EATING KHITROVKA SOUP
The city is wonderful for the shameless.
Russian proverb
Not twenty minutes’ walk from the Kremlin was the Khitrovka, perhaps the most notorious slum in all Russia. Levelled during the 1812 Moscow fire, the land was bought by Major General Nikolai Khitrovo in 1823 with plans to build a market there. He died before his designs could be enacted, though, and by the 1860s, following the emancipation of the serfs, the area had become a spontaneous labour exchange. It was a magnet for newly arrived hopefuls and dispossessed peasants, at once desperate for a place to seek work and prey for urban predators of every kind. Dosshouses and cheap taverns lined a maze of small, dark courtyards and alleyways, teeming with the unemployed, unwashed and usually drunk or drugged. It was perennially cloaked in a heavy and evil-smelling fog from the stagnant river Yauza and the cheap tobacco and open cooking pots of its denizens as they cooked the unsavoury mix of salvaged and spoiled food known as ‘dog’s delight’. The common saying that ‘once you’ve eaten Khitrovka soup, you’ll never leave’ was as much a statement about the mortality rates as about the miserable chances for social elevation.1 This was a living hell, a slum in which up to 10,000 men, women and children were crammed into lean-tos, shacks, tenements and four disease-ridden trushchoby: the Yaroshenko (originally Stepanov), Bunin, Kulakov (originally Romeiko) and Rumyantsev houses. In these dosshouses, they bunked down on double- and triple-decked wooden sleeping platforms, above infamous drinking dens including those tellingly known as Siberia, Katorga (‘Penal Servitude’) and Peresylny (‘Transit’).2 The last was a particular haunt for beggars, Siberia for pickpockets and their fences, and Katorga for thieves and escaped convicts, who could find anonymity and employment in the Khitrovka.
The urban gangster was a product of the slums of a rapidly urbanising late-tsarist Russia, the so-called yamy, where life was cheap and miserable. It was in the drinking dens and dosshouses of the yamy that the subculture of the vorovskoi mir emerged, the ‘thieves’ world’. Its code, of separation from and contempt for mainstream society and its values – nation, church, family, charity – became one of the few unifying forces within this milieu, and would become a central part of the macho beliefs of the twentieth-century Russian vory. It was not that the criminals had no codes or values, but rather that they picked, chose and invented them as best suited their needs.
For example, Benya Krik, the gangster hero of Isaak Babel’s Odessa Tales, is in many ways the epitome of two intertwined folk archetypes: the wily Jewish community leader and the benevolent underworld godfather. Fictional, yet based on the real-life ‘Mishka Yaponchik’ (‘Mishka the Japanese’) discussed later, Krik leaps from this series of stories written in the 1920s with a zest and vigour that no mere page can contain. He is the product and symbol of the predominantly Jewish Moldavanka neighbourhood of Odessa, the Black Sea port – and smuggling hub – that was in its day as cosmopolitan and freewheeling a city as one could find within the Russian Empire. The Moldavanka may not have been much to look at, with its ‘unsavory terrain, a quarter filled with dark alleys, filthy streets, crumbling buildings and violence’,3 but it was known for its vitality, cunning, romance and opportunity.
Sins of the city: crime and urbanisation
A husky, unskilled village boy comes to the city seeking a job or training – and the city gives him only street fumes, the glitter of shop windows, homebrew, cocaine and the cinema.
L. M. Vasilevsky (1923)4
There can be little doubt that the countryside can seethe with the same violence, sins and greeds as the cities. However, urbanisation and its bedfellow industrialisation have a very different culture. Rural life is driven by the daylight hours, by the seasons, by the life experiences of the elders, and by a small and usually relatively stable community’s need to pull together to survive. By contrast, the Russian town was to be reshaped by rapid industrialisation and expansion as waves of migrant workers flocked in from the villages. It was characterised by massive turnover in populations, anomie, a loss of old moral norms and a sense of invisibility amongst all these new faces. While breaking down the former patterns of hierarchy and deference, industrial life is undoubtedly also organised and it breeds a new sense of structure and discipline, in which leadership goes not necessarily to the old but the able.
