proud of it; certainly he did not do much to stop it, and cronies of his were deeply involved in this arrant criminalization of the country. From this anarchy, though, a new order would emerge, as major underworld combines formed, pecking orders emerged and territorial boundaries became established.

 

Yeltsin’s presidency offered organized crime the perfect incubator. This was a time of extraordinary change, including a massive widening of the gap between haves and have-nots. Moscow began to be decked in gaudy neon, and Mercedes-Benz was selling more armored limousines in Russia than the rest of the world put together. But outside the metro stations you would see lines of desperate pensioners selling anything they had – a chair, a half-used tube of toothpaste, a wedding ring – just to try and make ends meet. The police, underpaid and outgunned, often lacked fuel for their cars and bullets for their weapons.

 

The headlong rush to privatize state assets transferred many into criminal hands at bargain basement prices. Likewise, limited democratization created corrupt local fiefdoms which resembled nothing so much as the snake-pit municipalities of interwar America, familiar from Dashiell Hammett’s noir thrillers – but with Kalashnikovs and the internet. Perhaps most insidious and corrosive was the widespread sense of insecurity and uncertainty; the new laws were contradictory, the old certainties were gone. If you needed a contract enforcing or a debt collecting, to whom could you turn when the courts were corrupt and backlogged? If you needed protection and security, who could provide it when the police were corrupt and inefficient? The answer, needless to say, was organized crime, which emerged perversely as an entrepreneurial Robin Hood, offering these very services – for a fee.

 

Between 1991 and 1998, when Russia’s stock, bond and currency markets collapsed, GDP fell by 30%, unemployment rose and inflation hit 2,500% in 1992 before falling to tolerable levels later in the decade – but only after wiping out savings and devaluing benefits. By 1999, more than a third of Russians lived below the poverty line. The hurried and ill-thought-through crash privatization campaign saw state assets being transferred into private hands at a fraction of their true value, a process exploited by those who already had cash and connections: corrupt officials, underground entrepreneurs and criminals.  As the state declined and organized crime ascended, for a while business people ended up coming to treat gangs simply as alternative service providers, different sources of the krysha – ‘roof’, slang for protection – so crucial to any venture in such uncertain times:

 

Protection meant more than just not being shaken down; it also meant not being cheated. The courts were corrupt, and, even if one could get a judgment in one’s favor, enforcing it would be problematic. Besides, this could take years and the best the courts could often do was order repayment of any outstanding debts or damages at the original rate.  Criminals now often considered themselves as protectors and arbiters.

 

Vladimir Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin as acting president in 1999 before a carefully managed election in 2000, is widely credited as having tamed the banditry. The anarchy of the 1990s passed, and with it the indiscriminate violence and the public fear. He deserves some credit, to be sure. Unlike Yeltsin, he had a clear vision for Russia, anchored on a strong state. There was no room in it for anything suggesting that the government was not in charge, whether opposition in parliament or gangsterism on the streets. However, Putin was as much symptom as cause: his elevation coincided with deeper political and economic pressures that permitted and indeed demanded this partial reassertion of central state authority. Putin made it clear that he would not tolerate overt or implicit challenges to the government. In the months leading up to his election, the flight of criminal capital out of Russia rose as gangsters hurriedly prepared themselves for a swift exit, in case Putin’s tough law-and-order rhetoric was more than just campaign theatre.

 

As deputy mayor of St Petersburg, Putin had regularly encountered the city’s underworld, and his job as deputy mayor had been to manage relations with a variety of powerful interests. It was important for the city administration to have a smooth relationship with the criminals, and this allowed them to expand their empire so long as they also enriched local officialdom and accepted its overall political control. This was in many ways the model for Putin’s national policy, and the criminals soon realized that what was available to them was an implicit social contract, their own ‘little deal’. So long as they were more discreet, so long as they cut officials into part of the action, then the state would not treat them as a threat. Of course, the police would still try to catch criminals, but they did not need to fear any sustained, comprehensive crackdown.

 

In many ways this paralleled Putin’s taming of the oligarchs, the mega-rich businessmen who had become such a politically powerful force under Yeltsin: they were offered a quiet life so long as they didn’t challenge the Kremlin. The three who were least willing to accept Putin’s terms, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, were forced into exile in the UK or, in the last case, sent to prison, but the rest fell into line. Likewise, most gangs were happy to accept these new rules of the game. Higher-order organised crime became increasingly regularized, corporate minded and integrated with elements of the state. When gangs did turn to the violent settling of scores – as sometimes they inevitably did – it was in a far more precise and targeted way, the sniper’s bullet supplanting the indiscriminate car bomb or drive-by shooting that had been such a bloody fixture of the 1990s.

 

Overall, the Russian underworld is defined not by hierarchical structures like the Italian mafia or Japanese yakuza but by a complex and varied underworld ecosystem. There are myriad territorially based groups, some controlling just a housing estate or a neighborhood, others cities and regions,

 

Networks rarely seek to establish territorial monopolies: Moscow is home to three major ones and also hosts a plethora of smaller groups such as the Mazutkinskaya, Izmailovskaya–Golyanovskaya and Lyubertsy gangs, which rise, fall and sometimes persist, perhaps loosely associated with one of the big groupings, but often with none or several.

 

The ‘blues’ under the vor ‘Trifon’ were individually tough, but less unified and disciplined than the ‘sportsmen’. The latter also benefited from the tacit support of the local political elite, whom they bribed widely and generously, acquiring a reputation as ‘reasonable gangsters’ (a term a former local police officer used describing them to me). The ‘blues’ were broken, followed by Uralmash’s other main rival, the Tsentralnaya gang. By 1993, Uralmash was dominant in Yekaterinburg. It moved quickly to establish its legitimate and illegitimate business empire and also sought political legitimacy by funding youth clubs, running charity campaigns and presenting itself as a club of concerned local businessmen. When the police arrested one of its alleged leading lights in 1993 on extortion charges, carefully orchestrated public protests followed, leading business figures extolled his charitable work, and political pressure was brought to bear. He was released within a few months.

 

Uralmash’s various enterprises managed to avoid duplication and competition, in part because of often micro-managing control from above. In many ways, the model was military in its insistence on the chain of command. This worked for a while, but it left Uralmash vulnerable. In Putin’s new era, it made the mistake of remaining too visible, too potentially powerful. Its chief at the time, Alexander Khabarov, overreached himself in both upperworld and underworld politics. He supported the muscular City Without Drugs initiative in Yekaterinburg while seeking to drive away gangs from the Caucasus. In part this was, ironically enough, a bid to control the local drug trade. He held a seat on Yekaterinburg city council between 2002 and 2005, even running for mayor in 2003. Just as alarming to Moscow, Uralmash had become involved in struggles over the region’s potentially lucrative resources, something the capital wanted to be able to dispense itself.

 

Uralmash’s hierarchical structure, once a strength, became a key weakness. The police – and criminal rivals – knew whom to target, and the operations of the system required management from above and thus regular contact between leaders and led. The plausible deniability that is often the godfather’s best friend was hard to maintain when there were telephone taps and other information attesting to people’s direct role in managing the gang’s operations. Uralmash seemed doomed and rival gangs began to circle. However, a new generation of leaders emerged who proved decisive and flexible. With some retrenchment, they restructured to present a less visible target and to retreat from politics.

