NEW TIMES, NEW VORY
Be patient, Cossack, and a chieftain you’ll be.
Russian proverb
There certainly has been change in Russia since Putin’s accession to power in 1999–2000, even what might look like progress. Consider the case of Sergei ‘Osya’ Butorin, the man who arranged the death of several of the gangsters already profiled in this book, including Otari Kvantrishvili, the man who thought himself Moscow’s boss of bosses, and the notorious contract killer Alexander Solonik. Butorin’s past is as dark and gory as any, as he repeatedly demonstrated that he was the kind of man perfectly willing to get his own hands dirty in ‘wet work’: bloodshed, a piece of both KGB and gangster jargon. A former security guard and small-time thug, he gravitated towards violent protection racketeering in the late 1980s. He became the head of Moscow’s Orekhovo gang in 1994, a group that specialised in extortion and violence.1 Orekhovo was part of a wider organisation dominated by Sergei ‘Silvestr’ Timofeyev, but when a radio-controlled bomb scattered him and his Mercedes along a hundred-metre stretch of Moscow’s Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street in 1994, ‘Osya’ moved quickly to grab power by the means he knew best.2 He gathered around himself a team of sportsmen and heavies, including his left-hand man, Alexei Sherstobitov (‘Lyosha the Soldier’), a former Spetsnaz special forces officer. His style was effective, if unsubtle, as befitted those gory times. On one warm summer’s day later that year, for example, rival gang leader Alexander Bidzhamo (‘Assyrian Alek’) was sitting in a Moscow street café with three of his bodyguards when they were mowed down with machine gun fire.3
This was not a modus operandi bound to win friends. By 1999, Butorin’s enemies had become too strong, too numerous, too determined to take him down. So, he faked his own death, even arranging his own funeral, his ‘ashes’ being laid to rest in a modest niche in the Nicholas-Archangel Cemetery. Meanwhile, he had cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance and fled to Spain. This was no retirement, though, and Butorin continued his criminal activities there until his arrest in 2001. He spent eight years in prison, then was extradited to Russia (despite an attempt to claim political asylum). In the past, gangsters ending up in a Russian court tended to walk, as witnesses failed to show and judges ruled unexpected mistrials. However, after a serious, meticulously run trial, Butorin was found guilty in 2011 of no fewer than twenty-nine murders and sentenced to life.4
So things are changing, little by little. There is a slow process taking place which is likely to see the country’s ‘exceptionality’ diminishing. The Russian underworld’s very distinctiveness reflected the unique circumstances in which it arose. As Russia acquires branches of HSBC and Starbucks, as Russians watch The Simpsons and The Sopranos, as Russians travel and study abroad, as their financial systems become more interconnected with others’ and as the legacies of Soviet rule recede, then bit by bit their criminals will likewise increasingly come to resemble ours. Globalisation will some day homogenise us all. According to Alimzhan ‘Taivanchik’ Tokhtakhounov, wanted in the USA on multiple warrants and accused of being a vor v zakone, the change has been dramatic: ‘There is no organised crime in Russia. None . . . There are hooligans, there are some lightweight bandits, there are drunks who come together to get up to something. But organised, concrete crime nowadays does not exist.’5
Tokhtakhounov is, perhaps, not the most dispassionate of observers, but certainly the Russian underworld of the twenty-first century does not have vory as understood in the terms of the 1970s, nor the 1950s, nor the 1930s. But the very fact that one can talk about these three iterations of the same concept immediately tells us something about the mutability of the term. To the blatnye, after all, the suki were a complete betrayal of everything for which the vorovskoi mir stood, and yet by the 1960s a vor meant someone who internalised the values of the ‘bitches’. The ‘good old days’ always have a particular allure, but while today’s criminals may not have as formalised a code as the old vory, they do have their ‘understandings’, and their own folkways. If the successors to the vory truly had no code, it is hard to see how they could have done so well in such business sectors as protection, in which long-term efficiency is won through reliability and ‘brand name’ rather than muscle, or at least muscle alone.
