THE GEORGIAN
The expatriate vor
My homeland is wherever I live well.
Russian proverb
Summer 2003 saw all the pomp and pageantry of the Georgian Orthodox Church and state on display at the funeral of Dzhaba Ioseliani. The burial took place in the graveyard of the thirteenth-century Sioni Cathedral of the Dormition in Tbilisi, where patriarchs of the church are laid to rest, and was presided over by the current one. The mourners represented the cream of Georgian society, led by President Eduard Shevardnadze himself.1 No one seemed disturbed that Ioseliani had been one of the most notorious organised-crime figures in the country, a man who had run not just an underworld empire but his own private army. Now, he was being honoured by President Shevardnadze, a man whose career had really taken off in Soviet times when he became known as Georgia’s ‘hammer of the mafia’, the interior minister who seemed to be the first in that position to want to do something about his small republic’s reputation for freewheeling corruption and criminality. It has long been clear that time can turn gangsters into icons; Ioseliani’s case made it evident just how short that time may be. Indeed, it had happened long before his death. The Georgian bestselling author Nodar Dumbadze admitted he had modelled a key character in his book White Flags – the ‘honest vor’ – on his childhood friend Ioseliani. He was himself honoured by the Georgian State Institute of Theatre and Cinema, from which he received a doctorate, for his own books and plays.2
It is fair to say that Ioseliani, who once said that in Soviet times ‘there were only two ways: prison or the Young Communist League. I chose the first one’,3 was not your typical gangster, but then again, even by the standards of the ‘mountaineers’ of the Caucasus, 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. The Slavs often claim that it is because they maintain their stranglehold by force; as one ‘source familiar with the criminal milieu’ put it, ‘those of our guys who have tried to rise up against this have been killed . . . They don’t let our guys rise up.’4 This may help them feel better, but actually bears little resemblance to the truth.
The lavrushniki (‘bay leaves’), as Slavic gangsters often call the Georgians, have long played an important role in Russia’s underworld. However, their strength has rested not on violence and threat so much as entrepreneurialism and their talents for deal making. New pressures and opportunities, though, are driving them and the other ‘highlanders’ in three different directions. Three specific godfathers perhaps best illustrate these trajectories: Tariel Oniani the empire builder, Aslan Usoyan the network weaver, and Rovshan Dzhaniyev the insurgent.
Bay leaves: the Georgians in Russia
I remember my father’s friend’s wife, a very dignified woman . . . coming and asking me, ‘Do you know any thieves in law? I have a problem I need sorting out.’ She didn’t have any idea what she was asking for, just that she had heard the thieves in law can help you.
Georgian academic, 20095
Perhaps it is no surprise that Georgia’s gangsters retained a positive reputation for so long, as the republic itself has long enjoyed – or suffered from – its own reputation as a land of good wine, easy living, long dinners and gangster bosses. 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, as discussed in chapter 3. 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’.6 The Soviet Union’s slide into institutionalised corruption in the 1960s and 1970s meant that, despite overt campaigns against ‘speculation’, bribe taking, embezzlement and theft, there emerged ‘organised 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’.7 The role of the vory v zakone, known in Georgian as kanonieri qurdi, was as elsewhere often to be the connector between these various worlds. Furthermore, they were active and numerous: 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 fifty of the total population.8
Alexander Gurov, the Soviet police criminologist who arguably did the most to bring the problem of organised 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”.’9
In keeping with their nation’s lively traditions of black marketeering and corrupt politics, the Georgian vory were the first and most enthusiastic to involve themselves in politics and then take full advantage of Gorbachev’s reforms of the 1980s. To a considerable extent, this was down to the authority and initiative of Dzhaba Ioseliani. A vor v zakone, convicted bank robber and killer, in 1982 he convened a skhodka in Tbilisi at which he advocated, largely with success, that the criminals actively seek to infiltrate and control local political institutions. Even by this time, the Georgian vory felt much less strictly bound by the traditional codes of the vorovskoi mir, establishing gangs based around family and kin and handing power from father to son in a dynastic manner technically proscribed by the rules of the underworld. This meant, however, that they were able to mesh much more closely and directly with Georgia’s kin-based politics, and thus they had a head-start on their criminal counterparts elsewhere in burrowing into the political elite.
