THE CRIMINAL WARS
Not everyone who carries a knife is a cook.
Russian proverb
Can the vory themselves be weaponised? In September 2014, Estonian Kapo (security police) officer Eston Kohver was about to meet an informant in a secluded wood near the village of Miikse, close to the border with Russia. He had back-up close to hand, but nonetheless no one was expecting what actually happened: an armed FSB snatch squad crossed the border, jamming his radio and hurling stun grenades to disrupt any attempt to prevent them from seizing him. It was clearly a set-up.1 Kohver was taken first to Pskov and then Moscow. There, he was accused of having been on the Russian side of the frontier (despite the fact that Russian border troops had signed a protocol confirming that the attack happened inside Estonia2) and convicted on trumped-up espionage charges. Even his service radio and pistol were paraded as ‘proof’ of his status as a spy. Although sentenced to fifteen years in prison, a year after his kidnap he was traded for a Russian agent, but this does not seem to have been the primary reason for this brazen raid. It was not even about making a point of Russia’s capacity and willingness to intrude.
Rather, the intent seems to have been to derail Kohver’s ongoing investigation. Yet the investigation was not about anything that would seem to warrant causing such a diplomatic incident, merely illegal cross-border cigarette trafficking. The evidence, backed up by conversations with Estonian and other security officers, suggests that the FSB was facilitating the smuggling activity in return for a cut of the profits. This was not for the enrichment of the officers concerned, but to raise operational funds for active political measures in Europe that had no Russian ‘fingerprints’ on them. As Estonia’s then-president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, tweeted at the time, ‘Kapo, like FBI in US, deals both with counterintelligence *and* organized crime. Just in some places they turn out to be same.’ In this, he was reminding us of something former CIA Director James Woolsey had said in 1999: ‘If you should chance to strike up a conversation with an articulate, English-speaking Russian . . . wearing a $3,000 suit and a pair of Gucci loafers, and he tells you that he is an executive of a Russian trading company . . . then there are four possibilities.’ These were that he was a businessman, a spy, a gangster, or ‘he may be all three and that none of those three institutions have any problem with the arrangement’.3
Useful idiots and dangerous opportunists
[In Russia] the nexus among organized crime, some state officials, the intelligence services, and business blurs the distinction between state policy and private gain.
James Clapper, US director of national intelligence, 2013.4
At the time of writing, the United States is still wracked by claim and counter-claim about Russian efforts to suborn people close to President Donald Trump, and also his links with alleged and suspected Russian and other gangsters. Whatever the truth about such allegations, this does point to a very real issue. Russia’s organised crime has played an important role in the opening hostilities of what has been called the ‘new Cold War’ – or the ‘Hot Peace’5 – that truly took shape in 2014 with the seizure of Crimea. All intelligence services sometimes make use of criminals (the mafia helped open doors for US agents in Sicily in the Second World War, for instance, although the extent to which they did this has been overstated6). However, when intelligence agencies work with or through criminals, they typically seek to maintain clear boundaries (ideally the gangsters should never know with whom they may be working). In the Russian case, these boundaries are too often blurred, permeable – and often the vory turn out to be the ultimate beneficiaries.
A particular ‘spook–gangster nexus’ has emerged. On the one hand, the security agencies have long used the vory and their criminal networks as occasional tools for leverage and intelligence gathering. Spanish prosecutor José Grinda González reportedly said that, in his view, the Kremlin’s ‘strategy is to use [organised crime] groups to do whatever the [government of Russia] cannot acceptably do as a government’.7 Gangsters are not just paid but offered immunity in return for carrying out covert missions. Grinda claimed, for example, that vor v zakone Zakhar Kalashov sold guns to Kurdish terrorists to destabilise Turkey under orders from the GRU, Russian military intelligence. Likewise in Latvia, a country increasingly important to Moscow as a financial bridgehead into the European Union, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, has not only been unmasked seeking to fund sympathetic politicians, it has also been connected with local ethnic Russian gangsters, encouraging them also to offer their support.8
A quintessential example is Viktor Bout, a man whose career spanned the worlds of crime, business and intelligence work – and often all three at the same time – and which has now led him to a prison in the USA. As an intelligence officer, probably from the GRU, he set up an air freight business specialising in shipping to dangerous destinations. Alongside delivering aid, he was also implicated in sanctions busting and arms dealing. It is unclear whether his offer in 2008 to sell 700 Russian Igla surface-to-air missiles to Colombian FARC narco-rebels was on Moscow’s behalf (although the volume of the missiles he could acquire suggests so), but as he was used from time to time as a deniable front by the government, yet in the process granted freedom to break the law with impunity, it is hard to tell.9
Likewise, one Western businessman of my acquaintance setting up a venture in Murmansk found himself in 2011 being pressurised by local gangsters; when he turned to the police, they brought in the local FSB, who suggested that he might want to bring in one of their former senior officers as a partner. When the businessman declined the invitation, he found financial information he had provided the FSB being used by the criminals. Where, ultimately, was the line between the spooks and the crooks?