Instead, 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 colonised 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 avtoritety 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 organised 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.6 He denies any wrongdoing and as of writing the case is ongoing, but a widespread assumption is that it was not all his, but rather that he was the holder of the common fund, the obshchak, of a gang of ‘werewolves’. Werewolves? Organised crime groups within the police forces are enough of a problem that its members even have their own nickname in common parlance: oboroten, ‘werewolf’.
The word vor may be in disuse, terms such as obshchak may have new meanings, the very codes and behavioural patterns of the criminals may have again adapted, but in many ways this reflects not the disappearance of the vorovskoi mir, so much as renewed adaptation, a fading of the bound-aries between that ‘thieves’ world’ and everybody else’s. The vory and their values have moved to the heart of the state, in the culmination of a process begun in the first half of the twentieth century.
Grinda cited a ‘thesis’ by Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian intelligence official who worked on [organised crime] issues before he died in late 2006 in London from poisoning under mysterious circumstances, that the Russian intelligence and security services – Grinda cited the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and military intelligence (GRU) – control [organised crime] in Russia. Grinda stated that he believes this thesis is accurate . . . Grinda said that he believes the FSB is ‘absorbing’ the Russian mafia . . .
US diplomatic cable, 8 February 20107
Spanish national court prosecutor José ‘Pepe’ Grinda González, a particular scourge of Russian gangs in his country, infamously dubbed Russia a ‘mafia state’, not least in this leaked cable. It is certainly a catchy epithet, but what does it actually mean? To Grinda, 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 organised crime and the state at local and national levels is complex, nuanced and often strikingly cooperative. It is as simplistic to suggest that organised 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 organised 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.’8 However, there is little evidence he truly intends – or at least, has so far intended – 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. In the 1995 elections for governor of the Ural region, for example, the Uralmash crime group openly supported the successful candidate, Eduard Rossel. He is then said to have asserted that its members no longer engaged in crime – reportedly contrary to the views of his own police.9 Did Rossel ‘run’ Uralmash, or did Uralmash ‘own’ Rossel? The answer, of course, is that neither was the case. Instead, expert observers believe it could have been something from which both sides expected to benefit and which lasted precisely so long as those expectations endured. Meanwhile in Moscow, persistent gossip has linked Mayor Yury Luzhkov with the capital’s crime syndicates, notably Solntsevo. He has always denied any such connections and has never been charged or convicted of any criminal offence. Although unproven, these rumours were were reflected in a classified US diplomatic cable:
Luzhkov used criminal money to support his rise to power and has been involved with bribes and deals regarding lucrative construction contracts throughout Moscow. XXXXXXXXXXXX told us that Luzhkov’s friends and associates (including recently deceased crime boss Vyacheslav Ivankov) . . . are ‘bandits’ . . . the Moscow government has links to many different criminal groups and it regularly takes cash bribes from businesses. The people under Luzhkov maintain these criminal connections.10
Luzhkov was forced to step down in 2010, though, and the day of the autonomous political–criminal fiefdom has largely passed. St Petersburg, for example, had been the cradle of the powerful Tambovskaya group described earlier in the book, whose boss, Vladimir Kumarin, who also goes by the name Vladimir Barsukov, became known as the ‘night governor’. In his days as deputy mayor in the 1990s, Vladimir Putin had reportedly liaised with the Tambovskaya and Barsukov had since then built a business empire through the city and region.11 However, the very public power of a gangster in Putin’s home city was an abiding embarrassment and vulnerability for the president and in 2007 some 300 police commandos were deployed to arrest him. Prosecutor General Yury Chaika feared leaks so much that he kept the St Petersburg police largely in the dark, flew in special forces from Moscow on Emergencies Ministry aircraft – not even ones from the Ministry of Internal Affairs – and later said that ‘if we had acted differently, [Barsukov] would have been warned’ because ‘we have discovered leaks in the prosecutor general’s office and city government, as well as the police and security agencies’.12 In 2009, Barsukov was convicted of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to fourteen years in prison.13
Perhaps the last remaining fiefdom outside Chechnya was far to St Petersburg’s south, in Makhachkala, capital city of the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan.14 Since 1998, it had been run and all but owned by Said Amirov. It took a special man to control what was arguably the most unruly city in Dagestan, itself in many ways the most unruly republic in the Russian Federation. Amirov appeared virtually indestructible in every sense of the word. He survived at least a dozen assassination attempts (some say fifteen), including one in 1993 that left him in a wheelchair, with a bullet lodged in his spine, and a rocket attack on his offices in 1998. Just as important, he appeared politically unassailable. Despite continued allegations of brutality, corruption and crime links, he saw out four Dagestani leaders and three Russian presidencies.