 

Uralmash has become something more like a club of powerful criminal-businessmen, numbering between 14 and 18, who closely coordinate the operations of their respective outfits, maintaining tight discipline but a low profile. It retains many of the characteristics of its earlier incarnations, including a reluctance to include non-Slavs, probably reflecting both the relatively crude nationalism of its founders and their continued struggle to hold their position on east–west trafficking routes against encroachments of north Caucasian gangs from the south-west and Central Asians from the south-east.

 

Even by the unruly standards of the 1990s, the Russian Far East – sparsely populated, far from Moscow, characterized by sources of valuable natural resources and widespread poverty – witnessed violent struggles between gangs. Many were over relative pittances. Others, though, were about, or else could impact on, the massive potential profits to be made from the region’s extractive and fishing industries. In general terms, the functional near-collapse of the state apparatus gave regional bosses across Russia much freedom of maneuver to engage in or sanction criminal deals, but the relative isolation of the Far East (and its seeming irrelevance to politics in Moscow) made for even greater scope for the predatory exploitation of the region’s resources.

 

The underworld of the Russian Far East was thus relatively primitive. Many settlements could not sustain more than one, quite small local gang, typically working with the administration. Cities such as Vladivostok, capital of the Maritime Region, had more, but even then had nothing like the complexity of the criminal ecosystems of a Moscow or a St Petersburg. The paucity of resources and a lack of mutually beneficial interactions between these gangs, along with weaknesses in local law enforcement, tended to make competition more common and more bloody.  Commercial contacts brought with them interested potential collaborators from the Chinese underworld. Drugs, weapons, illegal migrants and then eventually timber, raw materials, rare wildlife and other more recondite commodities began to be traded, and the Russians also became launderers for a growing share of Chinese criminal cash.

 

Everything from fish to timber is smuggled out of Russia and finished goods and illegal migrants are smuggled in. Perhaps $1 billion of the $8 billion-plus Chinese heroin market now comes from Afghan drugs smuggled across Russia and Central Asia, but that pales before the tallies of these other products. Even illegally logged Russian timber for the Chinese construction market is a massive industry, worth perhaps $620 million. The Russian leg of this Northern Route is largely dominated by ethnic Russian and Russian-based gangs (including Georgian and Chechen), with a small proportion handled by Central Asian criminals, often using the diaspora of migrant laborers in Russia, and largely selling to and through those expatriates. Of the route’s total flow, more than a third stays in Russia. According to official figures, almost 6% of the country’s population, some 8.5 million people, are drug addicts or regular users. The key challenge is the growing proportion of users becoming addicts and the use of harder and more dangerous narcotics. Some 90% of drug addicts use heroin at least part of the time, making Russia the world’s leading heroin-using nation per capita — Russians consume some 20% of global heroin production. The remainder heads west into Europe or east and south into China, where it is largely sold in wholesale quantities to local gangs for resale.

 

Given that the main profit is downstream, where the drugs are sold close to the retail dealers, and the main costs upstream, where they are initially bought, there has to be faith in an equitable distribution of revenues. Successfully and profitably navigating this complex process thus encourages long-term relationships.

 

By the end of the 1990s, whereas once protection racketeering had essentially been regarded simply as a means of extorting payments from local businesses (typically demanding 20–30% of targets’ profits), now it became a weapon to take over a controlling interest in them instead. Increasingly the Tambovskaya looked to partnerships, either setting up new businesses or investing in existing ones. These companies not only served as fronts for criminal rackets, they also operated within the legitimate sector. For example, the group’s private security firms employed Tambovskaya enforcers, who were thus given an excuse legally to carry weapons, but they also provided genuine protection services for clients. The more legitimate business interests the Tambovskaya leaders acquired, the more they were forced to operate to legitimate standards. Just as the leaders of the Tambovskaya were gaining in legitimacy and political power in the upperworld –they were losing it in the underworld. The result was another gang war.

 

Many of the leaders of the Tambovskaya (or Tambovskaya–Malyshevskaya) have ended up operating in Spain, and others are to be found in Germany, the Baltic states and further afield. It is not that violence and coercion are no longer factors, but the core retains its influence over this loose network (one that has diffused to the point where it does not even have much of a distinctive identity) by controlling access to the money, opportunities and lifestyle to be found abroad. The bandity may be powerful at home, but, in the words of a Spanish police officer, ‘if they want to play a full part in Tambovskaya’s activities abroad, they need to stay in favor with the avtoritety’.

 

Facing claims that St Petersburg was becoming a focus for organized crime – claims which both deterred investors and were embarrassing to the new Russian prime minister and soon-to-be president, local boy Vladimir Putin – the St Petersburg authorities began to impose a degree of order.

 

It has largely devolved to numerous smaller outfits and operators and moved into new businesses such as methamphetamines and counterfeit goods. The role of the core appears now primarily be to resolve disputes, protect the network as a whole (especially against incursions by ‘highlanders’ from the north Caucasus) and to manage international flows of goods – drugs, people, stolen cars, counterfeit wares – and money. Indeed, in many ways the primary role of the core is to operate abroad.

 

 

Solntsevo established a role as a pseudo-state agency for the enforcement of contracts. Given that the Russian arbitrazh courts responsible for commercial cases were in the 1990s inefficient, backlogged and corrupt, retrieving unpaid debts or winning damages for broken contracts could be a lengthy and uncertain process. Solntsevo, on the other hand, could offer to resolve such disputes in its own way for a cut of the sum in question (typically a market-beating 20 per cent), discreetly and far more quickly.

 

The Chechens, a people whose national animal is the wolf, take a perverse pride in the hardships they have endured, with some reason, given that they have survived, unbroken and untamed. While the 1990s saw the resumption of their on-and-off struggle for independence, it also saw the extraordinary rise of the Chechen bratva (‘brotherhood’) within the Russian underworld. Conquered by the Russian Empire in the 19^th century, as it spread south into the mountainous Caucasus region, the Chechens have periodically rebelled when they have felt their masters seemed weakened or distracted. The Russians have brutally repressed them each time, crushing the forms of resistance but never managing to extinguish the desire. Stalin, true to form, adopted the most murderously comprehensive response in 1944 when the Chechens took advantage of the Nazi invasion of the USSR to launch another series of risings. On 23 February – coincidentally Red Army Day in the Soviet calendar – the entire Chechen population, along with their ethnic cousins the Ingushetians, were ordered to report to local Party centers. This was the start of ‘Operation Lentil’, the forced deportation of two entire nations – men, women and children – a brutal and violent process in which anything from a quarter to a half of the total population died. Stalin had them scattered across Siberia and Central Asia. The Chechens would not be allowed to return home until after Stalin’s death.

 

When talking to Russian law enforcers, one of the constants is their determination to discuss Georgians, Chechens and others whose origins are in the Caucasus region: one could almost believe that they are to blame for most organized crime in Russia. Admittedly, as of 2004, ethnic Georgians reportedly comprised 35% of the vory v zakone across the former USSR, and only 2% of the population.

 

If the Slavic gangs have predominance in political and probably economic power within the Russian underworld and the Georgians the most vory – though not most members as a whole – then what is the distinctive asset for the ‘highlanders’ of the north Caucasus, and particularly the Chechens? The answer would appear to be cohesion and reputation. The Chechen criminals, often described as the ‘Chechen brotherhood’, have no formal structure in common. They do represent a distinctive criminal subculture, though, holding itself apart from the mainstream Russian underworld.