Clearly, the presence of Russian and Eurasian organised crime has subtle, as well as obvious effects. Europol’s 2008 Russian Organised Crime Assessment, for example, concluded that it had a ‘medium level direct impact’ on the European Union, mainly felt through their trafficking operations, but a:
high level indirect impact on the EU. This is experienced through money laundering and investments. These activities distort and may even destroy legal competition; raise prices and inflation in the property and other similar markets; increase corruption of business practices and culture; create concrete losses to legal business and national economies in the EU; increase the lucrativeness and social acceptance of criminal activities; facilitate OC-penetration and integration into legal structures; legalise the proceeds of crime, the criminals and their activities and in turn also seriously damage many legal elements of the EU societies.10
Since then, though, the concern has clearly sharpened, as the impact of Russian criminal penetration is increasingly seen not simply as a law enforcement issue, but as something much more serious. Although in the main, gangsters are gangsters, sometimes they can be state assets, too.
The first criminal war: taking Crimea
Is Crimea the first conquest in history conducted by gangsters working for a state?
A question I was asked at a NATO workshop, 2015
The answer to the above question, as is so often the case when academics are asked seemingly simple questions, is complex. It is hardly novel for gangsters to be used in times of war, but, unusually in this case, the criminals were combatants, not just collaborators, and they were not merely unleashed against an enemy like eighteenth-century privateers – pirates given sanction so long as they attacked the other side – but integrated into the invader’s forces. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it did so not only with its infamous ‘little green men’ – special forces without any insignia – but also with criminals. To the gangsters, this was not about geopolitics, less yet about redressing what Putin called the ‘outrageous historical injustice’11 that occurred when the Crimean peninsula was transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, it was about business opportunities.12
From the first, Moscow’s campaign to wrest Crimea from Kiev depended on an alliance with local underworld interests. Sergei Aksyonov, the premier of the new Crimean region, is alleged to have had a vor past, having gone by the nickname of ‘Goblin’ back when he was a member of the Salem organised crime group in the 1990s.13 Aksyonov rejects all claims of such links as being part of a slander campaign initiated by political opponents, but the one time he brought a defamation action against someone who made these allegations, the Appeals Court dismissed the case as groundless.14
Nonetheless, the respective trajectories of both Aksyonov and the Salem tell us something about Crimea’s own development, and the role the vory could play in Russia’s near-bloodless seizure of the peninsula. (It is hardly coincidental that the two parts of Ukraine in which Russia is, as of writing, entrenched are both areas where the old-style vory are equally thick on the ground.) Even before the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991, Crimea had become a haven for smuggling, black marketeering and a lucrative array of embezzlement schemes centring on the region’s health spas and holiday resorts. As independent Ukraine struggled in the early 1990s both with economic crisis and the near-collapse of its law enforcement structures, organised crime assumed an increasingly visible and violent form. Simferopol was fought over by two rival gangs, the Bashmaki (‘Shoes’) and the Salem (named after the Salem Café, in turn named after Simferopol’s sister city).15 They were at once entrepreneurs and predators, forcing local businesses to pay tribute and sell their goods on pain of arson, beatings and worse. A retired (he says) criminal-entrepreneur recalled one ferry trip to Kerch, at the eastern tip of the peninsula, in which he was accompanied by a courier carrying a suitcase stuffed with cans of cheap whitefish roe, which Salem would force restaurateurs to buy as expensive ‘beluga caviar’; a gaggle of prostitutes recruited for brothels in Yalta; and a pair of hungover and heavily tattooed ‘bulls’ – mob enforcers – returning from a party in Novorossiysk. As he put it, ‘all Crimean crime was on that boat’.16
