BANDIT RUSSIA
The theft of a nation?
A thief’s country is any place where he can steal.
Russian proverb
‘What is the difference,’ a Russian policeman once sourly joked to me, ‘between a mafioso and a politician?’ The punchline turned out to be ‘I don’t know either.’1 Many national leaders around the world like to talk tough on national security, but it is hard to see many being willing to use criminal slang at a press conference. In 1999, though, Vladimir Putin memorably said of Chechen terrorists, ‘If we find them in the toilet, we’ll whack them, even in the outhouse.’ He used the word mochit, which literally means ‘to wet’, and comes from criminal slang recorded as far back as the 1920s. In a term that ended up being adopted even by the KGB political police, mokroye delo, a ‘wet job’, was a killing, wet because blood was shed. When Putin – at the time still prime minister, but President Boris Yeltsin’s heir apparent – used a term like this, it not only consolidated his status as a leader with a touch of the bad-boy street hoodlum, it also sanctioned the spread of such language throughout official society.2
There had been a transfer of vor phrases, even customs, before. Within the Soviet Spetsnaz special forces, for example, a test for new recruits was to place a clean, white towel inside the barracks door: whoever casually makes himself at home and wipes his dirty boots on it shows himself to be in the know, not a clueless greenhorn.3 This custom was originally one of the ways blatnye in the labour camps recognised one of their own.4 Yet this was so much more deliberate and mainstream. Suddenly, politicians and commentators alike were talking about razborki (violent score-settling) and skhodki (meetings), about who was under whose ‘roof’ and who had ‘ordered’ (in the sense of taking out a contract killing) whom, and how many limonki (‘little lemons’, a million rubles) that might have cost. Like gangsters, after all, Russians must live po-ponyatiyam, ‘according to the understandings’ – in other words, acknowledging the unwritten codes and hierarchies, not just the formal ones.
In some ways, this is the final irony. Fenya, once a token of deliberate separation from the rest of society, has become enthusiastically incorporated by that same society. The thieves’ language has been tamed, adopted and commodified in what may seem a final victory of sorts by the mainstream. Of course, there had always been a bleed out of criminal expressions into youth and counter-culture slang, but these tended to be transitory phenomena, as today’s cool becomes tomorrow’s embarrassing anachronism. Terms like pakhan (gang leader) for father and dokhodyaga (a zek on the verge of starvation) for a skinny guy came and went out of fashion without leaving a mark, unlike the way this more recent adoption of criminal language has reached the mainstream.
No country for old thieves?
Nowadays we don’t really have any real thieves. Everything is sold for a price and decided by money.
Yevgeny, career criminal5
The question is, how far has this affected truly Russian public and political culture? Of course, the process goes two ways. Mainstream society has adopted criminal slang not just because it was exciting to break such taboos after years of stultifying and po-faced Soviet jargon, nor yet simply to follow Putin’s example. It also reflected a fundamental process of criminalisation of politics and daily life, a way of describing the byt, the experiences of the day to day, communicating a world in which clan loyalty, ruthless competition and naked exploitation were the order of the day.6 Yet words make worlds, and the spread of this idiom must surely also have contributed to this process. Linguist Mikhail Grachev has said, ‘Thieves’ terms denote a lexicon of aggression [and] when they cross over into common usage, they gradually influence our psyche for the worst.’7 Viktor Erofeyev, a writer himself no stranger to the margins of acceptable language, likewise presented the way Russia has evolved as being both cause and effect: ‘A whole new vocabulary was needed to reflect the emerging bandit-capitalist reality; and on the vacant lot of Soviet newspeak neologisms culled from the jargon of prison life and drug culture sprouted like bamboo. Those words transformed Russian into a language of desire, irony, coercion, and pragmatism.’8
As the Russian underworld loses its old myths and codes, as the title of vor v zakone becomes commodified and turned into an empty vanity, as the senior criminals set up corporations and charities and seek to blend into mainstream society, and as politicians start talking like gangsters, who is taming and teaching whom? Somewhere around the turn of the twenty-first century, state-building thieves and criminalised statesmen met in the middle. The Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov – himself killed in a mob hit in Moscow in 2004 – quoted Konstantin Borovoi, chair of the Russian Commodity Exchange, as saying, ‘The mafia is an attempt to imitate the government. It has its own tax system, its own security service, and its own administrative system. Any entrepreneur, in addition to paying taxes to the government, has to pay taxes to this shadow government.’9
In the 1990s, the state was in crisis, not failed but failing. Since then, it has recovered, in part by not simply taming but absorbing the underworld, or at least those more far-sighted elements who were trying to ‘imitate the government’. It is too simplistic simply to call this a ‘mafia state’. Under Putin, while people at the heart of the regime are undoubtedly interested in enriching themselves, there is also an ideological mission dear to his heart. Putin’s appeals to Russian patriotism, his self-declared mission of restoring to Russia its ‘sovereignty’ and its status in the world – making Russia great again – appear to be more than just self-justificatory rhetoric. Likewise, when the interests of the Kremlin and the underworld collide, it is the latter which accommodates the former. As the arrests of figures such as St Petersburg’s criminal ‘night governor’ Vladimir Barsukov/Kumarin demonstrate (see chapter 13), this is not a regime which ignores challenges.
