CHAPTER 1

KAIN’S LAND

Even a bishop will steal if he’s hungry.

Russian proverb

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 labour.

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.

Criminal histories

I am not a scholar, but I can tell you this: Russians have always been the best, the bravest criminals around.

‘Graf’ (‘Count’), middle-ranking criminal, 19931

Ironically enough, while there is a strong historical pedigree for the vory, it is one in which they have never shown much interest. 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.² The yakuza claim their roots are not in the bandit kabuki mono (‘crazy ones’) who terrorised 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 organised crime seems to revel in its very ahistoricity, lacking even a folklorish interest in its past. Eschewing memorialisation 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, as a new generation of criminal leaders, the so-called avtoritety (‘authorities’), disdain the tattoos and routines which marked out the old generation.⁵

For all this, though, Russia’s modern underworld of sharp-suited criminal-entrepreneurs and their heavily armed bodyguards and leg breakers did not emerge full-grown from their country’s tumultuous transition to the market after 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet system. Instead, they are heirs to a history which in its twists and turns reflects the wider processes shaping Russia, from centuries of rural insularity to the crass, state-led, crash industrialisation of the late nineteenth century and the Gulag-driven modernisation of Stalin’s reign. Perhaps most striking, though, is the extent to which Russia’s history, while full of vicious bandits and blood-stained murderers, is unusually heavily dominated by fraudsters, embezzlers and gangsters who understood how to use the system to their advantage, when to challenge it, and when to keep a low profile.

One of the lessons of the historical evolution of Russian organised 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. Even before the anarchy of the post-Soviet transition, though, a blend of coercion, corruption and compliance was central to the Russian way of crime.

Can Russia be policed?

Never tell a cop the truth.

Russian saying

There were, arguably, two ways Russian organised crime could have evolved, two potential precursors, one rural and one urban. In the nineteenth 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 nineteenth century, tsarist Russia covered almost one-sixth of the world’s landmass. The population of 171 million (1913)6 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’,7 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. To the south were the unruly and mountainous Caucasian regions, conquered in the nineteenth century but never truly subjugated. To the east were the Islamic provinces of central Asia. Westwards were the more advanced cultures of the occupied Congress Kingdom of Catholic Poland and the Baltic states. Even the Slavic heartlands included the rich farmlands of the Ukrainian black-earth regions, the sprawling and overcrowded metropolises of Moscow and St Petersburg, and the icy Siberian taiga. In all, the empire embraced some 200 nationalities, with Slavs accounting for two-thirds of the whole.⁸

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. By 1900, the proportion of the state budget spent on the police was around 6 per cent – well below European standards and possibly half the per capita expenditure in Austria or France and a quarter of Prussia’s.⁹ Russia’s police had to do rather more, with proportionately rather less.

Successive tsars tried and failed to police their country. From the Razboinaya izba or Banditry Office established by Ivan the Terrible (reigned 1533–84)¹⁰ 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 labourer’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 organising military recruitment. The standard ‘summaries’ of police duties published in the 1850s ran to some 400 pages apiece!¹²

Furthermore, the police were as corrupt as any of the institutions of the state, something of a Russian tradition. The apocryphal story is that when the moderniser and state builder Peter the Great proposed to hang every man who embezzled from the government, his procurator general gave the blunt reply that this would leave him with no officials because ‘we all steal, the only difference is that some of us steal larger amounts and more openly than others’.13 This was scarcely an exaggeration as even into the nineteenth century, although officially banned from doing so, Russian officials were often implicitly expected to practise 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.¹⁴ 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.’¹⁵ 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.¹⁶ For the sake of comparison, at this time, a rural police commissioner was paid 422 rubles a year.¹⁷ This became a particular problem when people overstepped the boundaries of ‘acceptable corruption’. For example, Major General Reinbot, the gradonachalnik (police chief) of Moscow 1905–8, became notorious for using his position to extort exorbitant payments, setting a dangerous example to his subordinates.¹⁸ Two merchants who testified before an investigation of Reinbot’s graft noted that:

the police took bribes before, too, but this was done in a comparatively decent way . . . When the holidays came around, people used to bring them what they could afford, what they could spare – the police used to accept it and express their gratitude. But this extortion commenced since the [1905] revolution, At first, they grafted cautiously, but when they learned that the new General, that is, Reinbot, accepted bribes himself, they no longer took bribes but actually commenced to rob the people.¹⁹

Reinbot himself was dismissed amidst a public investigation, but most corrupt police officials kept a much lower profile. Besides, Reinbot’s fate was hardly a deterrent: when he finally came to special court in 1911, beyond the loss of his special rights and titles, he received a fine of 27,000 rubles and a one-year prison sentence. The fine was little hardship – from one deal alone, Reinbot was alleged to have pocketed 200,000 rubles – and Tsar Nicholas II subsequently interceded to ensure he never had to go to prison.