Even in the eighteenth century, in Vanka Kain’s days, the city had its own underworld. It was a realm of runaway serfs and army deserters, impoverished soldiers’ widows (who often became fences, buying and selling stolen goods) and opportunistic bandits.5 Institutions such as Moscow’s Great Wool Court – the city’s main cloth mill, and its largest single employer – and the Moscow Garrison School – established for the sons of fallen soldiers – appeared on the surface to be bastions of the social status quo, but also became recruiting grounds for street criminals, havens for wanted men and warehouses for stolen goods. But then Russia went through a belated but brutal industrial revolution from the mid-nineteenth century, accelerated by the need to modernise the country’s defensive capabilities after the debacle of the Crimean War (1853–6). Between 1867 and 1897, the urban population of European Russia doubled, doubling again by 1917.6 If some of these new workers were attracted to the cities by their opportunities for economic and social advancement, many others were pushed there by a growing pressure on the land. As Russia’s population grew,7 the proportion of landless peasants almost trebled.8 For many, moving to the city for a season or even to start a whole new life was simply an economic necessity.
It is no coincidence that the cities provided the cradle not only of new political forces – including what was to become the Communist Party – but also new types of crime and criminals. Between 1867 and 1897, both St Petersburg and Moscow almost trebled in size, from 500,000 to 1.26 million and 350,000 to 1.04 million respectively.9 In the main, workers lived in crowded, poorly ventilated and unhygienic barrack blocks provided by their employers, perhaps even sharing a bunk bed by shift.10 Yet these were the lucky ones. In the 1840s, a commission investigating the conditions of the urban poor in St Petersburg painted a picture of mounting overcrowding and squalor, with a single tenement often holding as many as twenty adults. In one case, fully fifty adults and children were squeezed into a room six metres square.11 By 1881, a quarter of the entire population of St Petersburg was reduced to living in cellars, with between two and three workers in the city for each available sleeping place.12 Conditions were terrible, with hours long (a fourteen-hour day was typical, longer ones common), pay minimal and safety provisions almost non-existent.13
The new workers lived lives full of exploitation and misery, yet empty of the village commune’s mechanisms of support and social control. In the village, tradition and family provided a context for life, while the elders represented authority. In the cities, rural traditions seemed meaningless, most of the workers were young and single, and the alternative stabilising factors (such as a trained ‘worker aristocracy’ or the responsibilities generated by starting a family) had not yet had time to emerge. Many turned to the bottle for escape. Perhaps one in four of St Petersburg’s residents had been arrested at some point in the late 1860s, usually for a drink-related crime.14 There were other escapes, too, for the generally unmarried young male workers.15 Syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases spread wildly, and prostitution – both by ‘yellow card’ registered practitioners and by amateurs – increased equally markedly.16 Street gangs also formed, although we know relatively little about them. The Roshcha and Gaida gangs, for example, became temporarily powerful in St Petersburg’s poor quarters, staging regular brawls. They emerged around 1900, but by 1903 they had already fragmented – some members gravitating to more serious, mercenary crimes, others growing away from this life of male bonding through vodka and violence – only for new and even more violent gangs to rise in their place.17 This was a time of rapid turnover even in the underworld, as yesterday’s kids become today’s street captains, and then tomorrow’s corpses lying unremarked in the snow.
The worst of the worst were the yamy (‘pits’ or ‘depths’). These slums exercised a morbid fascination for Russia’s writers. In Crime and Punishment (1866), Dostoevsky wrote of St Petersburg’s Haymarket yama being ‘thick with whorehouses’ and full of ‘dirty, fetid yards’,18 and in his Slums of Petersburg (1864), Vsevolod Krestovsky characterised it as a place of vice and villainy.19 Alexander Kuprin’s novel Yama (1905) rather coyly describes Odessa’s slums as ‘a place exceedingly gay, tipsy, brawling, and in the night-time not without danger’.20 However, Maxim Gorky, himself a man whose family had fallen from middle-class affluence into poverty, and who lived life as a vagrant before his transformation into an iconic writer, presents a rather more hopeless picture in his play The Lower Depths (1902). In it, a yama’s ‘tipsiness’ is not so much ‘gay’ as born of a desperate and unredemptive search for oblivion.21 Likewise Mikhail Zotov, a writer of the popular publications known as lubki, portrayed the ‘hopeless drunkards and vicious thieves’ of Moscow’s Khitrovka.22 Near enough every major city had its yama. These were indeed the lower depths, to which sank the lost and the destitute, the twenty-kopek whores, the raddled alcoholics and the drug addicts who would kill for their next fix.