Ioseliani would continue to play a pivotal role in Georgian politics, and one in which his background as, in his own words, ‘a known thief and an unknown artist’ (he had distinct creative pretensions, writing books and plays) seemed little obstacle.10 He proved to be as effective a politician and warlord as a gangster, and in 1989 founded a nationalist paramilitary movement, the Mkhedrioni (‘Knights’), which was as much a criminal venture, involved in protection racketeering, drug dealing, kidnapping and organised robbery, as a political one. (Ioseliani embraced this with typical panache, calling it ‘a patriotic organisation, but based on the thieves’ tradition’.11) At the forefront of persecuting Abkhaz and Ossetian minorities (and engaging in some looting on the side), the Mkhedrioni also became the stormtroopers of rising nationalist demagogue Zviad Gamsakhurdia. As is so often the way, the two ambitious men fell out: after Gamsakhurdia became independent Georgia’s first president, he had Ioseliani arrested and imprisoned. Such a figure makes a dangerous enemy and prisoner, though. A few months later, he was freed in a coup that would force Gamsakhurdia to flee and, for the next few years, he played a powerful role in the new government, before being again arrested, then pardoned. Eventually Ioseliani died of a heart attack in 2003.
Georgia’s criminals were thus heirs to an exceptionally entrepreneurial tradition and engaged in illicit business years before the avtoritety. They also benefited from an early shift towards seeking to subvert and control political institutions. Although Ioseliani’s career may have ended in prison and disgrace, it also saw a vor occupying the roles of kingmaker and parliamentarian: a powerful example, even if the very unruliness of the Mkhedrioni undermined some of the folklore of the ‘good gangster’. Many Georgian criminals chose to operate in Russia during the 1990s and 2000s, especially after Ioseliani’s fall, because of the opportunities there or because their roots were in the Georgian expatriate community. Otari Kvantrishvili, profiled in chapter 8, was just one of many.
However, Georgian politics also provides a much more direct reason for the numbers of lavrushniki in contemporary Russia’s underworld. Following the 2003 ‘Rose Revolution’, which toppled President Shevardnadze after disputed elections, new 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 qurduli samkaro – ‘thieves’ world’ in Georgian – was criminalised. 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 programme sought to combat widespread attitudes that condoned bribe-taking and glorified the gangsters.12 Faced with the threat of arrest, harsh detention and the confiscation of their assets, Georgia’s vory upped and left.
Tariel Oniani and the Georgian ‘iron’
Oniani knows how it’s done, how to build an organisation, how to use it; the Georgian iron slid over everything.
Russian criminologist, 201413
In the sometimes opaque slang of the Russian underworld, the phrase ‘to iron the firm’ (utyuzhit firmu) emerged in the 1980s as a term for ripping off (‘ironing’) foreigners (‘the firm’). In the 2000s, it became used more broadly for exploiting any bunch of outsiders, whether from a different city, gang, ethnic group or country. By the 2010s, when I heard it at all, it had begun to acquire a more aggressive sense, ‘straightening out’ in the sense of making people pay up whether they liked it or not, through direct intimidation and extortion. It is a fitting way of describing the trajectory of Tariel Oniani (‘Taro’), a Georgian crime boss who has become perhaps one of the most dangerous and destabilising forces within the modern Russian underworld, precisely because he is careless of the customs, understandings and balances which have, in the main, kept the peace there for years.
In 2006 Georgia’s general prosecutor, Zurab Adeishvili, asserted that there was not a single vor v zakone left in the country; he was slightly exaggerating the case but not by much.14 In essence, their power had been broken, even if this is a long way short of saying that the country had no more criminals or organised crime. Of course, these exiles had to go somewhere, and for many the destination was Russia. One of the greatest beneficiaries was Oniani. In some ways, though, the rise of this particular Georgian godfather has been at the expense of the old ways of Georgian organised crime. He largely abandoned the old habits of sticking to kin and focusing on the deal, or rather subordinated them to the ruthless pursuit of control within his organisation, and power within the wider underworld. This is not a man who makes allies, when he can make subjects.