 

Chechens and encroaching Cossack soldier-settlers clashed and raided each other from the 17^th century. In the 19^th century, the Russian Empire brought the Caucasus region under its control, by conquest, punitive massacre and deportation, culminating in Stalin’s act of near-genocide. The Chechens declared independence, but Moscow proved unwilling to accept. Clumsy attempts to pressurize the Chechens back into the Russian Federation only served to rally them behind Dudayev, culminating in two wars: the first, 1994–6, in which the Chechens in effect fought Moscow into accepting partial autonomy, and then the second, from 1999, which saw them forced back into the fold.

 

Under Dudayev, Chechnya became a virtual criminal fiefdom. Favoritism, corruption, nepotism, clientelism and localism all flourished. The Chechen police force suddenly grew from the 3,000 officers it inherited from the Soviet period to 14 separate forces, accounting for some 17,000 armed officers, as hitmen and clan gunmen were sworn in as ‘police’. Likewise, the Chechen State Bank became a counterfeiter’s, fraudster’s and money launderer’s dream. In 1992 alone, at least 60 billion rubles (then $700 million) were siphoned from the Russian Central Bank

 

Today’s pro-Russian regime under Ramzan Kadyrov, even though it claims to have the lowest crime rate of any Russian region, is likewise bedeviled by credible accounts of lawlessness, banditry and corruption, and, as is discussed below, can in many ways be seen to have simply taken over the rackets of Chechnya to form a single criminal–state syndicate. Within Chechnya, many rebel warlords also maintained profitable side-lines in kidnap, banditry and drug smuggling. In many ways, Chechen organized crime draws on the patterns of Chechen society. Andrei Konstantinov noted that ‘to survive, the Chechen people were forced to develop their internal organizations to the highest level of all the peoples of the Caucasus’. They are typically either small gangs built around one or a few charismatic or effective leaders or else larger collections of such groups. Their characteristic structure is not a hierarchical pyramid so much as a snowflake, semi-independent groups around a coordinating council of elders. In many ways, these correspond to the building blocks of Chechen society: the extended family, and the clan, made up of multiple families. This parallel also extends to personnel and recruitment. The smaller gangs tend to be based initially around direct kinship or other personal ties.

 

Larger groupings tend in turn to bring together a variety of these smaller gangs, united either by the area in which they operate or else the teips from which their leaders trace back their origins.

 

Generally, the Chechens were involved largely in protection racketeering and some prostitution, but several, including Altangeriyev and Nukhayev, were rumoured to maintain good links with the KGB. In particular, the security agencies would turn a blind eye to their foreign currency dealing, in return for useful information about the tourists and travellers they encountered. Over time, they would largely be eclipsed by Slavic gangs. The Chechens were simply too few, and taking them on even became a mark of machismo for Slav gangsters.

 

The police have guns and badges, but the Chechens have something far more terrifying at their disposal: guns and folklore. Russians are, in a way, victims of their own literature. Nineteenth-century works such as Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Pushkin’s Prisoner of the Caucasus imparted a sometimes admiring, sometimes horrified picture of the Chechen as a fierce primitive who would never shirk from a fight, an impression only solidified by their performance during the Chechen wars. As a result, there is a general assumption that, to quote one gang hanger-on, ‘you don’t mess with the Chechens. If you challenge them, even if they know they will lose, they will fight, and they’ll summon their brothers and their cousins and their uncles and keep fighting. Even if they are going to lose, they’ll fight just to bring you down, too. They are maniacs.’

 

There is a perverse bonus for the Chechens in being considered implacable, indomitable maniacs: it makes sense to cut a deal with them, even if the logic of force and connections would seem not to be to their advantage. This actually has made Chechen-related gang violence less common since the mid-1990s, for the very reason that people are disinclined to challenge them. While this has denied them some of the scope for expansion enjoyed by their counterparts, it does mean that the Chechens have managed to dominate their chosen niche. This is evident in the way that the authorities ascribe them such a disproportionately powerful role within the Russian underworld.

 

By being able to claim that they ‘work with the Chechens’ (this is the usual expression) and thus can, if necessary, call on their support, gangs acquire considerable additional authority. Victims who might otherwise consider resisting their extortion are more likely to pay; rival gangs are less likely to encroach on their turf; and even law enforcers might think twice about taking them on. In return, the gang pays a cut of its proceeds and subordinates itself to the nearest influential Chechen godfather, who may call on it for services in the future.

 

The Russians won their war in Chechnya with extravagant brutality, overwhelming firepower – and Chechens. The Second Chechen War, which began in 1999 and formally ended in 2009 when Moscow announced the euphemistic end of ‘anti-terrorist operations’, was launched by Russian troops but largely concluded through the use of Chechen militias. Many were former rebels, able to take on the insurgents in the hills and villages on their own terms.

 

The irony is that Chechnya is arguably now more independent in practice than at any time since it was conquered under the tsars – and what is more, it gets the Russians to pay for it. More than 80 % of the Chechen republican budget is made up of subsidies from Moscow, as the Kremlin is desperate to avoid another bloody and unpopular war in the south. Not that ordinary Chechens get to benefit from much of this. Even back in 2006, a US diplomatic cable spoke of ‘massive corruption and state-sponsored banditry in Chechnya . . . Presidential Advisor Aslakhanov told us last December that Kadyrov expropriates for himself one-third off the top of all [federal] assistance.’ Money has gone on extravagant vanity projects, such as the construction of a shiny commercial center to which nobody goes, and a huge mosque dedicated to Akhmad Kadyrov.

 

Somehow, a luxurious lifestyle is achieved for Ramzan Kadyrov. While his official income is around 5 million rubles ($78,000), he has a personal zoo, and a stable of luxury cars including a Lamborghini Reventón, one of only twenty ever made and costing $1.25 million. It seems money also goes to keeping his family and subordinates – the two are often one and the same, such as cousin and parliamentarian Adam Delimkhanov – happy and loyal. Meanwhile, Kadyrov has been accused by the US Treasury of overseeing ‘an administration involved in disappearances and extrajudicial killings’.

 

There are thus still ‘two Chechnyas’. One, the mother country itself, features sometimes on trafficking routes, including heroin from Afghanistan and women into the Middle East. However, it is really best considered a single criminal–feudal operation, where the primary business is diverting and embezzling state funds. So long as Kadyrov controls the government – and the 20,000 or so Kadyrovtsy – and Moscow feels it cannot afford to move against him, this situation is likely to continue.

 

Georgia has been something of a special case. The Armenians and the Azeris have their criminal diaspora in Russia, to say nothing of the other north Caucasus peoples of the Russian Federation, from Dagestanis to Ingush. But certainly through the 2000s and into the 2010s, there was a common belief, even within the Russian underworld, that Georgians played a disproportionate role, at the Russians’ expense. According to an article in Izvestiya, in 2006, Georgian godfathers comprised almost a third of the underworld leaders in Moscow, and more than half across the country as a whole.

 

Even back in tsarist times, Georgian criminals crossed the boundaries between rural banditry and urban gangsterism, and that most (in)famous Georgian, Stalin himself, blurred the lines between revolution and plunder. Under Soviet rule, the scale of criminality in the republic was infamous: it was known for corruption ‘second to none . . . carried out on an unparalleled scale and with unrivalled scope and daring’. The Soviet Union’s slide into institutionalized corruption in the 1960s and 1970s meant that, despite overt campaigns against ‘speculation’, bribe taking, embezzlement and theft, there emerged ‘organized criminal clans of a new type which brought together professional criminals, black marketeers – the clients of whom existed amongst bureaucrats at the highest level – and corrupt law enforcement officials’.