This was an inherently unstable situation: not only was there pressure from political and business elites for the police to reassert their authority, but the gang war was beginning to prevent either side from actually turning a profit. The conflict escalated until a paroxysm of murder and violence in 1996 left both gangs on their knees. It also opened a window of opportunity for Gennady Moskal, the Crimean police chief between 1997 and 2000, to launch a crackdown on overt gangsterism. Crimea became a more peaceful place, but claims that the gangs were finally broken were a convenient fiction. ‘Alfrid’, a grizzled Tatar veteran of the 1990s turf wars, claimed that ‘the punks just grew up, they realised wars were bad for business and there was a lot more money to be made in business. Moskal just helped them make the jump.’17 The more senior and less blatantly thuggish leaders – including one brigadir, known as ‘Goblin’ – instead took their money and their connections and went (semi-)legitimate, in business and politics. Indeed, usually they were involved in both, leveraging their continued, although less overt, criminal alliances to further their political and economic ends.18 In this respect, Crimea’s vory followed much the same pattern as in Russia.
By the 2000s, these gangster-businessmen were increasingly dominant within Crimea. Kiev appeared to have little interest in bringing good governance and economic prosperity to this peninsula of ethnic Russians, and this gave the local elites both free rein and also a perverse legitimacy. Crimea regarded itself as neglected by, and separate from, the political mainstream. In this political, economic and social vacuum, the new mafia–business–political empires could thrive. As one US embassy cable in 2006 put it, these ‘Crimean criminals were fundamentally different than in the 1990s: then, they were sportsuit-wearing, pistol-wielding “bandits” who gave Crimea a reputation as the “Ukrainian Sicily” and ended up in jail, shot, or going to ground; now they had moved into mainly above-board businesses, as well as local government.’ It added that ‘dozens of figures with known criminal backgrounds were elected to local office in the March 26 elections’.19 Viktor Shemchuk, former chief prosecutor of the region, recalled that ‘every government level of Crimea was criminalised. It was far from unusual that a parliamentary session in Crimea would start with a minute of silence honouring one of their murdered “brothers”.’20
The key commodities were control of businesses and, increasingly, land. Some of the former leaders of the Bashmaki, for example, were accused of trying to take over SC Tavriya Simferopol, Crimea’s main football club, largely for the properties it owned.21 More generally, as prices rose – especially as Tatars, displaced from their Crimean homelands under the Soviets, began to return home – the gangster-businessmen and their allies within the corrupt local bureaucracy sought to snap up real estate and construction projects to take advantage of this market.
Although Crimea was part of Ukraine, many of the most lucrative criminal businesses, such as trafficking narcotics and counterfeit or untaxed cigarettes, depended on relationships with the Russian criminal networks. It helped that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet still had its base at Sevastopol in Crimea under a treaty with Kiev, and that so many navy veterans had retired locally: there was common civilian and military traffic back and forth. When the Ukrainian state began to totter as President Yanukovych struggled with the Maidan protesters, Moscow was able to begin to reach out to potential allies in Crimea through underworld channels. According to a conversation with a Russian police officer, representatives from Solntsevo had visited Crimea for talks with local vory even before 4 February 2014, when Crimea’s presidium, or governing council, considered a referendum on its status. The Muscovites came not just to feel out the scope for further criminal business, but also to gauge the mood of the local underworld.
Aksyonov, head of the Russian Unity party, seemed an ideal choice as a Kremlin figurehead. Even though he had been elected to the regional parliament in 2010 with just 4 per cent of the vote, he was ambitious, ruthless and alleged to be closely connected with both political and criminal power-brokers on the peninsula.22 When Moscow moved to seize Crimea on the morning of 27 February, it deployed the ‘little green men’, some local police who solidly supported the coup, and also thugs in mismatched fatigues and red armbands, nonetheless often clutching brand new assault rifles. These ‘self-defence forces’ spent as much time occupying businesses – including a car dealership owned by a partner of Ukraine’s next president, Petro Poroshenko23 – and throwing their weight around on street corners as they did actually securing strategic locations. While some were veterans and volunteers, many were the footsoldiers of the peninsula’s crime gangs, who had temporarily put their rivalries aside to pull Crimea out of Ukraine.