Oniani’s career was made on the run. A vor v zakone and lifelong criminal – his first conviction was for armed robbery at the age of seventeen – Oniani fled Georgia in 2004, moving first to France, then Spain. In 2005, he was forced to flee again, ahead of a Spanish arrest warrant. He already had substantial assets and allies in Russia, so he moved there under the short-lived alias ‘Tariel Mulukhov’, aggressively building his operations and wooing his fellow Georgian exiles. An outsider, he demonstrated no qualms about moving into others’ turfs and businesses and ignoring established mechanisms for resolving intergang disputes.
He rose rapidly, but gained enemies with equal celerity. In particular, he began an increasingly overt campaign against Kurdish-Georgian gang leader Aslan Usoyan. There were previous grounds for a feud, although it is also likely that Oniani simply felt that Usoyan, as the highest-profile Georgian-born gangster operating in Russia, was the man to beat. In 2006, senior Georgian crime boss Zakhar Kalashov (‘Shakhro the Younger’), an ally of Usoyan’s, had been arrested in Spain. Usoyan appointed the vor ‘Lasha Rustavsky’ to be the guardian of ‘Shakhro’s’ assets and the group’s obshchak, but Oniani claimed that he was owed a share of it from joint money-laundering and illegal-immigrant-smuggling operations. With ‘Shakhro’ sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, a general squabble began within the Georgian criminal diaspora about these funds. Oniani was able to exploit this to his advantage, not least winning over the violent gang leader ‘Merab Sukhumsky’ and his brother Levon, a noted contract killer, with promises of a share of the obshchak.
Exploiting and exacerbating the rivalries and suspicions inevitable in an underworld proved one of Oniani’s particular strengths. At a time when most senior criminal figures were eager to maintain the peace and concentrate on business rather than war, Oniani could leverage his intransigence and his apparent willingness to bring the whole structure crashing down to his advantage. By 2007, his feud with Usoyan was leading to tit-for-tat killings that threatened to spark a wider war. In 2008, it fell to Russian gangsters, of all people, to try to broker a peace between them. A skhodka was arranged on Oniani’s yacht, but it was raided by the police: thirty-seven vory v zakone were briefly detained and subjected to the embarrassment of being paraded on TV, even though none were eventually charged. This was a bad start to the negotiations (Oniani may have tipped the police off, precisely for that reason), but in any case, they foundered on Oniani’s refusal to compromise, even after one of his right-hand men, Gela Tsertsvadze, was murdered. Faced with the threat that the Russians would side with Usoyan, Oniani then agreed to allow veteran vor Vyacheslav ‘Yaponchik’ Ivankov to try and arbitrate their dispute so as to appear willing to cooperate. However, as covered in chapter 8, Ivankov was then murdered; recurring reports have suggested that ‘Yaponchik’ – who knew Usoyan – was on the verge of ruling against Oniani, who silenced him first.
In July 2010, Oniani was sentenced to ten years in a maximum-security prison for his role in the kidnap in Moscow in 2009 of fellow Georgian businessman ‘Johnny’ Manadze, for whose release he was demanding a $500,000 ransom.15 That he was arrested is perhaps unsurprising considering that he was one of the highest-profile gangsters in Russia, and was also wanted on an Interpol red notice international arrest warrant. More surprising was that he was held (and refused bail, even when his lawyers offered 15 million rubles, equivalent to $480,000), tried and awarded a serious sentence.16 There has been suspicion that the government was trying to defuse a mob war by taking him out of circulation, or else that the conviction was ‘ordered’ – bought and paid for – by Oniani’s enemies.