 

According to Soviet police data, as of the end of the USSR, one in three of all vory v zakone were Georgians, even though they made up only one in 50 of the total population. Alexander Gurov, the Soviet police criminologist who arguably did the most to bring the problem of organized crime to the fore, is sure that, even back in the 1970s, Georgia’s gangsters already had a place at the table and in the system. He recounted that a local Party boss, whenever the crime figures looked embarrassingly excessive or there was the risk of an inquiry from higher up, ‘would summon to a meeting the [local police] chief, the [local KGB] chief, and the local crime boss, and say, “How can you have allowed there to be such a rise in crime?” He would address this first and foremost to the crime boss. Who would at once start “taking steps to reduce the crime rate”.’

 

President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government embarked on a serious campaign against the vory, one that drew on lessons from the Italian struggle against the mafia. Mere membership of the ‘thieves’ world’ in was criminalized. The property of vory v zakone could be seized and they would be held in a special maximum-security prison, where they could be segregated from the other prisoners. Meanwhile, a massive purge of the law enforcement apparatus was launched in a notably effective campaign against corruption, while a public education program sought to combat widespread attitudes that condoned bribe-taking and glorified the gangsters. Faced with the threat of arrest, harsh detention and the confiscation of their assets, Georgia’s vory upped and left.

 

Negotiating succession is one of the riskiest times for godfathers and gangs alike, especially for those with relatively informal internal rules and no clear, strong and legitimate hierarchy. External rivals and the police may seek to take advantage of temporary disunity and mistrust; internal power struggles sharpen; losers bear grudges or fear reprisals; winners seek to promote their cronies and harbor suspicions of their rivals.

 

One of the problematic by-products of the relative stability of the 2000s underworld is a decline in social mobility. In the 1990s, ambitious younger gangsters could expect rapid promotion thanks either to the exploitation of new opportunities (often seized from other gangs) or the murders of their seniors. However, as turf boundaries hardened, killings declined and new opportunities became scarcer, promotions came more slowly and rarely.

 

Azeris, though, form a more distinct community, one which has been able to rely both on kinship ties and on its members’ ability to move back and forth between Russia and Azerbaijan, to avoid arrest and smuggle goods. Thus, in many cities from Moscow to Yekaterinburg to Vladivostok, relatively small but tightly knit Azeri communities spawned their own gangs.

 

Up to the end of the Soviet Union and even into the 1990s, organized crime in Russia tended to be ethnically structured. As elsewhere, modernity, social and physical mobility, and the greater interpenetration of societies has broken down these old divisions. Just as the ‘Italian mafia’ in prohibition-era America included such distinctly un-Mediterranean figures as ‘Dutch’ Schultz and Meyer Lansky, of German-Jewish and Polish-Jewish stock respectively, so too did business and the search for capable allies break down the old solidarities in Russia. The 1990s were times of hype and horror as ‘the Russian mafia’ – often regarded as a single, monolithic conspiracy – emerged as a suitable bugbear to replace the Soviet threat. FBI Director Louis Freeh thought that ‘Russian organized crime presents the greatest long-term threat to the security of the United States . . . The United States is presented with a well-organized, well-funded, sophisticated and brutal conspiracy.’

 

It is certainly true that one of the most striking characteristics of Russian organized crime is how quickly and effectively it has become a truly global phenomenon, even a brand. Its networked, post-modernist model not only allows these criminals to respond quickly to new opportunities, it permits the incorporation of new members regardless of ethnicity, so long as they can work within the Russians’ rules. The first wave of expansion into Europe was largely by vory moving to areas with sizeable Russian communities or, as in the case with many former Warsaw Pact or Soviet states, where they had existing contacts with local criminals and corrupt officials. The Baltic States, Poland and Hungary were all early targets, soon followed by a drift into Austria and Germany. Similar early targets were Israel (where many used real or fake Jewish ethnicity to ensure immigration rights) and the USA.

 

Mafias do not, on the whole, migrate. As Federico Varese has meticulously demonstrated in his Mafias on the Move, the myth of a globalized, universal criminal class able to migrate to wherever a new opportunity seems to be emerging is just that – a myth. Generally, when ‘mafiosi find themselves in the new locale, it is not of their own volition; they have been forced to move there by court orders, to escape justice or mafia infighting and wars. They are not seeking new markets or new products but are instead just making the most of bad luck.’ Even when they do move, the odds are they will fail in their efforts to establish their criminal enterprises in a new land, where they lack local contacts, often even the local language. Instead, Varese’s findings are that for this transplantation to be successful, there are two requirements: First, no other mafia group (or state apparati offering illegal protection) must be present. It is too much of an uphill struggle for an incoming mafia to set up shop in the presence of a powerful local competitor. Second, a mafia group is most likely to succeed in transplanting when its presence coincides with the sudden emergence of new markets.

 

Organized crime from Russia is undoubtedly a significant feature of the global underworld, but usually in the form of facilitators rather than street-level thugs. These vory are the business partners of local groups: selling them heroin from Afghanistan, laundering their money through Russia’s still-murky financial system, providing weapons and occasionally someone who knows how to use them. In this way, even if the Russian mafia is not a direct problem in a country, it can have a serious impact by providing existing gangs with access to expertise, services and criminal products to which normally they could never aspire.

 

Instead of the classic hierarchical gang, often drawn from a single ethnicity, home region or kin group, this is a flexible, networked criminal phenomenon that embraces a wide range of businesses (both licit and illicit), practices and even nationalities, but nonetheless has certain distinctive ways of operating. Indeed, ‘Russian organized crime’ may not necessarily be Russian, is often not especially organized, and does rather more than just crime.

 

In Central Asia, a succession of more-or-less authoritarian regimes resting on exploitative elites run Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Beyond low-level street gangs, which are often suppressed by security forces unconcerned with legal niceties, the main crime organizations will invariably either be run by elements of the elite apparatus or be heavily dependent on them. Their role is often to act as agents diverting profits from corruption and embezzlement of state assets to the elite, or else to manage key illegal businesses for them, especially drug trafficking. Here, the gangsters are often little more than deniable agents of the corrupt elites.

 

Russia’s criminals had particular reasons to want to internationalize their operations as quickly as possible. There was a pervasive (if misguided) belief that there could be a hard-line Communist revival or even some kind of nationalist–authoritarian coup. This helps explain the extreme measures taken – with Western acquiescence – to rig the 1996 presidential elections to ensure Boris Yeltsin beat his Communist rival.

 

By internationalizing, they could secure revenue streams in alternative currencies (to protect them from the collapse of the ruble), prepare fall-back options if they were suddenly denied access to their main sources of income, and perhaps gain the right to live abroad through citizenship, investment or strategic marriage. That way, they could escape the Motherland if things suddenly began to look dangerous.

 

Developing operations abroad was not so much a source of revenue, but a drain: a loss-leader or investment in personal security. It was also a matter of prestige, a form of consumption as conspicuous as the shiny imported limousine and the equally shiny domestic arm-candy. Where it could, Russian organized crime did what most ethnic migrant gangs do: preyed on its own people, exploiting immigrants who lacked their own resources, their own support structures and, often, faith in local law enforcement.

 

The indigenous gangs’ home turf advantage in central Europe in particular often manifested itself in the tacit or even active support of local police and security structures, which had also come to terms with the ‘invasion’ they faced. The debate about the intrusion of Russian organized crime often quickly acquired a clearly nationalist tone, with talk of ‘colonization’ and ‘imperialism’, and became securitized. The presence of Russian gangs began to be considered – not without reason – also in terms of the presence of potential Russian spies, saboteurs and agents of influence.