To Communist agitator Leon Trotsky, Odessa was ‘perhaps the most police-ridden city in a police-ridden Russia’23 and certainly it proved a dangerous environment for revolutionaries – and yet it also became a byword for crime of every kind. The explanation for this seeming paradox is that the police, in Odessa and elsewhere, concentrated on political crimes and securing the well-to-do parts of the cities. In the poor neighbourhoods, they chose largely to turn a blind eye to many offences, unless the crimes were especially serious or impinged on the interests of the state or wealthier classes.24 Mass brawls between rival gangs or workers’ groups were quite a frequent and almost ritual occurrence, for example, and they were often allowed to play themselves out to their usual bruised and bloody conclusion: only when they were staged in the centre of town were they likely to be broken up.25
At least the police were present from time to time in the poor workers’ districts, but, to a large extent, they left the yamy and their denizens well alone. What, after all, was a murder, beyond one less problem walking their streets? As it was, they often confined themselves to collecting the bodies of the dead every morning. When forced to go into the slums more decisively – usually only in response to some outbreak of serious violence which could be construed as having some potential political implication – they went as if troops invading hostile territory, in squads, with rifles at the ready.26 Otherwise, though, as one St Petersburg newspaper noted about the notorious Harbour Fields quarter on the city’s Vasilevsky Island, ‘police, or more often Cossack, patrols pass this place without stopping, since this “club” is outside the range of their operations: they pass by only in search of sedition’.27
In the gloomy half-light of the dirty dives, in crowded, bug-infested flophouses, in the tearooms and taverns and the dens of cheap debauchery – everywhere where vodka, women and children are sold – I encountered people who no longer resembled human beings. There, down below, people believe in nothing, love nothing and are not bothered by anything.
Alexei Svirsky, journalist, 191428
This official neglect was not simply because the authorities did not care what happened in the yamy, more that they lacked either the resources or the political support to do anything about it. Contrary to popular belief, the tsarist state was by no means staffed entirely by backward-looking fools and greedy paper pushers. Quite the opposite: it is striking how many clear-thinking officials rose within the system, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) itself was historically sympathetic to the Russian workers’ plight, even if for the most self-interested reasons, as a happy worker is rarely a rioting one. Although scarcely a radical, future interior minister Vyacheslav Plehve, while director of the Department of Police, bemoaned that ‘before the rich capitalist, the individual factory worker is powerless’, and even the Okhrana political police force was ‘a long-time advocate of factory reform and improving workers’ conditions’.29
The real indictment is that their assessments and proposals were too often ignored. That the growth of the cities would pose a political, criminal and even sanitary threat was apparent from the first. Major General Adrianov, the gradonachalnik or police chief of Moscow 1908–15, not only made efforts to improve the honesty and efficiency of his force, he appealed to the Duma (parliament) to bring down high meat prices, and later established anti-epidemic commissions.30 Most such measures were, however, limited or blocked. Instead, this became a time of creeping martial law, as the tsarist state increasingly sought to side-step its own legal system by relying on emergency powers, through the declarations of ‘extraordinary guard’ and ‘strengthened guard’ provisions. These gave governors and gradonachalniki sweeping powers31 but they were largely used in the suppression of protest, not in extending their role or redefining the notion of the maintenance of public order. By 1912, only 5 million Russians out of a total population of 130 million were not covered by such martial law provisions.32
The question of urban crime only became a truly important political issue at the turn of the century. Even then, this was stimulated not by a sensitive assessment of the real pressures bubbling away but by a moral panic, stoked by a rising tabloid ‘boulevard press’, about the threat so-called ‘hooliganism’ posed above all to the genteel folk of St Petersburg.33 Young workers, who once would confine themselves to ‘their’ part of the city, began invading the well-to-do central neighbourhoods. Suddenly it seemed that everywhere, rowdies in their trademark greasy jackets and flat caps were crowding the pavements, drinking, whistling at the passing girls, jostling and catcalling and in due course graduating to vandalism, random violence and demanding money with knives and menaces. To Russian educated and elite opinion, this was regarded hysterically as evidence of the imminent collapse of the social order and, not seeking to engage with the underclass, they demanded that ‘their’ police do something about it: that is, keep the uncontrolled workers out of ‘their’ city and squander overstretched resources protecting their rights.