However, imprisonment does not seem to have interfered with Oniani’s ability to manage his criminal empire. A flow of visitors – and even Skype calls from his cell – seem to be allowing him to continue to set policy and visit vengeance upon his enemies. After all, his is a much more overtly hierarchical and rigidly and ruthlessly disciplined organisation than is the norm for larger criminal combines in Russia, essentially following the model of the ‘core group’. Oniani showed himself willing to allow many of his associates considerable autonomy, but he expected them to kick a share of their proceeds up to him. Ironically enough, this was often described as the obshchak, although what was once envisioned as a common kitty to help ordinary members in distress had become the boss’s personal slush fund. More to the point, this autonomy was regarded as a privilege rather than a right, and members of the group were expected to show absolute obedience when called upon by Oniani or one of his inner circle, all Georgians. These are drawn largely from the Kutaisi clan, the largest Georgian crime group in Russia, with some fifty vory v zakone and numerous other gangsters in its numbers, and which also operates across Europe.17 The Kutaisi clan’s chief, Merab Dzhangveladze (‘Dzhango’), appears to have been Oniani’s right-hand man; indeed, this led to Usoyan trying to have him stripped of his status as a vor in 2008, although this means little in today’s more diffuse and opportunistic underworld. This combination of size, discipline and audacity made – and at the time of writing still makes – Oniani’s organisation, while not the largest in the Russian underworld, probably the most dangerous, dynamic and destabilising.
Grandfather Hassan’s boys
We are peaceful people and don’t bother anybody . . . We are for peace, in order to prevent lawlessness.
Aslan Usoyan, 200818
If Oniani’s gang represents one model of ‘highlander’ organised crime – disciplined, centralised, dominated by a single leader and a single ethnicity – then that of the criminal godfather Aslan Usoyan (‘Ded Khasan’, ‘Grandfather Hassan’), murdered in 2013, represents another. His organisation, sometimes known as the Tbilisi clan, became characterised by relatively loose affiliations and, above all, an avowedly multi-ethnic character, but this came only in the final stage of Usoyan’s complex career.19 In this respect, it represented a traditional Georgian model – essentially, the gang as a cooperative underworld business enterprise linked by kinship and charisma – updated to the modern era. It remains to be seen how long it will survive its founder.
Perversely, it is thus worth starting Usoyan’s story near, albeit not quite at, its end. 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 harbour suspicions of their rivals. In 2011, it looked as if Usoyan might be able to navigate these rocky waters. He had risen to become one of the dominant figures within Russia’s complex multi-ethnic underworld. A member of Georgia’s small Yezidi Kurdish minority, he was one of the few vory v zakone who had managed to adapt to the world of the avtoritety. He had survived near-elimination at the hands of his rivals in the late 1990s (and multiple assassination attempts) to emerge as a consummate dealmaker, able to reach accommodations with the state, ethnic Russian gangs, Georgians and Chechens alike.
In January 2013, though, he was stepping out of Moscow’s Stary Faeton, the restaurant at which he would habitually combine dining with meeting allies, clients and petitioners. As he walked across the interior courtyard shared by a trio of such establishments, an unknown assassin who had been waiting at an upstairs window across the street opened fire with an AS-Val, a specially built silenced rifle only issued to Russian commandos. His first shot hit Usoyan in the neck. The gunman made a clean getaway; Usoyan died in hospital shortly after.20 Ultimately, Russia still awaits a pioneer able to show the way to an honourable retirement and smooth transition within the top echelons of the underworld.
Born in Tbilisi in 1937, Usoyan opened his criminal record with a sentence for pickpocketing while just an adolescent. After an early criminal career in Georgia, he lived and worked across Russia and in Uzbekistan. In that time, his star rose within the underworld, and he acquired the rank of vor v zakone and a reputation as a shrewd operator. By the late 1980s, he was preying on black marketeers, earning him the muscle, connections and wealth to prosper in the post-Soviet era. At a time when many other criminal organisations were adopting a more networked structure, though, Usoyan’s – like those of many other Caucasian criminals – was a more conventional gang of the ‘core group’ variety, built around kinship, personal connections and hierarchy.