 

As one Estonian Security Police (Kapo) officer put it to me, ‘in the late 1990s, and again after 2007 [when Moscow launched a cyberattack on Estonia], dealing with Russian gangs was not just a police issue, but a vital security one’. Thus, especially in central Europe and the Baltic states, a moral panic about the Russians led to a particular focus on combating them, even at the expense of addressing indigenous threats. As a result, by the end of the 1990s, the first expansionist wave of Russian and Eurasian vory had largely been cut down to size. They had been either forced to withdraw or brought down to becoming just one more player in their respective foreign underworlds.

 

One of the recurring debates about the expansion of European empires in the 19^th century has been how far one can ascribe imperialism to the Machiavellian strategies of metropolitan governments and how far one should instead look to the self-interest, values, ambitions and interactions of the men on the ground, from soldiers to merchants, who often shaped or simply ignored policy from the center. So, too, it is essential to realize in this context that what from the outside may look like grand strategy may well in fact be the result of a confluence of intent, chance and personal interest.

 

There are undoubtedly organized crime gangs based within the ethnic Russian communities in the United States. But efforts to turn them into outposts of some global crime empire failed.

 

Their role in the Czech Republic’s underworld by the 2010s was best summed up by one police officer as ‘the criminals behind the criminals, not controlling them, but selling them everything they need’. They have instead concentrated on working as illegal wholesalers, criminal coordinators and underworld investors in businesses of every kind.

 

There is no doubt that Russian and Russian-linked organized crime can be found across the globe. It is defrauding millions out of the US Medicare and Medicaid programs, swapping heroin for cocaine with Latin American drug gangs, laundering money around the Mediterranean, selling guns in Africa, trafficking women into the Middle East and raw materials into East Asia, and buying up real estate in Australia.

 

At least as often, the commodity is expertise. Even back in the 1990s it was the Russians who introduced the New York Cosa Nostra to the heady, white-collar profits from fuel excise scams, and these days 60% of the Russian or Eurasian organized crime operations investigated by the FBI across the USA relate to frauds of one kind of another.

 

A classic example is their role providing financial services to the global underworld. Any criminal needs the ability to move and above all launder their profits so that they can use the money they make safely, without law enforcement being able to prove connection to a crime. The Russians have been able to develop a wide range of laundries, often through their own financial system, but also by exploiting less scrupulous or demanding jurisdictions abroad. Typically, the money is first ‘prewashed’ within the former Soviet region, such as through Ukraine or Moldova, knowing that, while this does not provide particular respectability, it does at least add an extra layer of legal and technical complexity for police investigators or diligent bank officers seeking to identify the source of the funds. Then it will move through countries such as Cyprus, Israel and Latvia, where the Russians have established relationships and front companies, before moving on to increasingly highly regarded jurisdictions, not least the City of London, in order to ‘wash’ it thoroughly.

 

The Russians are willing to deal with other criminals of near enough any type, ethnicity or structure. It is an irony that gangsters from a society in which racist, even xenophobic, attitudes are still quite common are the new internationalists, eager to cut deals with anyone and happy to recruit not just agents but partners outside their community.

 

A Vietnamese shopkeeper in California would covertly duplicate a customer’s credit card information, which was then transmitted to Chinese criminals in Hong Kong and thence to Malaysia. There the data was embossed onto false credit cards. These were couriered by air to Milan, where Neapolitan gangsters from the Camorra sold them to a Russian group in the Czech Republic. The cards were flown to Prague and distributed to agents who fanned out to the major cities of Europe where they almost – but not quite – maxed out their cards buying luxury goods. These goods were then flown back to Moscow for sale in retail outlets. What could be a better example of today’s global supply chains?

 

The Russian gangs abroad now tend to avoid overt displays of their criminal status, hiding behind indigenous allies, anonymous front corporations and legitimate Russian expat and business communities. They are also especially prone to seek to woo and buy local protectors within the political community. The close intertwining of business, crime, politics and the security apparatus also means that the gangsters can often rely on access to official resources, and even advance warning of foreign investigations.

 

The groups in the USA have especially acquired a reputation for complex and lucrative frauds of private and government medical insurance schemes. Overall, by 2011, an estimated $60–90 billion was being stolen a year from the Medicare and Medicaid budgets. Russian and Eurasian gangs appear to be the largest players in this business, but even so they do not account for an absolute majority of losses. In 2010, the Armenian Mirzoyan–Terdjanian Organization was charged with stealing $100 million from Medicare, for example. Breaking the records, though, was a Ukrainian and Russian operation in Brighton Beach that involved nine clinics and allegedly conspired to defraud private medical insurance companies of $279 million over 5 years, until it was broken in 2012. Both cases were largely proven in the courts, and their masterminds received sentences of three and 25 years in prison, respectively.

 

The globalization of the underworld has also forced the Russians to begin to share their own markets with competitors and partners from around the world.

 

However much the Medicare fraudsters of the USA may make, their profits pale into insignificance compared with the estimated $13 billion a year the Russian Northern Route for Afghan heroin is worth, for example,

 

In an age of market economics and pseudo-democratic politics, where power is largely disconnected from any real ideology beyond an inchoate blend of nationalisms, arguably it is rather that the vory have diversified, and perhaps even colonized the wider Russian elites. There are racketeers, drug traffickers, people smugglers and gunrunners – but there is also a deepening connection with the worlds of politics and business. Today’s vory are exploiting the opportunities of Russia’s cannibalistic capitalism, and likewise the state itself, or at least its agents, are exploiting their own criminal opportunities in an increasingly organized way. In 2016, for example, the police raided the apartment of one of their own senior officers, Colonel Dmitry Zakharchenko, ironically enough the acting head of a department within its anti-corruption division. There they found $123 million: so much money that the investigators had to pause the search while they found a container large enough to hold all that cash.

 

Deep crime and the deep state Grinda cited a ‘thesis’ by Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian intelligence official who worked on organized crime issues before he died in late 2006 in London from poisoning under mysterious circumstances, that the Russian intelligence and security services –the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and military intelligence (GRU) – control organized crime in Russia. Grinda said that he believes the FSB is ‘absorbing’ the Russian mafia, and rather than being under the control of the criminals, the Kremlin (or at least the security apparatus) is a shadowy puppeteer making the gangs dance on its strings. In practice, the truth is rather that the relationship between organized crime and the state at local and national levels is complex, nuanced and often strikingly cooperative. It is as simplistic to suggest that organized crime outright controls the Kremlin as that it is controlled by it. Rather, it prospers under Putin because it can go with the grain of his system.

 

There is, needless to say, a very high level of corruption, which provides a very conducive environment for organized crime. Even President Putin has acknowledged the problem and vowed to ‘eliminate the root causes of corruption and punish particular officials’, adding, ‘We defeated oligarchy. We will surely defeat corruption.’ However, there is little evidence he truly intends more than a public show of resolution and a periodic purge of officials sufficiently junior and far outside his personal circle to be disposable scapegoats. The relationship between the elite and the gangsters is not just one of buyer and bought, but typically of symbiosis or deeply rooted and mutually profitable relationships, which are often long term.

 

The modern Russian state is a much stronger force than in the 1990s, and jealous of its political authority. The gangs which prosper in modern Russia tend to do so by working with rather than against the state, and a new political generation has risen to power dependent for their futures on the Kremlin’s patronage rather than local underworld contacts. In this respect, if Russia is truly ruled by a ‘deep state’ – the term comes from the way Turkey for so long seemed to be run by an inner elite within an elite, controlling politics behind the scenes – then there are also ‘deep crime’ structures.  Do well by the Kremlin, and the Kremlin will turn a blind eye. Connecting political figures, government officials, business leaders and criminal kingpins, these loose networks of patronage and mutual interest are very difficult to plot

 

A key characteristic of today’s Russian organized crime is the scale and depth of its interpenetration with the (sometimes only seemingly) legitimate economy. It is impossible to deny that this is a considerable problem, with criminals controlling financial, commercial and industrial enterprises, exerting influence over government contracts and simply stealing businesses and assets. However, it is equally impossible to put any kind of meaningful figure on it.

