Russian and Post-Soviet Organized Crime

Mark Galeotti, Mark Galeotti

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351550352
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Historia
• Categoria: Historia del mundo

A timely look at a widespread yet largely uninvestigated area of Russian life. Chapters include: consideration of the history and basis in culture for the organization of crime in Russia; the actions of emigres to the USA; and the development of modern sophistications of exchange and networking that currently blight privatization. Diverse perspectives, including comparative, structural and ethnic frameworks, give unprecedented national and international insights into a pervasive element of modern Russia.

Part I
Criminal Foundations

[1]
Criminal Russia: The Traditions behind The Headlines

Mark Galeotti

■ At the beginning of this year, the patience of market traders in the southern Russian town of Saratov broke. When locargangsters came as usual to collect their protection dues, they were beaten unconscious, then beaten some more, and then one of them was impaled upon a piece of metal scaffolding. This was an especially brutal and graphic example of the resistance of ordinary Russians to the new criminal class the collapse of the Soviet Union has liberated, but it harkens back to another age.

In 1873, a peasant by the name of Kuz’ma Rudchenko was found near a village called Brusovka, having been accused of stealing from the community. His hands had been chopped off, his head crushed and his body impaled upon a wooden plank. Far from an unusual and horrific crime, this was just an extreme instance of peasant samosud literally, ‘judging for oneself – the rough justice of the village community. Saratov today has its police force, but the market traders could not or would not trust them. Instead they took the law into their own hands, just as the peasants of imperial Russia had put their faith in samosud, rather than the Tsar’s courts or the rural police.

Suspects rounded up by President Yeltsin’s interior ministry police in Moscow, October 1993: part of a co-ordinated crackdown on organised crime.

Although both Tsarist Russia and the USSR were seen as police states, it is actually striking just how unruly they really were. The relatively few police officers at work were thinly distributed across this huge country. As a result, communities were encouraged or forced by necessity to police themselves. Perhaps more importantly, though, policing remained a crudely political affair. The legal codes, concerns and priorities of the government seemed alien to most Russians, while the state’s own agents seemed to break the laws openly with impunity.

Self-policing? A village council or mir depicted in this 1803 engraving.

The initial pattern had been set in Tsarist times. Until 1903, a mere 8,400 rural constables and sergeants were faced with the task not only of policing a countryside of over 124 million souls, but also collecting taxes, inspecting sanitation and carrying out a multitude of other administrative duties. The cities of Moscow and St Petersburg were exceptions. In 1905, Moscow had 4,843 policemen, meaning one for every 278 inhabitants, a ratio that compared favourably with those of Berlin (325) or Paris (336). Yet even where they were present in sufficient numbers, their training and methods left much to be desired. Whereas British constables would patrol a beat, their Russian counterparts were simply assigned places to stand within earshot of each other and waited for trouble to come their way.

Most importantly, they never really managed to win the trust and support of the commoners, not least because of their notoriously lax morals and their powerlessness in bringing the law to bear on the crimes of the rich and powerful. Tsarist Russia was a corrupt and lawless nation. Civil servants were even expected to survive by kormlenie, ‘feeding’, supplementing inadequate wages with backhanders and private scams. A government commission in 1856 even concluded that a bribe of less than 500 rubles – perhaps five times a policeman’s entire annual salary – should not even be thought of as a bribe at all. No wonder that the Russian proverb had it that law and money flow from the same spring’.

In practice, the peasant community – the mir – looked after itself. Cutting wood illegally in forests owned by the Tsar or a landowner was regarded as perfectly acceptable. Crimes against other members of the mir, though, were punished accordingly, but usually through samosud rather than the state’s legal system. In 1884 alone one district medical officer found himself carrying out autopsies on 200 victims of the lynch mob, in a province of only a quarter of a million inhabitants. As another peasant proverb had it, ‘the vengeance of the village is nearer than the mercy of a Tsar’.

The 1917 revolution and the subsequent consolidation of Bolshevik power thus took place in a country already accustomed to think in terms of two sets of laws. There were those of the people, which addressed matters of day-to-day life and the community, and which were enforced by the community. Those of the state, by contrast, as often broken by the state’s own agents as enforced, seemed very far from the concerns of the common man or woman. Although the Bolsheviks had expected to bridge this gap, the state of the nation they inherited forced them to think first of survival. The First World War cost Russia some 16 million deaths. The besprizornye, homeless, rootless, orphaned children, came to number seven million. Millions of homeless peasants, jobless workers and hungry deserters had no stake in this new world of famine, revolution and civil war. Many turned to brigandage and street crime to survive. The newly established Bolshevik state, though, could not and would not tolerate such anarchy. In the period 1826–1905, the Tsarist regime had shot 894 criminals and revolutionaries. Even in 1906, the peak of late Tsarist repression, the gallows and the firing squads had accounted for some 1,310 victims. But in contrast in eighteen months over 1918–1919, the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, killed over 8,300 ‘enemies of the people’.