The new elite is thus a triumvirate of Moscow appointees, local politicians and gangsters made good. And they did indeed make good, quickly moving to skim funds from the sums Moscow provided to start developing the peninsula, and simply expropriating properties owned by the Ukrainian government and its allies. In theory, these properties were sold at auction to raise more development funds, but often in practice the ‘auctions’ were clearly rigged sweetheart deals.24 ‘Alfrid’, for example, made no bones about the fact that he was taking many of his liquid assets, and using the cash to snap up properties. ‘This is like privatisation in the 1990s,’ he said, ‘one of those chances in life when you can make a fortune if you move fast and know what you’re doing.’ For ‘Alfrid’, in his sixties, this was his ‘pension plan’.25
Meanwhile, Sevastopol could begin to challenge the Ukrainian port of Odessa as a smuggling hub. Historically, Odessa had handled the lion’s share of not just Ukrainian but also Russian smuggling across (and very occasionally beneath) the Black Sea. Whether or not Sevastopol ever could emerge as a credible rival, especially in light of Western sanctions, is in a way irrelevant: the very possibility that it might do so forced Odessa’s godfathers to lower the ‘tax’ they levy on criminal traffic through the port, an example of black-market economics at its most basic.
The second criminal war: burning the Donbas
The beneficiaries are the politicians, the oligarchs and the gangsters. Coal, gold, petrol and tobacco. That is what they are fighting for in eastern Ukraine.
Russian journalist Yuliya Polukhina, 201626
Perverse incentives are the bane of many a seemingly well-thought-through plan. If Moscow is offering to replace your car any time it gets stolen or written off, then why bother driving safely or locking it at night? Indeed, why not say it was stolen and sell it on? Sadly, the same is true when applied to munitions promised to militia groups in the Donbas region of south-eastern Ukraine. Recruit criminals and adventurers, arm them, put them in a messy, fluid conflict sitting across established smuggling routes, and pledge to make good on expenditures in battle, and one should hardly be surprised when skirmishes against Ukrainian government forces are started for no reason beyond providing an excuse to burn off, say, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, while claiming to have used twice as much. When the replacement 20,000 rounds appear from depots deeper in the Donbas, the excess can neatly be dumped onto the black market for a profit.27
Moscow presumably thought that by relying heavily on local militias it could fight its undeclared war against Kiev deniably and on the cheap, but in practice it created a situation in which it was often scarcely in control of its notional proxies. Indeed, from the first it was being embezzled by them, and soon began to pay the price in terms of an upturn in violent crime and illegal arms dealing back home. In Rostov-on-Don, the southern Russian city acting as a logistical support hub for the war, there was a growing problem. In 2015, the Rostov region was the ninth most criminal in all Russia, but by 2016 it had become the seventh, and the city itself had become, according to some measures, the most dangerous in Europe – having not even been in the top ten before.28
At the time the Donbas operation must have seemed a great idea. Crimea had been easy, and, as if carried forward by the momentum of their success, the Russians then became even more ambitious. The idea was not to annex the grimy, smokestack Donbas, despite its relatively large ethnically and linguistically Russian population. Instead, it was to generate a pseudo-revolt there to put pressure on Kiev. Ukraine would, the Russians reasoned, have to acknowledge Moscow’s regional hegemony, something they assumed would be quick and inevitable. Thus, if in Crimea the aim was to create a new order, in the Donbas it was as much as anything else to create chaos, even if a controlled, weaponised chaos.
To this end, the Russians set out to engineer a local insurrection by Russian-speakers alarmed at the new regime in Kiev. They tried to stir up trouble in various cities in the region, most of which was either put down or never really took off in the first place. In Donetsk and Lugansk, though, initial successes allowed Moscow to set up proxy regimes, the so-called Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. The Russian army remained the final backstop for these pseudo-states, but Moscow wanted to make this look like a genuinely popular movement. It encouraged nationalists, adventurers, mercenaries and Cossacks from Russia to join local forces. There arose as a result a bewildering array of militias, often-ramshackle collections of genuine volunteers, defectors from the government and local gangsters.