A policeman’s lot was not a happy one
At present, the work of the ordinary police appears to consist entirely in worrying people about passports, regulating the street-traffic in daytime, and ‘running in’ drunkards and dissolute females at night . . . The St Petersburg policeman has no beat . . . He is posted at certain points, and only moves about to keep himself warm or from falling asleep.
George Dobson, Times correspondent to tsarist Russia34
The police were thus confined to deterring and dealing with crimes rather than preventing the development of conditions which generated them. At this they were not, it must be said, very effective. They were often overstretched, forced to rely on the hue and cry to summon cooperative cityfolk as well as their unofficial deputies, the dvorniki. These were porters employed by nearly every town apartment building; they were required to report crimes to the police and even the comings and goings to and from their buildings, and also provided occasional muscle for arrests. The dvorniki were very much a mixed blessing. While there were many incidents of them raising the alarm and assisting the police, they were also often insalubrious characters themselves. In 1909, the head of Moscow’s detectives suggested that dvorniki themselves accounted for or assisted in fully 90 per cent of thefts from locked premises.35
The precise degree of police overstretch is hard to ascertain. There has been an interesting debate about the actual size of the Russian police force. Robert Thurston’s figures suggest that, by the end of 1905, Moscow had one officer per 276 citizens, comparing well with Berlin (325:1) and Paris (336:1).36 However, Neil Weissman has made a convincing case that such figures should not be taken at face value. The Russians’ own ideal was to reach a ratio of 500:1 in the cities (reduced to 400:1 after the uprisings of the 1905 Revolution), but they admitted to problems in achieving such targets.37 Official figures were often of establishment rather than actual strength: even in St Petersburg at the end of 1905, the Department of Police was short by 1,200 officers, leaving more than half of its police posts unmanned.38 The figures also include ‘dead souls’ introduced by fraudulent commanders (so that they could pocket those ringers’ pay) as well as policemen who never pounded the beat but were actually permanently appropriated by senior officers to act as their messengers, cooks and batmen. Weissman suggests that in the towns and cities beyond Moscow and St Petersburg, the ratio was often 700:1 or even worse, a situation exacerbated by rapid urbanisation.39
Not only were there not enough police, but the Russians failed to make the best use of them, keeping them badly trained and inefficiently deployed. The gorodovye, the basic street cops, did not often patrol like their European or North American counterparts. They simply manned guard posts, each generally within earshot of the next, and waited for trouble to be reported to them or just come by.40 This essentially passive, static approach to policing meant that the police largely ‘slept like hibernating bears’,41 at best resembling security guards more than active public protectors.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the yamy and other slums, essentially abandoned by the state, became criminalised enclaves akin to the rookeries and stews of early modern London, where burglars could plan their raids and fence their goods, where muscle could be hired at any tavern, and where life and death were equally cheap. Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s study of the Khitrovka included this scathing assessment of its police station: ‘The police guardhouse was always quiet at night, as if it wasn’t even there. For about twenty years, the city cop Rudnikov . . . ruled there. Rudnikov was uninterested in unprofitable night-time calls for help, and the guardhouse door stayed locked.’42
The yamy came to symbolise both the plight and the perils of the indigent urban poor – as Daniel Brower noted, ‘in popular literature Khitrovka acquired junglelike qualities and became a sort of “darkest Moscow”’.43 These slums also raised a growing concern that the criminalisation of their teeming and discontented population could lead not only to revolutionary ferment but also a professionalisation of the underworld. Odessa’s predominantly Jewish Moldavanka district likewise saw law breaking increasingly characterised in the eyes of outsiders as ‘professional, businesslike criminality’.44
Gangs of the city
Dear Comrade Pinkus: On the fourth of August at nine o’clock in the evening, please be so kind as to bring, without fail, 100 rubles to the tram station across from your house. This modest sum will preserve your life, which is certainly worth more than 100 rubles. Any efforts to evade this payment will lead to major difficulties for you. If you turn to the police, you will be killed immediately.