His operations extended across central and southern Russia and he forged connections with key figures within Moscow – including ‘Yaponchik’ and Alexei ‘Petrik’ Petrov, head of the Mazutkinskaya group21 – as well as a whole string of local kingpins in cities such as Nizhny Tagil, Yekaterinburg and Perm. Interestingly, Usoyan very specifically made it clear that while he was from the ‘highlander’ regions, he was not one of them. Indeed, figures such as ‘Yaponchik’ and ‘Yakutyonok’, his kingpin in Perm, warmed to him for that very reason.22
In the process, Usoyan became one of the holders of a common obshchak still existing at the time, in effect an underworld banker. A high point of his influence in that time came in 1995, ironically when he was arrested in a police raid on a gathering he was hosting in Sochi. Some 350 senior criminals had assembled, ostensibly to pay their respects to murdered vor v zakone Rantik ‘Synok’ Safaryan. In practice, though, this was a pretext for a regular skhodka.23 All the attendees were released for lack of evidence of any crime, but the public recognition that Usoyan was hosting such an event consolidated his standing within the underworld. The next year, the newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta published a league table of Russia’s gangs – such were the wild 1990s that organised crime almost seemed to have become a national sport, and certainly a national fascination – that put Usoyan’s combine third, after only Solntsevo and the Far Eastern Association of Thieves.24
However, with visibility comes vulnerability. In 1997 Usoyan was arrested again, charged with the murder of rival kingpin Amiran Pyatigorsky. He was acquitted, but Pyatigorsky’s death was just part of a wider war with ‘Rudik’, an Armenian gang leader eager to loosen Usoyan’s grip on the Caucasus region of Mineralnye Vody.25 ‘Rudik’ continued to apply direct methods – Usoyan survived his next assassination attempt in 1998 – but realised that the most dangerous attacks are often oblique ones. He began to question Usoyan’s stewardship of the obshchak, accusing him of embezzlement and mismanagement. Usoyan’s misfortune was that the 1998 financial crisis saw the ruble devalued dramatically, and with it the once seemingly safe government bonds in which much of the obshchak was held. His former allies turned on him, especially as rumours and suspicions still encircled him about the fate of ‘Shakhro the Younger’s’ obshchak. For a while, even Usoyan’s status as a vor v zakone may have been revoked.
No one befriends a gangster who seems to be on the way down. More of Usoyan’s lieutenants were killed or defected and an old feud flared up again. In the early 1990s, although based in Moscow, Usoyan had been made a smotryashchy (overseer) responsible for monitoring the activities of the gangs in St Petersburg and resolving disputes. This was very much a feature of the older days of the vorovskoi mir, in which a senior vor v zakone could operate as local arbiter. The post-Soviet underworld is rather different, though, and by 1994 Vladimir Kumarin, head of the Tambovskaya network, had begun to believe that Usoyan was trying to use this role to assert his personal authority over the city. Usoyan thus became the latest manifestation of a traditional St Petersburg bugbear: the bumptious upstart from Moscow who thinks he can throw his weight around in the ‘second city’. Once his position began to be weakened elsewhere, Usoyan quickly found his authority in St Petersburg disappear and his local allies with it.
In some ways, though, these perils were the making of Usoyan. The prospect of a widening mob war that could tear the Russian underworld apart worried many senior criminals and they began trying to broker some accord. Furthermore, Usoyan himself realised he needed allies and adopted a new strategy. Where once he had looked for subordinates, now he looked for allies and partners. By the end of 1999, he had agreed a ceasefire with ‘Rudik’. In order to rebuild his empire on more cooperative, networked lines, Usoyan needed also to find some cohering principle that could hold it together, to replace personal loyalty to him. He did so by charting a middle course between the three main ethnic groups dominating the Eurasian underworld: the Slavs, the Chechens and the Georgians.