Petty corruption was endemic within the police as a whole, from turning a blind eye in return for a consideration, to outright extortion. Even essentially honest officers saw no real problem in breaking the law in pursuit of their duties, manufacturing confessions or applying the ‘law of the fist’ (kulachnoye pravo) to teach miscreants a quick lesson with a beating. Their watchword was ‘the more severity, the greater the authority of the police’,20 but authority did not mean respect or support. Alienated from the masses, feeling largely unsupported by a state which paid them little and expected much, it is perhaps unsurprising (if indefensible) that the police cut corners and lined their own pockets.

Peasant justice

He’s our criminal, and it’s up to us to punish him.

Peasant saying²¹

Russian culture is characteristically rich in its forms of peasant resistance to their masters, whether that be the state or the local landlords, grandees and officials who afflicted them. At one end of the spectrum came the sporadic explosions of rural violence known as bunt, which Pushkin characterised as ‘Russian rebellion, senseless and merciless’.²² Russia has faced widespread rebellions at various times, such as the Pugachev Rising of 1773–4 or the 1905 Revolution, but more common were localised 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’²³).

Most of Russia was in practice policed by the community’s fists and by the landowner’s whip. Even the chief of the paramilitary Gendarmes was of the view in 1874 that local police lacked ‘even the possibility to organize any police surveillance at all of localities with heavily populated manufacturing centers’, so that they were but ‘passive spectators of the criminal acts that are committed there’.²⁴ Instead, 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 has been best studied by Cathy Frierson, who concluded that – contrary to the opinions of many police and state officials of the time – it was not mindless violence but a process with its own logic and its own principles.25 Above all, 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. There was, for example, the thief whose arms and legs were skinned before his head was split by an axe,²⁶ or another beaten to within an inch of his life and then thrown to the ground before a charging horse for a poetic coup de grâce.²⁷

Was this a crime, or was it the commune policing itself? Needless to say, 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 per cent of stolen horses were recovered²⁸) and rarely made great efforts to win themselves friends in the village. The rural guards known as uryadniki, for example, while drawn from peasant stock, had, by taking on the tsar’s uniform, aligned themselves instead with the state. (It is worth noting at this stage that the injunction against taking arms for the state would also appear in vor culture.) The peasants typically called them ‘dogs’, and the uryadniki returned the favour: a contemporary observer complained that they ‘boast of their commanding superiority and almost always treat the peasants with disdain’.²⁹ It is thus hardly surprising that one contemporary source suggested that no more than one in ten of all rural crimes were ever reported.³⁰ Nonetheless, 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.

This is especially because 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 offences accounted for 70 per cent of male property convictions in late tsarist Russia.31 The Russian language contains two very distinct words for crime: prestupleniye, an essentially technical definition, a breach of the law, and zlodeyanie, which carries with it a moral judgement.³² Tellingly, the peasant proverb had it that ‘God punishes sins, and the state punishes guilt’.³³ Such poaching may have been prestupleniye, but the peasants certainly did not see it as zlodeyanie because the landlord had more than enough wood for his personal needs, and ‘God grew the forest for everyone’.³⁴ It could even be interpreted as an act of social banditry, a petty redistribution of wealth from the exploiter to the exploited. In the eyes of the eighteenth-century traveller the Marquis de Custine, the 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’.³⁵

Policing the countryside

How was I to enforce the law over a population of 60,000 scattered in 48 settlements with but four sergeants and eight guardsmen?

Rural constable, 1908³⁶

Of course, none of this could be considered ‘organised crime’ in any meaningful sense – even when such acts as serial samosud murders were undoubtedly crimes committed in an organised manner, they were not for private gain. Even long-term and organised poaching only marginally approaches the criteria, especially as it was generally managed within the context of traditional village authority structures. While Nicholas I’s reforms had been a significant start, that is all they were. They certainly did not bring law and order to the deep forests, dark fields and unmarked frontiers of Russia. A force which by the turn of the century had grown to 47,866 officers of different rank and variety was expected to police a country of 127 million souls.³⁷ The cities may have been moderately heavily policed (although even this is open to debate, as will be discussed later), but the real problem was in the countryside. There, 1,582 stanovye pristavy (rural constables) and 6,874 uryadniki were expected to patrol Russia’s immense rural hinterland and keep almost 90 million people in line.³⁸ On average, each stanovoi pristav 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. Earlier Russian banditry can rarely be considered organised crime. Although relatively little hard data is available, there is little sense of the kind of sizeable, autonomous criminal groupings operating for an appreciable period that Anton Blok identified in the eighteenth-century Netherlands,39 for example, or as represented by the sixteenth-century Italian bandit-chieftain Francesco Bertazuolo, who commanded several hundred men divided into separate ‘companies’, as well as a network of spies.⁴⁰ Even the infamous Vasily Churkin, a highwayman who terrorised the Moscow region in the 1870s, was much less influential than popular folklore had made him out to be.⁴¹ Rather than being the daring master of a sizeable bandit gang, he was actually a murderous thug who rarely had more than a handful of followers. This was the norm, and most gangs were small and often ephemeral collections of outlaws and misfits which individually posed only a minor threat to the rural order. The challenge was, rather, the very number of such small groups.