Instead, two processes have taken place. One could be called the – limited – ‘nationalisation’ of the underworld. Some of its members have been rolled into the state elite, whether in the form of avtoritet businessmen or gangsters turned politicians. At the same time, there is a clear consensus that the licence the criminals have received is contingent on their living po-ponyatiyam, with the state periodically defining these understandings, whether it means not supporting the Chechen rebels or doing the intelligence services an occasional favour.
The second process is the ‘gangsterisation’ of the formal sectors, one which long predates Putin, but whose parameters have again become more clearly defined under him. In politics, the state will rule by presidential decree and legislative process when it can, but will use behind-the-scenes deals and deniable violence when it must. In the process, it creates a climate of impunity and permissiveness that encourages its agents and allies to act extralegally, whether in the case of the murder of opposition figure Boris Nemtsov in 2015, widely assumed to have been carried out by men answerable to Ramzan Kadyrov,10 or the attacks splashing caustic chemicals into the face of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2017.11 In effect, this is a state still torn between a legalising impulse and a habitual lawlessness.
Likewise, business contracts are now generally enforced by courts, not killers,12 but when times are hard, old habits quickly reassert themselves. ‘Raiding’ others’ assets, stealing them with false documents or through spurious legal cases, diminished sharply in the 2000s and early 2010s, but the post-2014 pressures on the economy quickly led to a resurgence.13 When the economy is under pressure, business once again ducks into the shadows. In 2016, according to Rosstat, the Federal Service for State Statistics, 21.2 per cent of working Russians were employed in the informal sector, a rise of 0.7 percentage points on the year before and the highest level since 2006 when the current formulation was introduced. Meanwhile, according to a study from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, more than thirty million people were in the ‘shadow labour market’, equating to over 40 per cent of the economically active population.14 In business, as in politics, there is an urge to reform, to move away from past practices where influence, corruption and violence trumped the logics of competition and the market, and the security of the law. However, the way in which capitalism came to Russia, the way in which from the beginning individual and regime self-interest saw the market uncoupled from the institutions meant to buttress and sustain it, the way the legitimate sector swallowed the criminals, their dirty money and their dirtier methods – all this has meant that certain instincts still run deep. It is perhaps no wonder – if unfair – that one Western economic attaché in Moscow paused in a description of his travels in Russia and said, ‘But the trouble is that we pretend to treat them like a real, working economy. It’s not: it’s all a film set. Just we think we’re shooting a commercial, and they’re still trying to work out which Godfather movie they’re in.’15
Headstones and blockbusters: representations of gangsterism
‘Are you gangsters?’
‘No, we’re Russians.’
Exchange from the film Brat 2, 2000
What would a gangster movie be without a funeral scene? Near the entrance of Vagankovskoye cemetery in west-central Moscow is a telling juxtaposition. On the one hand there is a contemplative stone angel, the grave of Vlad Listyev, the principled and popular TV anchor and journalist, whose murder in 1995 has never been solved, but was likely because of a struggle for the Ostankino TV network. Almost opposite is the massive and pompous grave of brothers Amiran and Otari Kvantrishvili, godfathers killed around the same time. Another angel, but haloed and with wings outstretched, stands before a tall stone cross, hands on the shiny, gold-lettered headstones of the two gangsters. The contrast between the physical representations of respect and reverence between the two is striking.
Perhaps it ought to have been a clue that he was not really dead that, when ‘Osya’ Butorin decided to fake his end in 1999, he had his ashes placed in a modest little niche in a quiet ceremony, rather than posthumously throwing the kind of lavish ritual gang leaders regarded as their due in those days. The mobster funeral, a staple of the ‘wild 1990s’ and almost a loved cliché since, was not just a chance to say farewell to a colleague (or rival), an opportunity to do business, and a display of wealth and adherence to underworld etiquette. It was much more. It was a case of ‘practising gangsterdom’, not least as much of the pomp was self-consciously modelled on the cinematic displays in films from the West. It was also a demonstration of power: for this moment, that slice of ground belonged not to society, not to the state, but to the vory.