For the vory, this was a priceless opportunity to turn their street muscle into a form of legal power. Although post-Soviet Ukraine had had at best partial success in building a working law-based state (if anything, by 2014 corruption was an even greater problem there than in Russia29), the east had been especially problematic, in the grip of a seemingly unbreakable cabal of business oligarchs and corrupt political managers. In short, ‘Donbas’s magnates – some criminals already under Soviet law – prevented the rule of law from emerging in the Donbas and severely limited the formation of a civil society’.30 Combine that with a heavy concentration of local prisons, and a faltering local economy that encouraged street gangs, and it is perhaps no surprise that it was commonly said that ‘every third man in the Donetsk region is in prison, has been in prison, or will be in prison’.31
Once the Russians had separated part of the Donbas from government control, the region’s criminal leaders held a skhodka in December 2014, to decide how to respond.32 They opted to take full advantage of the new situation and, indeed, to encourage vory from government-held areas of the Donbas to head into the rebel territory.33 Meanwhile, the illegal production of counterfeit alcohol and tobacco and its export to Russia, Ukraine and Europe increased, now that the criminals were essentially in charge.34
It is perhaps interesting that the commanders of the ‘rebellion’ went largely by call-sign names such as ‘Motorola’, ‘Batman’, ‘Strelkov’ (‘Shooter’) and ‘Givi’, as if in homage to gangster klichki. Most of the headline figures were enthusiastic adventurers or veterans of the military and security worlds. However, second-rank militias and many junior commanders came from the underworld. With them came a culture of intimidation, violence and theft. One Russian volunteer, who had gone to fight genuinely believing Moscow’s propaganda that Ukrainian ‘fascists’ were out to persecute the Russians, had a rude awakening when he actually joined a militia: ‘When you get there, from the very first minutes you realise that this is not a military unit – it is a real gang.’35
The rebels certainly can create, and have created, chaos, and as of writing in 2017 no end to this miserable conflict seems in sight. But then, when it comes to ‘weaponisation’, chaos is easier to generate than control. Several commanders have been assassinated, probably by Russian special forces precisely because they became too wilful and too dangerous. Much of the smaller-scale fighting appears uncontrolled, as often as not triggered by boredom or the opportunity to make money. Meanwhile, Rostov-on-Don has seen its murder rate soar (up 19 per cent in 2016) and the supply of illegal weapons expand dramatically as Kalashnikovs and even heavier weapons trickle back onto the Russian black market.36 Whether or not the Kremlin considers all this to be a success, there is little question that the Donbas is a criminal war, and not just in terms of international law.
The third criminal war: Crimintern
Now a kind of ‘nationalisation of the mafia’ is taking place: the mafia structures are actually being replaced by the real authorities.
Police Lt. Gen. (retired) Vladimir Ovchinsky, 201637
Since Putin’s return to the presidency after his brief period as puppeteer-premier in 2008–12, Russia has increasingly become a mobilisation state.38 In practice, if not in law, the regime reserves to itself the right to call on any individual or organisation, from a company to a media outlet, to advance the Kremlin’s agenda. This could range from donating funds to a cause it wants deniably to support, through to providing a handy cover identity for a spy. In essence, this is nothing new. In the early 2000s a huge palace was built at Gelendzhik on the Black Sea, alleged to be for Putin’s use and funded by money provided by oligarchs as a ‘levy’ intended to go towards improving the health infrastructure. That has been denied, but whatever the truth it is known as ‘Putin’s Palace’.39 In recent years, though, Putin’s Russia has, psychologically at least, been put on a war footing, especially as the new geopolitical conflict has emerged. Increasingly, dissent has been framed as treason, and the interests of the current regime presented as the interests of Russia as a whole.