 

Under Putin, corrupt officials have continued their ascent back to the commanding heights they occupied in Soviet times.

 

Since the 1980s, when tourists began to become more common in Moscow and Leningrad, Russian gangsters have used the phrase ‘ironing the firm’ to mean stealing or extorting money out of foreigners.

 

In the late 1990s, murder was a depressingly common way of resolving business disputes. The notorious ‘aluminum wars’ of the early 1990s saw thugs occupying factories, a string of murders, and lurid accounts of organized-crime links across the metals industries. Contract killings remained frequent – according to Professor Leonid Kondratyuk of the MVD’s Scientific Research Institute, even in the early Putin years they were ‘seeing somewhere between 500 and 700 such killings annually. But those are just the murders we know for sure were contract killings. In reality, it’s probably two to three times higher.’

 

The Vora are well aware that an honest and well-functioning police force and a dedicated and incorruptible judiciary would be a serious threat to them. As a result, they have a strong interest in preserving the status quo and their ability to use violence or corruption as and when their circumstances dictate. This collective commitment to the status quo preserves their power, but it also sets rules and boundaries, as do the very economics of the market.

 

Since Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012, after a four-year interregnum while his puppet-president Dmitry Medvedev kept his chair warm for him, things have changed. A combination of economic pressures, the breakdown in relations with the West after the 2014 annexation of Crimea and invasion of south-eastern Ukraine, and the impact of consequent Western sanctions, has meant that at the time of writing many of the bad old ways are slowly reasserting themselves.

 

The underworld is an economy in its own right. One as extensive as Russia’s inevitably develops a complex array of service industries and market niches. The first and most obvious need was for people who were able credibly, willingly and effectively to use violence and there remains a strong supply of would-be thugs and leg breakers. For more sophisticated purposes, organized crime looked to sportsmen and martial artists – many of the first gangs came from sports clubs, such as weightlifters and wrestlers or to current and former police and military personnel.

 

Special executive jets run by the air force for senior Defense Ministry officials were instead being chartered illegally by members of the Izmailovo–Golyanovskaya gang. Services routinely engaged by the criminals range from the serious, such as wiretapping by the security agencies, through to the near-trivial, such as paying off an official for the right to place a flashing blue emergency-services light on your car. These migalki, a bone of contention for many Russian motorists, are widely abused by officials, business people – and gangsters – to allow them to run red lights and generally evade the traffic rules.

It is not that the vory have disappeared so much as that everyone is now a vor.

 

Fruit and vegetable markets since 1991 have been lucrative targets, fought over regularly by the Caucasus gangsters in particular, given how much of the produce comes from their regions. In 1992, Azeris controlled the three main markets – Cheryomushky, Severny and Tsaritskinsky – and, while the geography of the city’s wholesalers has changed over time, bloody wars for them have raged periodically ever since.

 

The Cosa Nostra made millions from their control of New York’s Fulton Street Fish Market through most of the twentieth century. Control of access to any commodity is valuable, and the markets are also great distribution hubs for all kinds of illegal commodities, from drugs to counterfeit goods.

 

In 2008, the global financial crisis had knock-on effects throughout the underworld, and in Russia it forced many of the smaller gangs and those less diversified in their economic interests into retreat. Competition for assets sharpened, and those groups without powerful political connections lost out. Dzhaniyev had never bothered cultivating a krysha in Moscow, and he paid for this with a number of reversals, such as the closure of the Cherkizovo market in eastern Moscow in 2009. Dzhaniyev largely dominated this massive and ramshackle bazaar, using it to sell illegal goods and services and demanding tribute from traders. This was a time when the city was looking to clean up its image, though, and he lacked the political connections to be able to prevent Moscow City Council from shutting the market down, taking a substantial economic hit in the process.

 

In 2014, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the subsequent rapid worsening of its relations with the West led to a sudden economic crisis. Again, gangs without allies, political cover and deep pockets were vulnerable.

 

In 2017, the Russian underworld is at once relatively calm – the odd assassination notwithstanding – and under growing pressure. It is by no means certain that a new round of major criminal conflicts is coming and, even if it does erupt, it will not reach the same pitch or be as indiscriminate as those of the 1990s. Yet such a prospect is closer than at any time since then.

 

The market contractions of 2008 spelled doom for some, but created great opportunities for others. The larger, more diversified groups cherry-picked those underworld assets they wanted and snapped them up at fire-sale prices. Gangs able to tap into state resources, whether government funds or the ability to flash a badge or grant or withhold a permit, did best. The 2008 crisis further strengthened incestuous links between corrupt officials, the state machine and the underworld, especially at the local level.

 

As times get harder for ordinary Russians, the impoverished souls who once would go to local houses of ill repute now gravitate towards the even cheaper and more desperate individual prostitutes of the streets. Facing a fall in their revenues, the brothel owners in part have diversified to selling narcotics, their premises becoming modern-day equivalents of the old opium den. To move into drug dealing, the brothel keepers typically have to get deeper into debt with the gangsters who previously just took a cut in return for leaving them free to ply their trade.

 

The trouble is that this kind of gangster, the small-scale local hoodlum, also feels the pinch. Typical is ‘Dvornik’ (‘Doorman’), a thug-made-moderately-good who was arrested in 2015. His problem was that not only did he have a lifestyle to maintain that involved high-stakes gambling and imported – and thus especially expensive considering the ruble’s depreciation – whisky, but he had a crew who expected to be paid and he also owed tribute to a bigger-time gangster in return for the right to practice his rackets. As one police officer involved in the case put it, ‘he had assumed that everything was going to go like before, or even better. He hadn’t saved or made plans in case the spring ran dry.’ A gang leader who can’t pay his crew has no gang; a gangster who can’t pay his debts has no future. As a result, ‘Dvornik’ had no option but to lean more heavily on the businesses on his turf, not least pushing those brothel keepers all the harder. And the local cops who also expected their regular payments in order to turn a blind eye were feeling the pinch and increasing their own demands accordingly.  ‘Dvornik’ was soon behind bars. The fact that, because of the pressure on his income, he had started to skimp on his bribes to the local police may also have had a bearing on the case.

 

Some brothel keepers simply could not cope in these conditions, and their businesses folded. Those who survived, though, generally did so by diversifying into even more dangerous ventures, such as narcotics, and this in turn meant that they fell further into the control of organized crime. In many cases, they accumulated more debt. The local gangsters, themselves under pressure, often simply sold their debts on to the larger, richer gangs in the city,

 

Criminals found new uses for the brothels as places to launder and move counterfeit money, reducing costs by staffing them with trafficked sex slaves from Central Asia. The depressing fact is that this actually got the approval of corrupt local police officers: the higher the turnover of the business, and the more serious the crimes involved, then the heftier the bribes they could expect. In this way, in Kapotnya at least, Russia’s economic crisis meant hard times for consumers and small businesses, and the petty gangsters and corrupt officials preying on both.