Such displays matter, especially when given permanence through gravestones and similar monuments. Looking at the criminal graves of Moscow and Yekaterinburg, Olga Matich deconstructed the photorealistic tombstone imagery that on the one hand sought to erase the violence of the gangsters’ lives (and often deaths) while at the same time highlighting virtues of the milieu: physical strength, family and wealth.16 Many deceased gangsters, after all, were shown in sports clothes and displaying symbols of their success, from BMW car keys to chunky jewellery. Unsubtle, to be sure; tasteless, absolutely. But fitting memorials of the values of the 1990s thieves’ world. From personal observation of the cemeteries of Moscow, by the 2000s styles were changing. The indulgence of brash statuary for the mightiest gangsters was still the norm, but these were more likely to be representations of the criminal looking contemplative, with nary a thick gold chain in sight, or of angels and similar features of Orthodox iconography. Aslan ‘Ded Khasan’ Usoyan’s grave, for example, dwarfs even that of the Kvantrishvilis, but it is ambiguous: a life-sized statue of the man, standing besuited between two tall obelisks. He could as easily have been an oligarch or a theatre director as a godfather. The intent, one might speculate, is to downplay the criminal and above all the outsider.
A similar metamorphosis has taken place in popular culture. Remember that the eighteenth-century gangster Vanka Kain, profiled in chapter 1, was perhaps the first (anti-)hero of popular Russian literature, inspiration for a whole series of tall tales originally recounted in the tavern or around the stove before making it to the page.17 His myth became encrusted with all kinds of romantic and over-the-top story-lines, from the exaggerated (robbing imperial palaces) to the redemptive (Kain was willing to give up his life of crime to marry a good woman). Ultimately, though, he was an ‘honest thief’ but not an honest man, a bad man whose only virtue was that the people trying to catch him were no better, underlining the essential moral bankruptcy of much of the rest of society.
The gangster has been normalised in post-Soviet Russia. Although there is now a much more vibrant and popular vein of cop and spook drama in literature, and on film and TV, the gangster is still very much a staple. Fictional tales and ‘true crime’ accounts still fill the bookshops, and organised crime is regularly on the screen. It may no longer be possible to talk of the ‘near-total criminalization of post-Soviet popular culture, the preoccupation with crime as a subject matter in virtually every narrative genre’.18 On the other hand, as representations of the police have also become more popular (and more positive), perhaps ‘criminalisation’ has simply given way to ‘law-and-ordering’. Either way, the lurid, ultra-violent and implicitly enthusiastic representations of the 1990s have at least partially given way to something more nuanced.
Consider, for example, the trajectory from the films Brat (‘Brother’) and Brat 2, through the TV series Brigada to the more recent Fizruk (‘PE Teacher’). The first Brat movie (1997) was a small-budget production following Danila Bagrov, recently demobilised from his national service, as he drifts through a gangster-ridden and run-down St Petersburg, more interested than anything else in the latest CDs from Nautilus Pompilius, a Russian rock group. Nonetheless, not least thanks to his feckless brother Viktor, he finds himself drawn into a series of gangster clashes in which – despite his frequent claims that he just did paperwork in the military – he demonstrates an unruffled and lethal competency. Sometimes he is a knight in shabby armour, sometimes a killer for hire, but either way this film, which became a cult hit, portrays the underworld as something seedy, amoral, but also inescapable and beyond the control of legitimate means. To become a vigilante, a ‘good law breaker’, is the only effective response.
The success of the first film led to the quick release of Brat 2 in 2000, which has a rather different, nationalist undertone. A series of misadventures brings Danila to Chicago, where he and his brother end up cutting a swathe through American and Ukrainian gangsters alike. Viktor stays in the USA, but Danila returns home with the girl, with the money, and with his Russian pride intact, and the chance to deliver a keynote address exalting the spirituality of Russian values over American materialism:
American, what’s your power? Is it really money? My brother says it’s money. You’ve got lots of money – so what? Truth is a real power. Whoever is right is strong. You cheated on a man and took away his money. Did it make you stronger? No, it did not, ’cause you are not right, and the person you cheated on is. That means he’s stronger.
This glossier iteration was clearly written and filmed with a much sharper sense of its message, at a time when – as Yeltsin handed over power to Putin – the supposed ‘revival’ of Russia was suddenly on the national agenda. The USA is portrayed as, if not evil, then certainly deeply flawed, but perhaps most interestingly perverse was Russians’ evident pride in their thugs. They may have gangsters, but at least their gangsters are tougher than anyone else’s.