While connected with Georgian crime groups in Tbilisi, for almost three decades, Usoyan’s operations had been based in Moscow and the north Caucasus. He did not really fit within the Georgians, especially as they had become increasingly dominated by Tariel Oniani. However, he was able to understand and work with them, just as he could with the Russians and the Chechens. Likewise, although a product of the old order of the vory, Usoyan was also a canny and successful entrepreneur and dealmaker, able to treat with the avtoritety. He was thus able to reinvent himself to exploit a gap in the market. He could appeal not only to the other ‘highlanders’, but also to criminals of every race, region and specialism. The leaders of this new network ranged from Usoyan’s kin (including his nephews, the vory v zakone ‘Yura Lazarovsky’ and Dmitry ‘Miron’ Chanturia), through Georgians, to Russians, Armenians, Azeris and even some Central Asians.26 He also formed a close alliance with Moscow’s Slavic Slavyansky gang.27
The network had considerable geographic scope. Its heartlands were Moscow (particularly its northern and eastern districts) and the surrounding area, and the Yaroslavl, Ural, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Krasnodar and North Caucasus regions. Outside Russia, it operated in Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia and Georgia, but relatively little any further afield. In this respect an old-school gangster, Usoyan had almost no interests in North America and very few in Europe, although there was some investment in Spain, Greece and the Balkans, especially in hotels and similar property. Even so, these were not platforms for future operations so much as rainy-day investments.28
In September 2010, Usoyan was shot in the stomach in central Moscow.29 He survived, but refused to name publicly whom he suspected of ordering the attack. Privately, he blamed Oniani. The traditional options would be a counter-attack or an attempt to buy off his enemy, but the seventy-three-year-old Usoyan again changed the rules. He began to divest himself of his main criminal assets and duties. At first it was assumed this was a ploy, but it became clear that in fact he was genuinely trying to manage the complex and unusual process of an orderly restructuring of his criminal empire and the distribution of its assets into associated but autonomous business units.30 ‘Yura Lazarovsky’ and ‘Miron’ Chanturia assumed day-to-day control of most operations within Russia: ‘Yura’ took over Usoyan’s businesses in the North Caucasus and southern Russia, especially the Krasnodar region, while Chanturia handled activities in Moscow, central Russia and the Yaroslavl region and became Usoyan’s spokesman and negotiator within the Moscow underworld.31
It is possible that this could have worked. Both Usoyan’s heirs, while young (then twenty-nine and thirty-one, respectively), were relatively well regarded. Most importantly, they were backed actively by Usoyan himself and also his confidant and consigliere, the vor v zakone ‘Edik Osetrina’. However, Usoyan’s murder in 2013 and the subsequent transfer of full authority to Chanturia left his plans in crisis. While the Usoyan gruppirovka leadership formally recognised Chanturia as their new chieftain, it did not look as if he had the authority, skills and credibility to step into his uncle’s shoes. One detective involved in the case expressed his doubts, noting that Usoyan’s strength was in his powerful network of connections, ‘someone he did a favour for twenty years ago, someone on whom he has incriminating evidence . . . With his death, that authority is lost. No one will listen to Miron.’32 As of 2017, Usoyan’s project to manage an orderly transfer of power seems to have come to fruition in a posthumous way, but his network is quietly falling apart.
Rovshan is not the kind of a guy to do that; he lives by the rules and would not have ordered [a hit] on a thief.
Cousin of Rovshan Dzhaniyev, 201333
Beyond Tariel Oniani, the other main suspect for organising Usoyan’s death was Rovshan Dzhaniyev, a relatively young Azeri gangster whose rise demonstrates one of the problematic by-products of the relative stability of the 2000s underworld: 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. Dzhaniyev, profiled in chapter 14, emerged as an outsider, looking to shake up the existing order, and as a result, became a magnet for other disgruntled younger criminals and a symbol of a worrying generational tension.
If Chechens and Georgians dominate the ‘highlander’ communities within the Russian underworld, it is important not to ignore other ethnicities such as the Armenians and Azeris. Armenian organised crime remains generally a low-level phenomenon in Russia and even such kingpins as the vor ‘Khromoi’, arrested in Moscow on drug charges in 2009, cooperate rather than compete with their Russian counterparts. This may help explain why Russian and Armenian criminals abroad also seem especially able and willing to work together. They have to, really: since the death of the senior Armenian gangster Rafik Bagdasaryan (‘Rafik Svo’) in 1993, they have never managed to maintain the kind of unity needed to be major players.34 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.