Combine this with the long-standing connections between the underworld and the upperworld, through the security agencies in particular, and the scope for a distinct type of mobilisation has emerged. In the past, the state had used those connections essentially negatively: to assert the new rules of the game after Putin’s rise to power, for example, or to warn Chechen gangs off supporting the rebels back home. Since then, though, just as the Soviet state used vory as instruments, whether controlling political prisoners in the Gulags or compromising foreigners, so Putin’s Kremlin has also put them to use.
Now, it is hardly the case that all Russian criminal operations are instruments of Kremlin influence abroad. Not every group or network can be induced to become part of what one could call Moscow’s ‘Crimintern’, its underworld successor to the old Soviet Communist International. Those which can I have defined as ‘Russian-based organised crime’ (RBOC): the crucial feature is that, while operating abroad, they retain a strong stake in Russia. Maybe it means their members still have family there, or assets, or that the core of their network is in Russia. Either way, it means the Kremlin has leverage. As a Western counter-intelligence officer inelegantly but evocatively put it to me about one RBOC vor, ‘so long as his balls were in Moscow, the Russians could always squeeze’.40 This is not necessarily about ethnicity, nor language, but exposure. Some of the ethnically Russian gangster expats in Spain, for example, have essentially migrated, moving their families and assets out of their homeland. Others, though, retain strong personal and professional connections back home. Likewise, key figures within the Georgian gangs operating in France, Italy, Greece and the Low Countries maintain significant links with Russia. Artur Yuzbashev, arrested in France in 2013 for his role in an international burglary ring and convicted in 2017, not only had a Chechen bodyguard, but had been arrested in Moscow in 2006.41 He served just two months in prison on drug possession charges, but, in that time, he established links with a Russian-based crime group that reportedly continued after he arrived in France in 2010. Conversely, the sizeable organised crime network of Georgian and Armenian gangsters charged in 2012 on counts of burglary and theft across France and Belgium had no direct contact with Russia, and therefore did not constitute RBOC.42
Nonetheless, RBOC is occasionally but increasingly used to play a variety of roles in Moscow’s ‘political war’ to divide, distract and demoralise the West, especially Europe, albeit only when Russia’s intelligence services have no alternative.43 Although its security agencies are increasingly developing their own in-house hacking capabilities, for example, Moscow still depends on recruiting cybercriminals or simply calling on them from time to time, in return for their continued freedom. In particular, they provide ‘surge capacity’ for major operations such as the attacks on Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008 as well as ongoing cyber-disruption in Ukraine. These hacks are often intended to support political subversion, and this requires money. As the Kohver case demonstrated, RBOC groups can also be tapped for chornaya kassa (‘black account’) funds, which can be used for mischief abroad more easily than directly moving money out of Russia, and without as clear a risk of the payments being tracked back to Moscow.
On a more tactical level, professionals adept at moving people and goods across borders are valuable to intelligence operations. In 2010, for example, eleven deep-cover SVR spies in the USA were unmasked in the FBI-led Operation Ghost Stories.44 Arguably the most able of them went by the name Christopher Metsos, and he managed to flee to Cyprus. He was arrested but then released on bail, at which point he promptly disappeared, despite all efforts to keep him under surveillance. Several US counter-intelligence officers expressed the opinion to me that RBOC people traffickers deployed their knowledge and connections to covertly send Metsos back to Russia or into another jurisdiction where regular Russian intelligence officers could finalise his return.
At the most muscular end of the spectrum, some assassinations ascribed to Russian intelligence appear to have been subcontracted to RBOC, such as those of several supporters of Chechen and other North Caucasus militants in Istanbul. Nadim Ayupov, whom the Turkish authorities accuse of murdering three alleged Chechen terrorists on behalf of the FSB, was a member of a Moscow-based organised crime group which had until then specialised in car theft.45 Likewise, RBOC groups may be behind the covert support of Russian-linked paramilitary organisations such as the Hungarian National Front, and notably the agitators who took part in the Moscow-backed attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 in a bid to prevent it from joining NATO.46
The fourth criminal war: blowback
‘We honestly don’t know sometimes if these guys are spies or criminals. But the thing is, even if they’re doing operation [intelligence] work here in Germany, they’re embezzling, stealing and raiding companies back in Russia.’
I ask whether they do the Kremlin more harm than good.