Once, Russia’s fictional criminals were wheeler-dealers. Isaac Babel’s 1920s Odessa Tales, for example, relate picaresque anecdotes about Benya Krik, larger-than-life Jewish godfather of Odessa’s Moldavanka ghetto before and during the Revolution. His thuggish criminality is balanced with an amiable cunning and pragmatism: he will fight off the police when he must, but would rather reach some implicit truce when he can. In this respect, he lived up to the popular conception of the Odessan: ‘experienced, shrewd, a trickster, a manipulator, a maneuverer, a man of ingenuity, a screamer, an exaggerator, a speculator’.19 Likewise Ostap Bender, the whimsical conman in Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Golden Calf (1931) – and possibly also an Odessan, like his creators20 – considers himself ‘the great combinator’ and relies on luck, wits, charm and a glib tongue in his efforts to amass a fortune and take it to live a new life in Rio de Janeiro. He preys on underground millionaires, profiteers and stupid Communist Party hacks alike, and in the process also demonstrates a keen awareness of the political environment in which he must operate.
In his fascinating study of the worst of 1990s Russian popular culture, though, Eliot Borenstein unpicks how the darkly pessimistic naturalism of the 1980s gave way to a gaudy, gory genre of sex and violence, pulp fiction on methamphetamine.21 While the cerebral detektiv (detective) whodunit survived, it was for a while drowned out by the visceral boyevik (fighter) action story. This is a genre of almost characterless hard men (and some women) of violence, who often lack even names, being referred to simply by such soubriquets as Yary (‘Savage’) or Beshenaya (‘Rabid Girl’).22 It provided ‘a symbolic vocabulary for the expression of fundamental anxieties about national pride, cultural collapse, and the frightening new moral landscape of Yeltsin’s Russia’, albeit often a very crude and simple vocabulary.23 Danila Bagrov in the Brat movies is a boyevik given a third dimension: he has a name, a backstory, some motivation, but in essence he too is a response to a time of bespredel (disorder), the hope that someone – someone else – will stand up and fight.
As Vanessa Rampton put it, ‘such a bleak portrait of Russian reality paradoxically allow[ed] Russians to simultaneously glorify having lived through this unique period.’24 However, Danila the innocent-eyed vigilante was less in keeping with the 2000s. As organised crime once again began to recede from direct public view, it became less terrifying, more open to being shown in soft focus. The TV miniseries Brigada, the first episode of which aired in 2002, could perhaps be described as three parts The Sopranos, one part soap opera. It depicted the lives of four friends involved in organised crime from 1989 through to 2000, starting with petty racketeering in the street markets of Gorbachev’s USSR, through to politics and revenge as the underworld turned. There are umpteen ins and outs, but the mutual (if not always guaranteed) loyalty of the brigada is juxtaposed with the plots of corrupt policeman Vladimir Kaverin, the recurring villain, who even sells guns to the Chechen rebels. Furthermore, the gangster-heroes, while undoubtedly flawed, often enjoy a good life, as well as the fraternity of the group.
In a perceptive analysis, Serguei Oushakine suggests that a core theme of Brigada is a depiction of the ‘renegotiation of new social positions’ in a time of sudden social and economic change.25 However, most crucial is precisely the way that the series charts the movement of crime from the margins to the heart of the system: ‘In Brigada the “law” of bandits and the “law” of the state are not merely coexisting or even competing with each other. Instead, it is their supplementarity, the unwilling but inescapable codependency of the (civilized) criminal and the (corrupt) official that makes profitable economic and political exchanges possible.’26
From violent outsiders in a world which cannot avoid them, through consummate insiders nonetheless more honest than the people with badges and suits, the final stage in what one could be considered the normalisation of the gangsters is epitomised by the popular TV comedy series Fizruk. As of writing it is in its fourth season, having started in 2013–14. The protagonist – ‘hero’ might be putting it a little strongly – is Foma, a gangster of the old school who had been the head of security to Mamai, an avtoritet of the new. Having moved across into the realms of legitimate(ish) business, Mamai sacks Foma at the start of the series for his ‘outdated’ ways. In an age of suits and brunches, leather-jacketed Foma, boorish and vorish, no longer fits. In a bid to regain his position, Foma decides to try and get close to Mamai’s rebellious daughter Sanya, and to do that he bribes his way into a position as gym teacher at her school.