 

When the Kremlin slapped counter-sanctions on Western foodstuffs in 2014, consumers seeking their Italian salami and French cheeses had to turn to the black market. Legitimate companies trying to bypass the control regime – only handed a greater market share to the outright criminal smugglers, who had the years of experience and corrupt contacts to move shipments across the border. Lest this sound trivial, consider than a single ‘cheeserunner’ gang broken up in 2015 was accused of earning two billion roubles (some $34 million) in just six months.

 

The Afghan heroin Northern Route was and is the most lucrative, of course, but also the hardest to break into. Nonetheless, it has meant that gangs along the main arteries, able either to participate directly or simply to demand tribute for safe passage, have become increasingly wealthy. With wealth, gangs can corrupt officials, bankroll further opportunities, keep leaders and ‘soldiers’ happy and attract new recruits, including disaffected members of other gangs.

 

As Vladimir Putin increasingly legitimizes his rule – and pays off his closest allies – with various prestige projects, this too creates all kinds of new opportunities, large and small. The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics was a particularly infamous honeypot. The whole project cost an estimated $55 billion, making it the most expensive winter Games on record. In part, this reflects the challenges of mounting winter games in a subtropical venue, but it is also a product of staggering levels of waste and theft. According to the international NGO Transparency International, corruption added fully 50% to the construction costs, suggesting perhaps $15 billion was up for grabs.  The real money was made by the oligarchs granted the major contracts worth billions, but even through subcontracted work such as providing labor-ganged workers (often virtually trafficked from Central Asia and forcibly returned once the job was done), the major criminal players could also benefit from the actual construction.

 

The government’s decision in 2009 to ban all organized gambling and instead develop four (later six) Las Vegas-style casino tourism hubs is also having an inevitable impact on the underworld. Of course, in reality this is proving every bit as effective as prohibition in the United States and Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign, driving habitual gamblers into underground, unregulated games and casinos run by organized crime. Beyond competition over these games, the new mega-sites, all at border locations meant also to cater for overseas markets, offer inviting new business prospects for the criminals.

 

In 2011 Russia accounted for about 35% of global cybercrime revenue, or between $2.5 and $3.7 billion. This is wildly out of proportion with the country’s share of the global information technology market, which at the time was around 1%. Even though China and the USA are still in the lead, it is striking just how many key players and operations in global cybercrime are Russian. As of 2017, the five FBI ‘most wanted’ cybercriminals are four Russians (one a Latvian Russian) and a cell of Iranian hackers. An operation which stole around $1 billion from some 100 financial institutions around the world in 2015 using the so-called Anunak malware (malicious software) was tracked back to Russia.

 

At home, the hackers generally appear not to be part of the existing criminal networks. Instead, much like professional assassins, forgers or money launderers, they are specialists for hire, engaged for a particular operation. More often, they form their own virtual groups and networks, increasingly cross-border and multi-ethnic ones, to commit crimes either for themselves or for hire to other gangs. They were, for example, reportedly the technical experts who cracked police databases for the Japanese yakuza in the 1990s, transferred stolen money abroad for Australian gangsters in the 2000s, and obtained credit card details for the Italians in the 2010s.

 

The state is once again the biggest gang in town, and local and national political/administrative figures are stronger than their criminal counterparts. While the movers and shakers of central government have little reason to fear or need the criminals – even if they do often move within common social circles – at a local level, the opportunities for deeper cooperation nationally between political and criminal are much more evident and the relationship not quite so one sided. One by-product of this is that even if the national government does ever get serious about fighting corruption and organized crime, this may be resisted and side-lined on the ground by the gangsters’ allies, clients and patrons.

 

Spanish prosecutor José Grinda González reportedly said that, in his view, the Kremlin’s ‘strategy is to use [organised crime] groups to do whatever the [government of Russia] cannot acceptably do as a government’. Gangsters are not just paid but offered immunity in return for carrying out covert missions. Grinda claimed, for example, that vor v zakone Zakhar Kalashov sold guns to Kurdish terrorists to destabilise Turkey under orders from the GRU, Russian military intelligence.

 

Europol’s 2008 Russian Organized Crime Assessment concluded that it had a ‘medium level direct impact’ on the European Union, mainly felt through their trafficking operations, but a high level indirect impact on the EU. This is experienced through money laundering and investments. These activities distort and may even destroy legal competition; raise prices and inflation in the property and other similar markets; increase corruption of business practices and culture; create concrete losses to legal business and national economies in the EU; increase the lucrativeness and social acceptance of criminal activities; facilitate OC-penetration and integration into legal structures; legalize the proceeds of crime, the criminals and their activities and in turn also seriously damage many legal elements of the EU societies.

 

Is Crimea the first conquest in history conducted by gangsters working for a state? It is hardly novel for gangsters to be used in times of war, but, unusually in this case, the criminals were combatants, not just collaborators, and they were not merely unleashed against an enemy like 18^th century privateers – pirates given sanction so long as they attacked the other side – but integrated into the invader’s forces. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it did so not only with its infamous ‘little green men’

 

Special forces without any insignia – but also with criminals. To the gangsters, this was not about geopolitics, less yet about redressing what Putin called the ‘outrageous historical injustice’ that occurred when the Crimean Peninsula was transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, it was about business opportunities. It is hardly coincidental that the two parts of Ukraine in which Russia is, as of writing, entrenched are both areas where the old-style vory are equally thick on the ground.) Even before the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991, Crimea had become a haven for smuggling, black marketeering and a lucrative array of embezzlement schemes centering on the region’s health spas and holiday resorts. As independent Ukraine struggled in the early 1990s both with economic crisis and the near-collapse of its law enforcement structures, organized crime assumed an increasingly visible and violent form.

 

By the 2000s, gangster-businessmen were increasingly dominant within Crimea. Kiev appeared to have little interest in bringing good governance and economic prosperity to this peninsula of ethnic Russians, and this gave the local elites both free rein and also a perverse legitimacy. Crimea regarded itself as neglected by, and separate from, the political mainstream. In this political, economic and social vacuum, the new mafia–business–political empires could thrive. As one US embassy cable in 2006 put it, these ‘Crimean criminals were fundamentally different than in the 1990s: then, they were sportsuit-wearing, pistol-wielding “bandits” who gave Crimea a reputation as the “Ukrainian Sicily” and ended up in jail, shot, or going to ground; now they had moved into mainly above-board businesses, as well as local government.’ It added that ‘dozens of figures with known criminal backgrounds were elected to local office in the March 26 elections’.

 

When Moscow moved to seize Crimea on the morning of 27 February, it deployed the ‘little green men’, some local police who solidly supported the coup, and also thugs in mismatched fatigues and red armbands, nonetheless often clutching brand new assault rifles. These ‘self-defense forces’ spent as much time occupying businesses – including a car dealership owned by a partner of Ukraine’s next president, Petro Poroshenko – and throwing their weight around on street corners as they did actually securing strategic locations. While some were veterans and volunteers, many were the foot soldiers of the peninsula’s crime gangs.

 

The new elite is thus a triumvirate of Moscow appointees, local politicians and gangsters made good. And they did indeed make good, quickly moving to skim funds from the sums Moscow provided to start developing the peninsula, and simply expropriating properties owned by the Ukrainian government and its allies. In theory, these properties were sold at auction to raise more development funds, but often in practice the ‘auctions’ were clearly rigged sweetheart deals. The beneficiaries are the politicians, the oligarchs and the gangsters. Coal, gold, petrol and tobacco. That is what they are fighting for in eastern Ukraine.