‘Ah . . . If I were Putin, I’d be more worried about what they’re doing at home.’
Conversation with German intelligence officer, 201647
However, there are serious risks for Moscow in this kind of state–crime collusion. It is easy to understand the temptations for Vladimir Putin. Russia is not in the best position to claim great-power status and challenge the West. Its military is smaller than the combined forces of European NATO, even without counting Canada and the USA. Its economy is smaller than that of New York state.48 However, it is an authoritarian regime able to focus its resources on its goals; Putin does not have to worry unduly about democratic accountability; and he has the combination of pragmatism and ruthlessness to exploit whatever advantages he can find. Russia’s underworld may be a serious drain on the country’s social, political and economic development, but it also can be and is being mobilised as a tool of foreign policy, in arguably the world’s first criminal–political war.
Has the Kremlin properly calculated the risks, though? Not just in terms of Russia’s plummeting global standing (though that is undeniable), but also in terms of the way that contact with the vory further corrupts the state security officers, whom erstwhile FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev called the ‘new nobility’ of Russia.49 Their privileged status, lack of effective oversight and use of extralegal methods in their day jobs have all contributed to making them incubators of criminal networks and circles. As journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, the best independent Russian observers of these spooks, put it:
In Soviet times, the members of the KGB were part of an elite. But when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia plunged into the new capitalism, few KGB officers emerged as business leaders. They were outflanked by younger, fleeter hustlers: a new breed of oligarchs. Instead, KGB veterans found their calling in second and third tiers of the new business structures, running the security departments of the tycoons’ empires. No longer masters of the universe, they now served the new rich.50
Who are the ‘new rich’ of Russia, then? Consider Sergei (for obvious reasons this is not his real name), a colonel in the FSB whom I have met a few times in Moscow. He is a smart and impressive man, focused and educated. He remembers the 1990s as a ‘time of troubles’ and more than once expressed with apparent sincerity his belief that ‘Putin was sent by God to save Russia’. I also have no doubts at all that he is as corrupt as they come. He comes from working-class stock, went to university, then for reasons never quite clear served a tour as a junior army officer before joining the KGB and transitioning to its successor service after 1991. He doesn’t seem to have inherited, and his wife doesn’t work, but nonetheless he owns a massive house on the outskirts of the capital with all the trappings of the Muscovite nouveau riche, from the three-car garage (Range Rover for him, BMW for her, Renault for the live-in housekeeper) to the imported marble countertops, massive flat-screen TVs on seemingly every wall, and a pool house in the garden.
Sergei, I understand, is a service provider. His position within the FSB allows him to access the wealth of information that the security services in an authoritarian state hold. If you need to know exactly how much money a target has before shaking them down, if you want to know who really owns that company you’ve got your eye on, or if you would simply like to have someone’s private mobile phone number, and that of his mistress, then Sergei’s your man. It presumably does not prevent him from also doing his job well, but at the same time the access and assets of his position are available for hire. Most of his clients appear to be ‘business’, but in modern Russia, where the worlds of business, crime and politics intersect so freely, this means nothing.
The more the security services use criminals as assets, whether hackers or killers, the more they have contact with them, the greater the risk of compromise, so that the handler can become the hireling. In 2012, for example, Jeffrey DeLisle, a sublieutenant in the Canadian navy, was arrested for being a spy for the GRU. He worked at HMCS Trinity, an intelligence fusion centre responsible for collating materials not just from Canadian services but also its allies in the UK, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. As such, he had access to a phenomenal array of secrets, but as the investigation proceeded it became clear that the tasks he was set included finding out what the Royal Canadian Mounted Police knew about suspected Russian gangsters in the country.51 Speaking to Canadian security officers, it is clear that they do not have any sense of quite why the GRU would want to know this. It seems more likely that someone somewhere in the chain of command simply realised that, given DeLisle’s position, he could effortlessly access information that could quickly be monetised and sold to the criminals in question. The history of the vory is of criminals who found ways to work within a powerful regime and to twist it to their ends. From the labour camps to the black market, they adapted and thrived by understanding how to exploit their environment to their advantage. It would be dangerous and foolish to assume that today’s successors to the Soviet vory are any less capable.