What follows are all kinds of fish-out-of-water and schoolyard antics, as well as a sometimes touching connection between Foma and Sanya, and the inevitable chalk-and-cheese romance with a prim fellow teacher. But for the purposes of this analysis what is most interesting is that Foma’s gangster aspect is not in itself the heart of the series. It is not underplayed, and were this a Western programme arguably some of the violence and gutter language would be excised, and a redemptive arc to Foma’s story introduced much more quickly and clearly. But what matters is not so much that Foma is a gangster – accentuated by his friend and sidekick ‘Psikh’ (‘Psycho’), who is still more clearly in the criminal world – but that he is not a teacher. He could as easily be a cop, a soldier, a journalist or a spy and the same motif would apply. In other words, the implication from Fizruk is that gangsters are people, too: not innocent Robin Hoods, not vicious predators, neither paragons to idolise not parasites to condemn, just ordinary folk like the rest of us.
Of course, these are just a few examples from a massive body of written and visual representations of the underworld since 1991. Today the lurid boyevik genre is still popular and to be found in many a bookshop. There are even websites such as PrimeCrime, which since 2006 has not only accumulated thousands of pages chronicling the deeds of vory great and small, but even has comment sections where criminals, wannabes and fanboys exchange news and views on their favourite gangsters.27 Nonetheless, the central message is of confluence, as the gangsters seek to normalise their own status, and society embraces or at least accepts them, no longer the feared outsider but just another facet of life.
Mainstreaming mobster music: russky shanson
Russian chanson is like a pornographic magazine. Everyone reads it, everyone listens to it, but they’re afraid to admit it.
DJ from Radio Petrograd Russky Shanson28
This process has been especially evident in music. In the past, Gulag songs inevitably travelled out into popular culture, and some of the fenya in youth slang can be explained by its use by counter-culture jazz musicians in the 1970s.29 But this was very much an underground phenomenon; even the great singer-songwriters of the day such as Vladimir Vysotsky, who blended elements of blatnye pesny (‘criminal songs’) with romantic ballad traditions, largely owed their fame to unofficial ‘apartment concerts’ and clandestine tape recordings, the so-called magnetizdat. When Mikhail Gorbachev began his glasnost programme, loosening many of the restraints of censorship and orthodoxy, prison and criminal themes and language – along with those of other hitherto taboo subcultures and topics, such as the Afghan War and drug abuse – quickly moved closer to the mainstream.
The result was the popular russky shanson musical genre (a term only apparently coined in the 1980s), frequently cloyingly romantic, sometimes shockingly dark, but often referencing criminal and prison experiences or using the language of the underworld. Back in Soviet times, the milder forms which avoided overtly criminal or rebellious themes – often called dvorovye romansy, ‘courtyard romances’ – were tolerated, while true blatnye pesny survived outside the official media. Since then, though, both have thrived – anyone who has taken a gypsy cab in Moscow has probably heard a radio tuned to Radio Shanson – and spawned a whole array of subgenres. There is the jollier vein of ballads about dumb cops and cunning robbers, often set in – where else? – Odessa; there are plaintive tales of love lost through imprisonment and dreams of return; there are gritty accounts of scores settled and traitors executed.
One of the first real stars of shanson in its criminal form was Mikhail Krug, whose first three albums were released unofficially but nonetheless copied and circulated widely. He openly socialised with gangsters in his home town of Tver and even wrote one of his songs, ‘Vladimir Tsentral’, to honour local kingpin ‘Sasha Sever’, who had served time in the prison of that name. Krug was killed during a break-in to his home in 2002, and, when one of the robbers realised whom they had shot, he killed his accomplice in the hope of preventing not the authorities but the gangsters from identifying him.30 (He failed.) More circumspectly, another of the big names of shanson, Alexander Rozenbaum, is the co-owner of the ‘Tolsty Frayer’ chain of pubs, essentially the ‘Fat Non-Criminal’ in fenya.
As well as traditional balladeers accompanied by their guitars, there are now those who mix in rock elements such as Grigory Leps, blacklisted by the US Treasury Department in 2013 on the basis of claims that he handled moneys for a criminal.31 Claims against Leps aside, the association of organised crime and music is hardly unique to him. For example, the veteran Georgian-born singer and politician Iosif Kobzon is frequently called ‘Russia’s Sinatra’, a judgement based on his alleged criminal associations as much as his crooning style. Kobzon – who is also barred from the USA – has reportedly interceded for criminals (he was rumoured to have been behind the early release from prison of Vyacheslav ‘Yaponchik’ Ivankov in 199132).