A particular exception to this exclusion of rural banditry from the definition of organised crime were the gangs of horse thieves, which represented such a concern to Russian peasants that they reserved for their captured members the most savage samosud murders.⁴² The lifeless bodies of these victims of lynch law would typically be left at the nearest crossroads (sometimes symbolically festooned with bridles or horsehair nooses) as a warning to other prospective horse thieves to continue on their way. However, the threat of samosud also forced the criminals to organise.

Horse thieves and the bandit tradition

Periodic epidemics, crop failure and other disaster cannot compare with the harm that horse thieves bring to the countryside. The horse thief holds peasants in perpetual, uninterrupted fear.

Georgy Breitman, 1901⁴³

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 recognised. This is, incidentally, an interesting parallel to the modern Russian gangster, who typically tries to create a home base, by corrupting or threatening local populations and political elites, as the hub for often transnational criminal networks.

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.44 One investigator, for example, wrote of the gang led by a certain Kubikovsky, which included almost sixty criminals and had its headquarters in the village of Zbelyutka. There, they made their lair in an underground cavern within which they could hide as many as fifty horses at a time. If this was full or unusable, then each local village had an agent, known as a shevronista, who could be called on to hide horses or provide information.⁴⁵ Not that they usually had to conceal them for long. Given that horses, while greatly in demand, were also relatively identifiable, 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. Thus, a study of criminal networks in Saratov province found that:

Stolen horses are taken on a certain road to the Volga or the Sura rivers; in almost every settlement along that road there is a den of thieves who immediately transfer the horses to the next village . . . All stolen horses end up . . . beyond the province’s borders, transferred either across the Sura into Penza and Simbirsk provinces, or across the Volga into Samara, while Saratov itself receives horses from these three provinces.⁴⁶

For a village to harbour horse thieves might bring it greater prosperity (not least as they squandered their gains on local alcohol and women) and perhaps even security. In some cases, the horse thieves operated as primitive protection racketeers, demanding tribute in return for leaving communities’ horses alone.⁴⁷ Faced with the very real threat of such 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 village48 – 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.⁴⁹ While this was a specialised form of rural banditry, in their rough-and-ready way the horse thieves did represent a kind of organised crime. They operated with a clear sense of hierarchy and specialisation, possessed distinct turfs of their own, maintained networks of informants, corrupted police officers, visited retribution on those who resisted or informed on them⁵⁰ and traded stolen horses with other gangs and corrupt ‘legitimate’ dealers.⁵¹ The more successful ones operated for years, and while they may have developed links with local communities, whether through extortion or as neighbours and protectors, they undoubtedly were not of the community, and in many cases recruited broadly, drawing on runaways, ex-convicts, deserters and petty outlaws.

This particular organised-crime phenomenon would prove an evolutionary dead end, though, and not survive long into the twentieth century. 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.⁵² 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).⁵³ However, as the Soviet regime began to assert its authority over the countryside, these bandits faced unprecedented pressure from the state. While rural policing as a whole remained a low priority, when more serious challenges emerged, the response of the revolutionary state was much more urgent and exigent. To suppress the larger bandit armies of the Volga, for example, the Bolsheviks deployed more than four Red Army divisions, along with aircraft.⁵⁴ The primal energies of bunt and banditry still remained, ready to break forth when the state seemed weak or when it put unbearable pressures on the countryside. In the whirlwind of Stalinist terror and collectivisation, for example, rural criminality once again became a serious challenge. In 1929, Siberia was declared ‘unsafe due to banditry’ and gangs roamed across much of the rest of Russia.55 In Sheila Fitzpatrick’s words, ‘theirs was a harsh frontier world, where bandits – often dekulakized peasants [repressed ‘rich peasants’] hiding in the forest – were likely to take potshots at officials while sullen peasants looked the other way’.⁵⁶ However, although bandits did often seek to steal horses, the specific phenomenon of the organised horse thief gang was not to survive long into the Soviet era.

The horse thieves already exhibited some of the traits of the later Russian gangsterism of the vorovskoi mir. They were a criminal subculture that deliberately held itself apart from mainstream society, but learned how to manipulate it. In the process, they became connected to that society through cooperation with corrupt officials and winning over the allegiance of disillusioned populations. When they could, the horse thieves would take over political structures and establish ‘bandit kingdoms’ from which to manage networked operations. Extravagantly violent when they needed to be, they were also capable of very complex and subtle activities. Nonetheless, for the real roots of modern Russian organised crime, the real ancestors of the vory, one needs instead to look to the cradle of its Kains, the cities.