Extortion notice, 191745
Despite the exaggerated courtesy of this typical demand, the gangs which had turned to extortion, kidnap and intimidation were hardly delicate or educated. Instead, they were products of the drinking dens and barrack housing of the urban slums. From them had emerged a new criminal culture which, unlike its rural counterpart of the horse thieves, adapted to thrive in the post-revolutionary era. This was the vorovskoi mir, the ‘thieves’ world’.
There had, of course, been crime gangs before the late nineteenth century. Many were in effect underworld equivalents of the artel, a traditional Russian form of work association already appropriated by beggars’ communities.46 An artel was a voluntary group pooling its labour and resources to a common end. Sometimes it was made up of peasants from the same village who migrated together to seek work in the cities, sometimes a work crew paid collectively for their overall production. In this way, the artel was a way of recreating the mutual support of the peasant commune, but in smaller and more mobile form. Typically, an artel would have an elected leader, a starosta (‘elder’ – although this was an honorific rather than chronological term), who negotiated with employers, handled common arrangements (such as renting accommodation) and distributed any profits.47 Artely typically had their own customs, rules and hierarchies, often reflecting those of their home villages.48 Likewise, criminal artely also probably had their own customs, although evidence is lacking to confirm this, let alone to prove any kind of common pattern. Andrei Konstantinov and Mal’kol’m Dikselius, for example, have claimed that even in the times of Vanka Kain, there was a criminal culture in Moscow that had such rules.49 However, it has been impossible to back this up with independent corrobor-ation beyond later stories which are apocryphal, intended as entertainment, and if anything probably reflect the perceived criminal culture of the narrators’ times. However, the artel model was just one form of criminal social organisation which emerged in the cities.
Writing about the fate of the rootless and dispossessed young man in the late tsarist slums, the contemporary Russian criminologist Dmitry Dril lamented that ‘he encounters the company of veteran tramps, beggars, vagrants, prostitutes, thieves and horse thieves’.50 Or, as teacher and youth worker V.P. Semenov put it, he will in turn and inexorably pass ‘through the school of the flophouse, the tearoom and the police station’.51 Within the yamy, a new generation would be born into a life of crime. The children of the cohorts of prostitutes would, for example, be rented out when new-born babies as usefully heartstring-tugging accessories to the city’s beggars, before eventually graduating into begging themselves. At least they had a parent and perhaps even a home: many of the genuine besprizorniki, the uncared-for children, lived truly on the streets, sleeping in rubbish bins or fighting over a discarded barrel for shelter.52 The children would play ‘thief’, a common and popular game,53 before in due course moving into more active participation in the underworld, from standing as a lookout to becoming a fortach, one of the wily and agile children used to wriggle through open windows to carry out burglaries.54
The presence of specialised varieties of law breakers, with their own distinctive modus operandi and title, is often a good index of the rise of an organised criminal subculture. The yamy certainly proved fecund breeding grounds for this culture, sufficient to maintain an increasingly specialised and varied criminal ecosystem. Although many crimes were carried out opportunistically, the thieves’ world embraced a wide range of criminal trades. Indeed, there was a bewildering array of such specialisms, from the shchipachy and shirmachy (pickpockets) to the common skokari (burglars) and poyezdoshniki (who would snatch travellers’ bags from the tops of carriages). With specialisation also came hierarchy, as underworld professions became increasingly differentiated. Unlike the purist blatnye who came to dominate the world of the prison camps in the early twentieth century, and who deliberately turned their back on legitimate society, for most within the vorovskoi mir of the late nineteenth century, the dream was to be a member of polite society, all the while mocking its values and robbing it blind. Even