The significance of the shanson genre is that, unlike gangster rap or the even more explicitly criminal Latin American narcocorridos (‘drug ballads’),33 it was never the edgy music of a disenfranchised and rebellious ethnic group or youth cohort. Rap and hip-hop may now be widely heard, but their roots are still in the projects and the ghettos of the United States, not the suburbs. Conversely, shanson is much more centrally located in the Russian cultural world. Radio Shanson has the fifth largest audience in Russia34 and, even amongst young people, the genre is the third most popular (after Western pop and rock music).35 However, the experience of the Gulags was a universal one, affecting Bolshevik theoreticians, army officers, teachers and peasants alike, and when the songs of the camps came with the returning zeki, they likewise suffused all strata of Soviet society from the first. Thus, the significance of the recurring themes of the genre ought to be considered as expressions of mainstream, not marginal culture. These are, even in their more whimsical moments, distinctly toxic ones. Consider, for example, Villi Tokarev, an émigré to New York’s Brighton Beach Russian community whose shanson music made it back to the Motherland before he did. His ‘Vory-Gumanisty’ (‘Humanist Thieves’) makes it clear that there is no prospect of a decent life lived honestly, even for the ‘professor, writer and . . . poet’ in the gang, because ‘he who does not steal lives like a beggar’.36
In the end, shansons are essentially fatalistic – life is hard and unfair, and it forces you down roads you might otherwise have avoided – and yet also vibrant. They lack, in the main, the overt violence and macho swagger of gangster rap; when the songs refer to violence, it is often couched in euphemism. Even in the more explicit lyrics, slang slightly softens the effect. For example, the popular ‘Gop-Stop’ (a mugging, ‘gop’ referring to a gopnik, a disparaging term for someone who in Britain might be called a ‘chav’ and in the USA ‘white trash’) is about an attack on a ‘treacherous bitch’ who spurned the singer. ‘Semyon’ is enjoined to ‘take this feather . . . and slice her under the rib’, using a prison term for a knife. In the main, though, shanson seems to navigate between melancholia and a whistling-in-the-dark zest for life that precisely draws its vigour from the knowledge that prison, death and betrayal are likely just around the corner.
The question of the effectiveness of the ongoing fight against criminalisation is the question of whether Russia will exist in ten years’ time.
Valery Zorkin, chair of the Constitutional Court, 201037
They may enjoy watching films about gangsters and even listen to Radio Shanson, but there is no evidence that ordinary Russians are happy with the present corrupt and criminalised situation. Admittedly, their main problem is corruption, because that directly and visibly affects their daily lives, while the gangsters have receded into the shadows. Ironically enough, even many within the elite, however much they have enriched themselves under the present order, appear to feel it is time to move on. From a purely anecdotal perspective, I am struck by how often I encounter a sense from the new rich (and especially their pampered but well-travelled offspring) that, to quote one, ‘Russia needs to be a regular country, a European one, and that means an end to the time of stealing.’38 If nothing else, ending the ‘time of stealing’ would, to them, mean not a meticulous restitution of their riches to all those from whom they had been stolen, so much as the creation of a rule-of-law state in which their wealth was now both legitimate and protected. After all, under Putin the real currency is not the ruble, but political power, and mere money and property are at best something held in trust until the day the state or some predator with a higher krysha and sharper teeth comes and takes it from you.
Back in the 1990s, the veteran geostrategist Edward Luttwak asked, ‘Does the Russian mafia deserve the Nobel Prize for economics?’ He went on to argue that ‘in purely economic terms the conventional wisdom is all wrong’ as modern and broadly humane advanced economies evolved from ‘lean and hungry wolves that . . . originally accumulated capital, by seizing profitable market opportunities – often by killing off competitors in ways that today’s anti-monopoly commissions would not tolerate – and by cutting costs in every way possible, not excluding all the tax avoidance they could get away with.’39 He was at once right on the nail, and dangerously wrong: right in that it was indeed from previous generations of robber barons, slavers and exploiters of every stripe that today’s Western elites emerged; wrong to suggest that it was some inevitable and irreversible process, such that one could and should just sit back and wait for it to happen. From the democratic rollbacks currently witnessed in central Europe (and perhaps even the USA), to the two-steps-forward, one-and-a-half-back fight against organised crime in Italy, it is clear that, just as there are natural processes driving societies towards law and regularisation, so too there are destructive ones. When there has been any kind of meaningful progress in cutting organised crime down to size – nowhere has it been wholly eliminated – then it has been through a combination of three basic necessities: effective laws and the presence of judicial and police structures able and willing to uphold them; political elites willing or forced to allow those structures to function; and a mobilised and vigilant public eager and determined to ensure that the work is done.