 

Moscow presumably thought that by relying heavily on local militias it could fight its undeclared war against Kiev deniably and on the cheap, but in practice it created a situation in which it was often scarcely in control of its notional proxies. Indeed, from the first it was being embezzled by them, and soon began to pay the price in terms of an upturn in violent crime and illegal arms dealing back home. In Rostov-on-Don, the southern Russian city acting as a logistical support hub for the war, there was a growing problem. In 2015, the Rostov region was the ninth most criminal in all Russia, but by 2016 it had become the seventh, and the city itself had become, according to some measures, the most dangerous in Europe – having not even been in the top ten before.

 

For the vory, this was a priceless opportunity to turn their street muscle into a form of legal power. Although post-Soviet Ukraine had had at best partial success in building a working law-based state (if anything, by 2014 corruption was an even greater problem there than in Russia), the east had been especially problematic, in the grip of a seemingly unbreakable cabal of business oligarchs and corrupt political managers. In short, ‘Donbas’s magnates – some criminals already under Soviet law – prevented the rule of law from emerging in the Donbas and severely limited the formation of a civil society’. Combine that with a heavy concentration of local prisons, and a faltering local economy that encouraged street gangs, and it is perhaps no surprise that it was commonly said that ‘every third man in the Donetsk region is in prison, has been in prison, or will be in prison’.

 

The illegal production of counterfeit alcohol and tobacco and its export to Russia, Ukraine and Europe increased, now that the criminals were essentially in charge. Moscow still depends on recruiting cybercriminals or simply calling on them from time to time, in return for their continued freedom.

 

There are serious risks for Moscow in this kind of state–crime collusion. It is easy to understand the temptations for Vladimir Putin. Russia is not in the best position to claim great-power status and challenge the West. Its military is smaller than the combined forces of European NATO, even without counting Canada and the USA. Its economy is smaller than that of New York state. However, it is an authoritarian regime able to focus its resources on its goals; Putin does not have to worry unduly about democratic accountability; and he has the combination of pragmatism and ruthlessness to exploit whatever advantages he can find. Russia’s underworld may be a serious drain on the country’s social, political and economic development, but it also can be and is being mobilized as a tool of foreign policy, in arguably the world’s first criminal–political war.

 

His position within the FSB allows him to access the wealth of information that the security services in an authoritarian state hold. If you need to know exactly how much money a target has before shaking them down, if you want to know who really owns that company you’ve got your eye on, or if you would simply like to have someone’s private mobile phone number, and that of his mistress, then Sergei’s your man. It presumably does not prevent him from also doing his job well, but at the same time the access and assets of his position are available for hire. Most of his clients appear to be ‘business’, but in modern Russia, where the worlds of business, crime and politics intersect so freely, this means nothing.

 

As the Russian underworld loses its old myths and codes, as the title of vor v zakone becomes commodified and turned into an empty vanity, as the senior criminals set up corporations and charities and seek to blend into mainstream society, and as politicians start talking like gangsters, who is taming and teaching whom? Somewhere around the turn of the twenty-first century, state-building thieves and criminalized statesmen met in the middle. The Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov – himself killed in a mob hit in Moscow in 2004 – quoted Konstantin Borovoi, chair of the Russian Commodity Exchange, as saying, ‘The mafia is an attempt to imitate the government. It has its own tax system, its own security service, and its own administrative system. Any entrepreneur, in addition to paying taxes to the government, has to pay taxes to this shadow government.’

 

It is too simplistic simply to call this a ‘mafia state’. Under Putin, while people at the heart of the regime are undoubtedly interested in enriching themselves, there is also an ideological mission dear to his heart. Putin’s appeals to Russian patriotism, his self-declared mission of restoring to Russia its ‘sovereignty’ and its status in the world – making Russia great again

 

Two processes have taken place. One could be called the – limited – ‘nationalization’ of the underworld. Some of its members have been rolled into the state elite, whether in the form of avtoritet businessmen or gangsters turned politicians. At the same time, there is a clear consensus that the license the criminals have received is contingent on their living po-ponyatiyam, with the state periodically defining these understandings, whether it means not supporting the Chechen rebels or doing the intelligence services an occasional favor.

 

The second process is the ‘gangsterisation’ of the formal sectors, one which long predates Putin, but whose parameters have again become more clearly defined under him. In politics, the state will rule by presidential decree and legislative process when it can, but will use behind-the-scenes deals and deniable violence when it must.  This is a state still torn between a legalising impulse and a habitual lawlessness.

 

In 2016, according to Rosstat, the Federal Service for State Statistics, 21.2% of working Russians were employed in the informal sector, a rise of 0.7 percentage points on the year before and the highest level since 2006 when the current formulation was introduced. Meanwhile, according to a study from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, more than thirty million people were in the ‘shadow labor market’, equating to over 40% of the economically active population.

 

These are just a few examples from a massive body of written and visual representations of the underworld since 1991. Today the lurid boyevik genre is still popular and to be found in many a bookshop. There are even websites such as PrimeCrime, which since 2006 has not only accumulated thousands of pages chronicling the deeds of vory great and small, but even has comment sections where criminals, wannabes and fanboys exchange news and views on their favorite gangsters. Nonetheless, the central message is of confluence, as the gangsters seek to normalize their own status, and society embraces or at least accepts them, no longer the feared outsider but just another facet of life.

 

They may enjoy watching films about gangsters and even listen to Radio Shanson, but there is no evidence that ordinary Russians are happy with the present corrupt and criminalized situation. Admittedly, their main problem is corruption, because that directly and visibly affects their daily lives, while the gangsters have receded into the shadows. Ironically enough, even many within the elite, however much they have enriched themselves under the present order, appear to feel it is time to move on. From a purely anecdotal perspective, I am struck by how often I encounter a sense from the new rich (and especially their pampered but well-travelled offspring) that, to quote one, ‘Russia needs to be a regular country, a European one, and that means an end to the time of stealing.’ If nothing else, ending the ‘time of stealing’ would, to them, mean not a meticulous restitution of their riches to all those from whom they had been stolen, so much as the creation of a rule-of-law state in which their wealth was now both legitimate and protected.

 

Under Putin the real currency is not the ruble, but political power, and mere money and property are at best something held in trust until the day the state or some predator with a higher krysha and sharper teeth comes and takes it from you.

 

When there has been any kind of meaningful progress in cutting organized crime down to size – nowhere has it been wholly eliminated – then it has been through a combination of three basic necessities: effective laws and the presence of judicial and police structures able and willing to uphold them; political elites willing or forced to allow those structures to function; and a mobilized and vigilant public eager and determined to ensure that the work is done.

Russia’s laws and institutions largely meet the necessary criteria on paper but are thoroughly undermined in practice. Despite attempts at reform, any attempt to bring genuine legality to this society faces the serious problems of corruption, a lack of resources for police and courts alike and, in particular, the blatant manipulation of the law by the political elite.

But what elite, unprompted, reforms a system that grants it the opportunity to steal with impunity? There is little evidence of any serious will on the part of the Russian elite to do anything, especially as power becomes more and more tightly held by Vladimir Putin and a shrinking circle of like-minded (and generally highly acquisitive) allies.

Nor is there much that the outside world can do, but ‘not much’ is not nothing. A key step would be to attack criminals’ assets abroad more vigorously and, perhaps most importantly, address a common temptation to turn a blind eye to money that is slightly grubby in the name of business. Even before the 1998 crisis sent financial institutions scrambling for business, it was an open secret that many would gladly accept dirty money so long as it had been ‘prewashed’ enough that the bankers could claim to be ‘shocked, shocked’ if it was proven to be dirty.