When, after all, did Soviet Russia ever have a chance to build a stable, law-based state? The 1920s saw a process of re-urbanisation which unsettled traditional patterns of life, even before the whirlwind of industrialisation, forced labour and political terror which was Stalinism destroyed them. Then came the Second World War, and a post-war era characterised by yet more problems of displaced populations and lawlessness. Having defeated the Nazis, the forces of the state were forced in effect to reconquer the USSR, fighting daily battles against deserters and bandits. Rail travellers lived in fear of the koshki, ‘ cats’ , grappling hooks which bandits would hurl through train windows to snag plunder, which would then be pulled out off the train, whether a bag or even a person.

Crime still prospered under the Bolsheviks, while many of the old ways simply adopted new guises. Denunciation to the secret police, often on the most ridiculous charges, replaced cruder and more physical ways of settling old scores. Corrupt bureaucrats revived the practices of kormlenie and corruption. The Cheka had not only adopted many of the methods of its Tsarist counterpart, but hired many of its agents. Stalin’s regime was able to impose some form of law and order, but through the use of police state techniques, and the massive and arbitrary use of terror and imprisonment. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Stalin restored order, but at the cost of making a mockery of any notion of law in the Soviet Union. Ironically, he also created a new type of Soviet criminal.

Photographing a criminal in Siberia, 1894.

Life in a Tsarist gulag: peasant women selling provisions to prisoners in Siberia, 1891.

Criminals may be outside the law, but they are never outside society. Tsarist Russia’s criminals mirrored the rest of society: broken into mutually supportive communities, strongly conscious of pecking orders and fiercely protective of their livelihood. The structure and attitudes of the mir and the urban guilds were reflected in those of the gangs the vory v zakone, ‘thieves in law’. They had their own distinctions, a whole hierarchy of illegal trades, from petty bandits to some twenty-five different thieves’ professions’ (from horse thief to burglar) to the frauds, the aristocracy of the vorovskoi mir, the ‘thieves’ world’. They had their own language, a thieves’ cant full of borrowed words from Romany, Yiddish and a dozen European tongues (English gave them shop, while the German ‘guten morgen’ became the slang for a morning burglary). They even developed a code of tattoos, different patterns and pictures recording everything from gang rank to whether or not the criminal had killed.

All this survived the Revolution, especially the code of the thieves in law, which emphasised style, skill and above all loyalty. They were meant never to co-operate with the authorities under any circumstances, and it was to be the collapse of this taboo which led to the next stage in the black evolution of Russian criminality. Stalin’s mass purges saw the labour camps expand at an extraordinary rate. From a prison population of 198,000 in 1927, by 1939 the figure was closer to three million. Many of these newcomers were innocents or political prisoners who knew nothing of the codes of the vorovskoi mir and the authorities did all they could to play on this division. Criminals began to be offered more opportunities to gain power within the camps by acting as trustees and keeping the ‘politicals’ in line. Then the Second World War saw many others volunteer to join the army as a way of getting out of the camps.

After the war, they returned to prison and, like the trustees, were labelled ‘dogs’, collaborators, by the other thieves in law. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the whole prison system torn by the so-called ‘scab wars’, as these ‘dogs’ took on the traditionalists and eventually won, a hidden war in which thousands died, and which the government either let happen or simply could not prevent. The prisons thus became dominated by criminals who had come to see the advantages in co-operating with the authorities. When the camps began to be opened after Stalin’s death in 1953, criminals, as well as political prisoners were to benefit. Massive opportunities beckoned to ambitious men, and the victors of the ‘scab wars’ also won this new battle for underground power. By 1956 they had consolidated their power so much that they held a gang bosses’ gathering to divide up the country between them. They even called it a ‘Congress’, in mockery of the Communist Party’s assemblies. What was the secret of their power? The ‘dogs’, unlike the traditionalists, looked to buy out and cultivate alliances with members of the political elite and the structures of the state, from the KGB and police to the Party civil servants.

From then, the worlds of Soviet organised crime and politics became increasingly close. The lax Brezhnev years of the late 1960s and 1970s represented their heyday, and were characterised by the almost open flaunting of...