Russia’s laws and institutions largely meet the necessary criteria on paper but are thoroughly undermined in practice. Despite attempts at reform,40 any attempt to bring genuine legality to this society faces the serious problems of corruption, a lack of resources for police and courts alike and, in particular, the blatant manipulation of the law by the political elite. Despite Vladimir Ovchinsky’s downbeat assertion that ‘MVD anti-mafia units constantly turn into mafia minions’,41 though, there are forces for change. Many within the judiciary, especially within the junior ranks, genuinely believe in the rule of law. I have met good Russian cops – even ones willing to take a petty bribe but essentially committed to taking down the bad guys – who would like to do their job. Since the chaos of the 1990s, there has been a distinct change, especially amongst the new generation of younger police officer. It is not that corruption has become anathema. Indeed, if anything my unscientific sense tallies with the rather more methodologically robust analysis by Alexis Belianin and Leonid Kosals of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics that finds there is a strong commitment to retaining a degree of corruption.42 Rather, there has been a distinct shift in the limits of ‘acceptable corruption’. One officer rationalised it in terms of substitution: ‘If the guy would anyway get a fine, then why not take a bribe to let him go? He’s still out of pocket, and anyway, he’d probably just bribe the judge or prosecutor instead. But he still pays for his crime.’43 However, for the kind of offence that would merit a custodial sentence, he definitely felt only a ‘bad cop’ – he actually used the fenya term musor, ‘trash’, akin to the British ‘filth’ – would take a bribe to overlook it. The specific example he gave was speeding and causing an accident in which no one was hurt and insurance would cover the damage, compared with a situation in which a victim was hurt or killed. Furthermore, all the examples given involved turning a blind eye: actively engaging in criminal acts (beyond taking the bribe) had become ‘bad cop’ territory.
To be sure, at present the police operate within a system in which most of the senior criminals are untouchable – the superiors of the unlucky officer who arrested underworld banker Semyon Mogilevich left him in no doubt about that – but they generally do what they can, and often wish it were more. Although there are no institutions which could wholly be said to be on the side of reform, there are clear factions within the Justice Ministry, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Finance, the Audit Commission and the General Prosecutor’s Office who are. However, the Kremlin still appears to believe that reform should be limited to the minimum necessary to maintain the legitimacy and effectiveness of the system.
But what elite, unprompted, reforms a system that grants it the opportunity to steal with impunity? There is little evidence of any serious will on the part of the Russian elite to do anything, especially as power becomes more and more tightly held by Vladimir Putin and a shrinking circle of like-minded (and generally highly acquisitive) allies. In the 1990s, it was still possible for people to draw fanciful parallels with the ‘robber barons’ of the nineteenth-century United States and consider organised crime a passing phase out of which the country would naturally grow, or even a necessary step in the building of capitalism. Gavriil Popov, former mayor of Moscow, said that ‘the mafia is necessary given the current situation in Russia . . . it fulfils the role of Robin Hood, distributing wealth’.44 Of course, this was nonsense: organised crime was and is closer to the sheriff of Nottingham, eagerly acquiring the power to plunder and then exploiting it as much and for as long as it can. There appear to be no such illusions now; Russians of every class seem fully aware of the rapacious and self-serving nature of the corruption–gangster nexus.
For all that Russia has its elections and campaigns, it is at best a ‘hybrid democracy’, an authoritarianism hiding behind the façade of the process. Nonetheless, even in such regimes, the opinion of the people is not entirely irrelevant. While the state dominates TV, there is still scope for serious investigation and discussion in the print and online media, and a relatively internet-savvy population has many ways it can find out what is going on. The problem appears to be a lack of faith that anything can be done about it, that change is even possible. This is something with which anti-corruption campaigner and opposition leader Alexei Navalny is struggling as I write. The first step in fighting organised crime and corruption is, after all, to have hope.
This is likely to be a generational process. Italy after the Second World War was a democracy, and its soap-opera politics were characterised by regular elections, ridiculously frequent changes in government and a vibrant media. It had good laws, courts and well-funded police forces. However, behind all that, for more than four decades it was essentially a corrupt one-party state: somehow the dominant Christian Democrat Party was always at the heart of government, and it was the primary ‘roof’ for organised crime. In return, the mafia paid up in cash and by delivering the southern vote for the Democristiana, time and again. It took the shocking murders in 1992 of two dedicated investigative magistrates, Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, to galvanise a public that was increasingly sick of the situation. Facing electoral decimation, the Italian elite grudgingly unleashed the magistrates and the police, and the start of a serious campaign against the mafia began.45 Twenty-five years on, there has been real progress, but also steps back and steps missed, and all in the context of an existing working, democratic state.