Rovshan Dzhaniyev, ‘Rovshan Lenkoransky’ (‘Rovshan of Lenkoran’), hailed from southern Azerbaijan. With a criminal career spanning prison terms in both Azerbaijan and Ukraine, he built himself a power base in Abkhazia, a region of Georgia now under Russian control, from which he appears to have had aspirations to form a ‘highlander’ network of his own. He certainly did not lack for confidence and ambition, and his criminal organisation developed connections in Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Moscow. In particular, he seemed to want to usurp Usoyan’s role in the ‘highlander’ community. The fact that many of the older-generation Azeri godfathers in Russia seemed willing to work with Usoyan perhaps made this inevitable.35
This was a formidable ambition. Dzhaniyev was in many ways a classic gangster, one who from the first believed in action over planning, a shoot-first kind of criminal, with a string of killings to his name. Ironically enough, in some ways this lack of nuance actually contributed to his appeal to footsoldiers in other groups, impatient and often frustrated with their criminal-businessman superiors. He was able to craft his personal myth as the daring bandit-chief – in some ways an abreg – harking back to an older, simpler and more exciting day.
As a result, he managed to attract a multi-ethnic collection of younger criminals, not only Georgians, including his right-hand man, Dzhemo Mikeladze, and Abkhazians, but also Dagestanis, Armenians and even Russians, including Alexander Bor (‘Timokha’), a former cohort of ‘Yaponchik’s’. The common denominator was that they were unhappy with the status quo. Sometimes they were simply stranded in a criminal no-man’s land. ‘Timokha’, for example, was a new-model white-collar gangster in many ways, having run ‘Yaponchik’s’ business operations in the USA, including stock manipulations in partnership with the Gambino mafia family.36 However, in Moscow he found himself exposed and friendless and needed to find new allies and protectors in a hurry. More often, though, Dzhaniyev’s followers were simply not well suited to the underworld of Putin’s Russia, where the slick and the smart entrepreneur called the shots and the old-style gangster was stuck in middle management.
According to some reports, Dzhaniyev was blamed by Usoyan for his attempted murder in 2010, although this may well have simply been a way for the latter to avert opening hostilities with Oniani (at whom he had first pointed the finger).37 Dzhaniyev continued to be a force in the underworld, even while regularly dropping out of sight, before his assassination in Turkey in 2016. His demise was perhaps unsurprising, not just because of his possible role in Usoyan’s death, but also because he had openly challenged the status quo.
Although his gang proved short lived, Dzhaniyev’s rise was a symptom rather than a cause of a generational struggle in the making and of the tensions between criminal organisations that are essentially mono-ethnic, and those which are more inclusive. Up to the end of the Soviet Union and even into the 1990s, organised 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.
In their own ways, Oniani, Usoyan and Dzhaniyev all offered different answers to the questions of how to create something that could fit the new times without completely abandoning the old ways and the loyalties they continued to embody. Usoyan offered a federation of semi-autonomous but mutually supportive groups, in many ways a ‘highlander’ equivalent of the networks that had come to dominate Slavic organised crime. Dzhaniyev gathered an alliance of the disgruntled, ambitious and frustrated, for whom a common desire to shake up the existing order transcended ethnic origins. Neither proved successful. Rather, it is Oniani’s ruthless and centralised model that is currently prevailing. It is hard to believe this will last for long, though. The habitually networked Georgians are coming to be dominated by Oniani’s ruthless machine, but given that it is doubtful he will seek to elevate a successor, much less manage the process with grace and effect, his empire will likely also break apart on his death, if not before. As one of Moscow’s criminal investigation officers observed in 2015, ‘the Georgians [gangsters] will take a while to discover that their day has already gone’.38
The distinctiveness of the Georgians may reflect certain cultural characteristics but it was, ultimately, more than anything else the product of specific environmental factors: the strength of the local informal economy in Soviet times, the struggles for power in post-1991 Georgia, the expulsion of the vory, the characters of Oniani and Usoyan.39 It is therefore hard not to see the struggles between these models as a desperate and brutal last gasp before the ‘highlanders’ too are assimilated into the multi-ethnic, multi-commodity, crime–business–politics networks of the modern Eurasian underworld. Resistance is futile.