No wonder that, as well as ‘Roosevelt’ – because of his wheelchair – he was known as ‘Said the Undying’, after Koshchei the Undying, an immortal villain from Russian folklore. When Moscow finally decided to move against him, in 2013, it had to consider the strength of his local power base. This included not only his own private army of bodyguards but also considerable influence in the Dagestani police and, allegedly, a drug-trafficking gang known as the Kolkhozniki (‘Collective Farmers’). As a result, his arrest was closer to a raid in hostile territory, spearheaded by FSB special forces brought in from outside the republic, backed with armoured vehicles and helicopter gunships. Such was the concern about his sway over the local authorities, Amirov was immediately airlifted to Moscow, along with his nephew and nine other suspects.
If Moscow had been happy enough to let him build his fiefdom for fifteen years, why did it turn against him? Part of the reason appears to have been that he fell foul of the powerful Investigatory Committee, owing to his involvement in the 2011 murder of one of its regional heads, Arsen Gadzhibekov. Likewise, although Amirov was convicted on the basis of a different case, his plot to use a surface-to-air missile to shoot down a plane carrying Sagid Murtazaliyev, head of the Dagestan Pension Fund, started the process rolling. Amirov was sentenced to ten years in a maximum security prison colony – the prosecution asked for thirteen – and the loss of his state awards (including some, ironically enough, given him by the FSB). This was unprecedented for one of the Kremlin’s former local strongmen, and a cautionary tale for other local kleptocrats.
But even the Investigatory Committee could not reach in and pluck someone like Amirov from his fortress-home and deposit him in Lefortovo prison without a political decision having been made in the Kremlin. The very attributes which once seemed to make Amirov such an admirable local proxy – his skill at managing the complex ethnic and factional politics of Dagestan, his ruthlessness, his network spanning both the underworld and the upperworld, his industrial-scale corruption, his acquisitive ambition for himself and his family – all had become liabilities.
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 scenes15 – then there are also ‘deep crime’ structures. An inventive study by Michael Rochlitz of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, for example, found an apparently clear correlation between local government officials using illegal methods to take over businesses and their success in bringing out the vote for Putin.16 In other words, 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 – Luzhkov’s alleged links, for example, are a matter of rumour and conjecture – but they undoubtedly exist and play a role in shaping Russian policy. But only when they remember that perennial truism: the state is the biggest gang in town.
‘It’s all business’
From wild, barbaric methods [organised crime] moves to civilised ones, becomes a part of the state machine and to a certain extent contributes to the country’s prosperity.