Post-Soviet Russia has only part of the institutional framework, and fewer than three decades’ experience. It seems unlikely that Putin will reinvent himself in any meaningful way as a ‘hammer of the mafia’, and his immediate successor may well turn out to be a pragmatic kleptocrat happy to rebuild fences with the West, but not challenge the power of organised crime and the acquisitive instincts of the elite at home. Italy still isn’t there; Japan, which started its real fight against the yakuza at the same time, is in much the same place as Italy. Russia will get there, but not tomorrow.
A helping hand?
I don’t know what the fuss in the West is about the Russian ‘mafia’. We’ve always been this way. It’s just that you’re finally finding out.
Yuri Melnikov, head of Russia’s Interpol bureau, 199446
Nor is there much that the outside world can do, especially given that in the current geopolitical environment any efforts to bring about change inside Russia will be viewed as hypocritical at best, hostile interference and an attempt at ‘soft regime change’ at worst. But ‘not much’ is not nothing. A key step would be to attack criminals’ assets abroad more vigorously and, perhaps most importantly, address a common temptation to turn a blind eye to money that is slightly grubby in the name of business. Even before the 1998 crisis sent financial institutions scrambling for business, it was an open secret that many would gladly accept dirty money so long as it had been ‘prewashed’ enough that the bankers could claim to be ‘shocked, shocked’ if it was proven to be dirty. Many of the world’s financial capitals, from Dubai and Nicosia to London and Hong Kong, still tend to be more concerned about preventing the influx of dirty money in the abstract than in practice. As John Kampfner wrote, with passion but also sense, ‘if the price of making the City [of London] a haven for low-tax oligarchs and other assorted spivs is to turn London into a mobsters’ paradise, then that is our lookout’.47 This is a classic case of short-term gains with serious long-term costs, and Cyprus, whose 2013 financial bailout was jeopardised by the presence of dirty Russian money in its system, offers a cautionary tale, but it is one few are heeding.
Part of the reason why the vory of the new age avoid tattoos, no longer speak blatnaya muzyka (or at least no more than everyone else) and generally seek to blend in with the mainstream is in part precisely so as not to be excluded from the benefits of globalisation. And in the main, so long as they do not practice their violent entrepreneurship in our countries, so long as they are high-rolling guests, investors, shoppers and tourists, we are happy to let them.
One Russian once asked me, ‘Why do you in Britain hate our mafia in Russia but love them at home?’48 He had a point. Many countries have proven as willing to accept the ‘right’ (in other words, wealthy) kind of people with criminal links as they have been to accept inward investment of questionable origins. After the Magnitsky affair, the US passed the ‘Magnitsky Act’ in 2012, a measure targeting Russians believed to be connected with that criminal case for sanctions. The anger and dismay this generated in Russia demonstrates the power of ‘naming and shaming’ as well as excluding criminals and their protectors from desirable ports of call. There are costs both practical and political for the West, but it might be a small inducement for many of the powerful figures in the criminal-business world to ‘clean’ themselves if their underworld activities seem to prevent them from holidaying on the Riviera or their children from attending foreign universities.
Ultimately, though, the Russian people are the first and worst victims of today’s iteration of the vorovskoi mir and it will be for them to tame it, as eventually I believe they will. There is always the Orientalising temptation to somehow suggest that certain peoples, from Italians to Russians, are naturally prone to corruption and gangsterism. And it is true that there is historical ‘form’. George Dobson, the Times correspondent in Russia in the late nineteenth century, dourly observed:
The two features of the Russian character which struck me most when first I went to Russia were their great hospitality . . . and their lawlessness. By this, I mean their absolute contempt for laws of all sorts . . .
If a law exists, someone seems to consider it his bounden duty either to flatly refuse to acknowledge it or, more generally, to see how he or she can manage to get round it.49
However, perhaps the last word ought to go to one of the Afghan War veterans I introduced at the very start of this book. In 1993, I briefly reconnected with Vadim, the police officer. As one of the OMON special police, he and his team were increasingly often being sent in to arrest gangsters and break up armed incidents. They had been issued heavy, uncomfortable, old-fashioned, army-surplus body armour that no one really trusted. They were using a battered old UAZ van that needed to be jump-started on a cold morning, and often had no more than a quarter of a tank of petrol. They were risking their lives, while being paid the same as the women who sat in booths at the base of the long escalators in the metro stations, watching that no one fell, and occasionally shouting at people to stay in line. He had acquired a one-year-old child, a scar from a ricochet and quite a drinking habit. And yet for all that he was unconscionably, unreasonably, unfathomably optimistic. ‘These are mad times,’ he admitted, ‘but they won’t last. We’ll survive. We will learn how to be European, how to be civilised. It just may take a while.’50 He probably did not mean quite this long, but all the same, I think he is right.