Criminologist Alexander Gurov, 199617
I remember once talking to a Russian entrepreneur whose business seemed mainly to involve unloading poorly made counterfeit CDs onto the market on behalf of some Ukrainian gangsters out of Donetsk. When asked about how he felt about working with organised crime, he airily waved the suggestion away: ‘It’s all business, just business.’ A key characteristic of today’s Russian organised 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. An apocryphal claim that organised crime controlled ‘40 per cent of the Russian economy’ in the 1990s continues to do the rounds, but largely only because there is no authoritative data to replace it.18 This is a question both epistemological and ontological: what does ‘controlled by organised crime’ mean and how can we determine this anyway? If a million dollars was earned through embezzlement, then reinvested in legitimate business, would the revenue that accrued be dirty money? And what about the money made by reinvesting those profits? When does ‘dirt’ fade? Unpicking dirty from clean money in Russia is a hopeless task, not least given that in the 1990s it was next to impossible to make serious amounts of money without engaging in practices that in the West would be questionable at best, downright illegal at worst. For instance, during 1994, every day an average of 104 enterprises were privatised – and 107 privatisation-related crimes committed.19
Since then, though, the overt role of gangsterism in most of the economy has undoubtedly, if unevenly, been declining. ‘Raiding’ – the seizure of assets and companies through physical or legal coercion – remains a serious problem,20 but it is increasingly conducted through the courts or state apparatus instead of by means of violence or its threat. A British-based businessman told me that he had twice had to fly to Moscow at a moment’s notice in 2009 because of attempts to steal a property of his. The first time, thugs appeared at the door and bulled past the single security guard. The businessman had to call in favours from the local police to have them expelled. The second time, though, the raiders came in the form of lawyers and bailiffs, bearing documents alleging that the property had been signed into their possession to discharge a (non-existent) debt. Whereas getting rid of the thugs took a few hours and, I suspect, a moderate bribe to the police chief, dealing with the legal challenge took weeks and much more paid out in legal fees and illegal inducements alike. At least until the 2014 economic slowdown, whose effects are covered in the next chapter, business people had been reporting that overt protection racketeering was largely a declining threat except in certain specific cases: the more backward provinces, the most vulnerable enterprises, and those which teeter on the margins of illegality such as kiosk and market vendors and stores selling counterfeit or untaxed goods. Overall, the use of the law instead of extrajudicial methods to resolve business disputes increased from the late 2000s.21
‘Regular’ financial crime is a growing problem, though. The 2007 PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Economic Crime Survey reported that 59 per cent of the Russian companies surveyed had suffered from economic crimes in the past two years, 10 per cent up from 2005, with the average reporting direct financial damage at $12.8 million, suggesting that the total direct cost of economic crime in Russia had more than quadrupled in the period 2005–7.22 Perversely, though, this is in some sense reassuring as these crimes were overwhelmingly ‘civil’: contracts were secured by bribes, employees fiddled the books, and business partners padded invoices. Direct evidence of organised crime, whether violence, intimidation or signs of criminal conspiracies, was strikingly absent.
However, the interpenetration of upperworld and underworld in Russia is still worryingly evident and problematic within the business realm. Most senior avtoritety – and even many more junior figures – maintain a portfolio of interests ranging from the essentially legitimate, through the ‘grey’ (for exam-ple, legal storefronts also selling untaxed goods, or a legal factory using smuggled raw materials or trafficked and indentured labour) to the wholly illicit. They are, after all, interested in money, power and security and are willing to turn their hand to whatever maximises them. This means that they usually have public roles within the legitimate economy and will shift their attention and funds between business interests as whim and opportunity dictate.
‘Ironing the firm’
The Magnitsky case is . . . the clearest case study of how the whole system has been criminalised in Russia, of how officials steal from their own country, how they then murder people who stand in their way, and then how the whole system protects them when they get caught.
Bill Browder, Western businessman, 201123
Under Putin, corrupt officials have continued their ascent back to the commanding heights they occupied in Soviet times. A particularly heinous case has become known as the Magnitsky affair after its greatest victim, but it really involved a British businessman of American descent, Bill Browder, and his Hermitage Capital Management fund.24 Established in 1996 to take advantage of new business opportunities in Russia, it did very well for itself and its principal. Between 1996 and 2006, it was one of the biggest foreign investment funds operating in Russia and Browder himself was making hundreds of millions of dollars.
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. It was perhaps inevitable that, with so much money in play, Hermitage Capital Management (HCM) fell due for an ‘ironing’. Although Browder had been an outspoken fan of Putin’s in the past, his business model often depended on a form of shareholder activism on steroids, challenging the corrupt and inefficient management of many of the biggest players in the Russian economy. Given the degree to which his targets were clients of even bigger players within the political system, Browder began to be viewed as an irritant, and in 2006 he was barred entry from Russia as a ‘security threat’. That left HCM vulnerable and in 2007 police raided its offices and carried away documents, computers and the all-important company seals. These seals were then used to falsify evidence of fraud, even while officially being held as evidence themselves. On the basis of fines levied as a result, claims were made fraudulently on HCM’s behalf for a tax refund of 5.4 billion rubles ($230 million) that was, with suspicious speed (given everyone else’s experience with the Russian tax office), disbursed to three phantom companies that were used to funnel the money to the conspiracy’s masterminds.
Browder’s tax specialist, the Russian Sergei Magnitsky, reported the fraud and began investigating it with dogged perseverance. For his pains, he was arrested and imprisoned, and subjected to a regime of beatings, psychological pressure and denial of medical care that led to his death in prison in 2009. Meanwhile, two small-time criminals, a robber and a sawmill worker who had once been convicted of manslaughter, were arrested and convicted of somehow managing to mastermind this colossal and complex fraud. Both pleaded guilty and were handed the minimum sentences of five years. No trace of the money was found in their bank accounts, and the police then claimed that as all relevant documents had been destroyed in a mysterious truck crash, it would be impossible to track the money.
As of writing, Browder is enthusiastically pursuing the case through courts and the media outside Russia, but, however murderously egregious, it is by no means unique, except in Browder’s ability and willingness to make it such a public cause. Instead, it demonstrates the interpenetration of corruption, organised crime, business and politics. Foreigners – ‘the firm’ – once had a special status, the geese which could lay golden eggs and who thus could be stolen from but not scared away. As foreign investment flowed into Russia, and Russian money flowed out, as companies merged and expats and Russians formed a new interstitial class of cosmopolitan managers and business people, ‘the firm’s’ old sense of distinctiveness began to disappear. What the HCM case truly demonstrates, then, is the degree to which, just as the Russian language has become colonised by many borrowings from criminal slang, so too have regular Russian business practices become suffused with underworld habits and methods.
The gangsterisation of business
The saying ‘the mafia is immortal’ seems relevant for our country to this day. The wild 90s have gone into history, with their characteristics. Many legends of the criminal world, whom I knew personally, are now in the ground. Contract murders have become fewer, although there are still shoot-outs, even in the centre of the capital. The racket has disappeared in its hard form, although there are kickbacks and raids. The ‘arrows’ [sit-downs] have been transformed into quite decent negotiations with the participation of financiers and lawyers. Disputes with gunfights are a thing of the past. Now business does not solve its conflicts with the help of bandits and red-hot irons, but in courts . . . hence the high level of corruption.
Valery Karyshev, 201725
In the late 1990s, murder was a depressingly common way of resolving business disputes.26 The notorious ‘aluminium wars’ of the early 1990s, for example, saw thugs occupying factories, a string of murders, and lurid accounts of organised-crime links across the metals industries.27 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.’28 Despite that, though, there has been a steady development in Russian business culture. A growing proportion, especially of younger business people and entrepreneurs, are eager to escape the old ways. Out of conviction, a desire for a safer and more predictable business climate, or to ‘rejoin the West’, as they see it, they eschew these methods when they can. However, cultural change takes time, and while murder is much less a feature of the business scene than it was – though still not unknown – corporate espionage, the use of political influence to swing contracts and stymie rivals, and bribery remain commonplace and continue to connect the worlds of crime and business. Likewise, the new generation crime boss is more likely than ever also to be active within the realms of legitimate and ‘grey’ business.
All this makes it extraordinarily difficult to distinguish between the genuine business person and the gangster-entrepreneur when one moves beyond the thugs at the bottom of the food chain. It also makes it especially hard to identify the sources of funds given the scope for considerable ‘internal laundering’ between businesses. Many of these gangster-entrepreneurs are happy to use the court system to resolve their disputes, not least given the extent to which money rather than justice often determines judgments. They are also frequently unwilling to turn to more coercive methods for fear of escalating conflicts and also attracting unfortunate attention (including from the West: many enjoy the opportunity to travel, shop and invest abroad).
This does not make them convinced champions of the rule of law. They appreciate a degree of predictability within the system, as well as – now that they are rich – a state apparatus dedicated to preserving property rights. However, they are also 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. Additionally, it means that when times get harder or when the legal institutions look less able to play their part, gangster habits can revive themselves. As will be discussed in the following chapters, 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.29 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.
‘Everything and everyone is for sale’
In Russia, I can buy whoever and whatever I want.
‘Roman’, Russian avtoritet, 201230
The economics of the market are also visible in organised crime’s ability to move beyond simple corruption and into hiring or acquiring the people, skills and assets it needs for its operations. After all, 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, organised crime looked to sportsmen and martial artists – many of the first gangs came from sports clubs, such as the weightlifters and wrestlers who formed Moscow’s Lyubertsy gang – or to current and former police and military personnel. The notorious Alexander Solonik (‘Alexander the Great’ or ‘Superkiller’) was a former soldier and OMON riot policeman who became a killer for hire, specialising in assassinating well-guarded gangsters. He later confessed to three such murders: Viktor ‘Kalina’ Nikiforov, Valery ‘Globus’ Dlugach and Vladislav ‘Bobon’ Vinner. He also became something of a legend, thanks to feats such as being able to shoot two-handedly (earning himself the additional nickname ‘Sasha the Macedonian’, as that is known as shooting ‘Macedonian style’ for reasons unclear); fighting his way out of a police station in 1994, killing seven security officers before finally being overpowered; and being one of the very few people ever to break out of Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina (‘Sailor’s Silence’) prison in 1995.31
While he retained links to the Orekhovo gang, of which he had once been a member, and thus the Solntsevo network into which it was assimilated, Solonik worked for a wide range of other groups, including their main rivals, the Chechens and the Izmailovskaya. This was not considered to be a problem, just a reflection of the free market of the Russian underworld. However, when he escaped prison to Greece and began to set up as a gang leader in his own right, he became a player rather than a service provider. He lost his neutral status and it fell to his former patrons, the remnants of the Orekhovskaya–Medvedkovskaya gang (one of the fragments of the Orekhovo) to eliminate him, which they did in 1997.32
Solonik knew full well what he was doing, but in modern Russia it is sometimes difficult even to know if you are working for the gangsters. The assassination of organised-crime boss Vasily Naumov in 1997 came as a particular embarrassment to the St Petersburg police when it emerged that his bodyguards were members of Saturn, one of their elite rapid-response squads, moonlighting and apparently engaged legitimately through a front company.33
This represents just one of the many ways the criminals are able to buy services from state agencies. At least it was legal, unlike a case in 2002 in which it came to light that special executive jets run by the air force for senior Defence Ministry officials were instead being chartered illegally by members of the Izmailovo–Golyanovskaya gang.34 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. Recently curtailed, they nonetheless epitomise a culture in which cash and connections can buy a degree of impunity from the rules, something the criminals eagerly exploit.
Some of the computer specialists – cybercriminals and cybersecurity experts alike – the gangs employ also work for the government, but most do not, forming part of a wider hacker world, with an estimated 10,000–20,000 people working in this underground sector.35 Hackers themselves rarely fit the model of organised crime: their ‘structures’ are generally collectives and little more than markets.36 Instead of becoming members of gangs, they tend instead to be outside consultants, brought in as and when needed for specific jobs, as will be discussed later.
Beyond that, the increasing sophistication of criminal operations, especially their shift towards white-collar crime, has meant a need for financial specialists, to manage both their own funds and also their economic crimes. The most infamous remains Semyon Mogilevich, who has established for himself a distinctive role as the mobster’s money manager of choice. One of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives and the subject of an Interpol red notice international arrest warrant, Mogilevich has been indicted on money-laundering and fraud charges but is living comfortably and openly in Moscow. As a Russian citizen, he is safe from extradition. (He is also a citizen of Ukraine, Greece and Israel.) His twenty-year career laundering and moving money for numerous organised crime groups – in the process making himself indispensable to many – provides perhaps even greater security. Indeed, when Moscow police arrested him by accident in 2008 (because he was at the time going under the name Sergei Shnaider), I heard from several police officers that the commander in question received a ferocious dressing down for landing the government with an embarrassing dilemma: how to release him without looking weak or foolish? He was eventually arraigned in a closed court, and the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.37
However, despite overblown descriptions as ‘the most dangerous mobster in the world’38 – his FBI wanted notice says he should be ‘considered armed and dangerous’ – Mogilevich is not so much a gangster in his own right, although he has been accused of very substantial frauds, as first and foremost the man gangsters turn to when they need someone to handle their money. In this respect, he is akin to such figures as Lucy Edwards, the former Bank of New York vice president who, with her husband (both naturalised Russian émigrés), was convicted of laundering some $7 billion from Russia between 1996 and 1999.39 These are the specialists who facilitate global criminal operations.
When is a vor no longer a vor?
‘The vory are gone, and with them their laws, their culture.’
‘Today’s criminals are just criminals, they don’t have the same rules as the old vory.’
‘Whether or not the vory really were anything like the image we have in the media, with their code and their language, that’s all in the past now.’
Conversations with three Muscovites40
Of the conversations quoted above, the first was with a serving police officer, the second with a long-since-retired hanger-on of the criminal world, and the third with a journalist. Yet they all share a strikingly similar perspective. Interestingly, while there are still people who call themselves vory v zakone, especially the apelsiny, the term vor itself has fallen into disuse. How can there be a vorovskoi mir only of chieftains and leaders, without footsoldiers?
That Russian organised crime has spawned such a complex service economy says much about its scale, sophistication and stability. In the process, the old vory v zakone are dying out, at least in their own terms. Once, if you wore a criminal tattoo to which they felt you were not entitled, you ran the risk of having that patch of skin forcibly removed with a knife – if you were lucky; now you just pay to get such a tattoo. As they made money and were freed from the shadow of the Gulag, the vory v zakone lost their old culture and cohesion. Crime once was something that defined people, that set them off from the rest of society. Now, it is just another route to power and prosperity.
Yet the vory should not be written off quite so quickly. Beyond street-level gangsterism, there is no longer the same space for the old ways, admittedly. The jump from blatnoi to suka was in many ways less dramatic, certainly less visible, than the transition of the marginal 1970s gangster or even the emerging 1980s wheeler-dealer and protection racketeer into the modern criminal businessman. But there are carry-overs, and the progression has been a relatively direct one: from preying on the black market, to engagement with it, through to involvement in all aspects of the economy, formal and informal. No longer a confined and beleaguered minority dependent on cohesion and violence for their survival, they do not need the same means of forming and maintaining their own community. The code lives on, faintly, in the form of the ‘understandings’ dominant within the underworld, not least the sense that an ‘honest thief’ should still be true to his word. The custom of skhodki sit-downs survives, but, interestingly enough, I have heard the phrase used by seemingly legitimate business people in the context of meeting rival companies, with no hint of irony or macho posture.
A vor I once spoke to bitterly complained that ‘we have been infected by the rest of you and we are dying’, but the infection has passed both ways. Many of the organising and operating principles of upperworld Russia follow the lead of the underworld. The concept of krysha (‘protection’) is central in business and politics, especially given the prevalence of ‘raiding’. The law in such situations means nothing, the power of your krysha everything. There is the sense that one’s word means more than a written contract, the belief that, ultimately, ‘man is wolf to man’ and that winning is more important than following the spirit or letter of the law. Maybe, as the closing chapters of this book will explore, it is not that the vory have disappeared so much as that everyone is now a vor, and the vorovskoi mir ultimately won.