Benya Krik, the criminal hero of Isaak Babel’s Odessa Tales, made sure that when his sister was married, the occasion was marked with a grandly traditional feast, ‘in accordance with the custom of olden times’.55 Perhaps as a result, the ‘aristocracy’ of the vorovskoi mir were its fraudsters and those able to pass as the well-to-do in order to carry out their crimes. In Odessa, for example, particular respect was due to the maravikhery, elite pickpockets who masqueraded as gentlemen while they worked the circuit of high society, from the theatre to the stock exchange.56 Of course, there was also a practical reason for the authority of the fraudsters, as those who were successful could make a great deal of money, more than they could easily spend. As a result, some became virtual bankers of the vorovskoi mir, lending their dirty money and in the process gaining clients and investing in further crimes.
Indeed, the criminals could more generally avail themselves of an increasingly sophisticated range of criminal services. For instance, raky (crayfishes), were tailors who could take a stolen item of clothing and overnight turn it into something else, undetectable to the authorities and ready for sale. Bunin’s trushchoba in the Khitrovka was known for its raky,57 while St Petersburg’s Kholmushi tenement quarter was a favoured place to fence stolen goods through ramshackle local shops, along with the Tolkucha market.58 Likewise, just as, for example, the taverns of Odessa’s port district acted as virtual labour exchanges, at which contractors and artel bosses could recruit whoever they needed for that day or week,59 so too did the drinking dens of the yamy become places where loot and information were exchanged, muscle hired and deals struck. Meanwhile, tavern keepers cultivated profitable sidelines in their own right, as fences and bankers to their shadowy clientele.
You want to understand today’s world of criminals? Read Babel, read Gorky, read about Odessa under the tsars. Today’s thieves’ world was forming then.
Soviet policeman, 198960
Striking evidence of the coherence and complexity of this underworld culture is to be found in its two languages: the criminal cant known as fenya or ofenya, and a visual one, encoded in the often complex tattoos with which career criminals inscribed their bodies. The hierarchies, internal organisation and evolution evident in these languages, which are explored in more depth in chapter 5, reflected the vorovskoi mir as a whole. This pre-Revolutionary underworld was not yet dominated by substantial and durable criminal organisations, but consisted of myriad small gangs and groups. The parallel with the artel only increased with industrialisation, as it often provided the social structure through which peasants could travel to the cities to work, especially in its early years.61 Artel-style collections of thieves worked together long term or else would form as the apprentices and minions of a veteran who would teach them their craft, such as ‘Morozhenshchik’ (‘Ice-Cream Seller’), an Odessan Fagin who taught a gang of his nephews and other street children the arts of pickpocketing and burglary.62 These groups tended to work within a specific criminal profession or at least within connected ones (so that a single group might include both conmen running shell games or similar street gambling scams and pickpockets who would prey on the crowds of onlookers), although the kind of group which later became known as a kodlo was often more heterogeneous, with perhaps as many as thirty criminals united by mutual interest and experience rather than specialism.63 These criminal artely had their own rules and rituals, and from them the customs of the vorovskoi mir would emerge, such as the swearing of oaths to the collective and initiation rituals requiring evidence of a command of fenya.
This was a time of social ferment and one in which people could and did move from city to city as new economic opportunities arose or, in the case of criminals, as they made enemies or became too well known to the local authorities. Combine that with the way the penal system became a powerful channel for transmitting the codes and folkways of the vorovskoi mir and it is perhaps no wonder that not only the core criminal culture but also local crime phenomena proved infectious. Of course, there was massive variation in the scale and nature of organised criminality across this equally massive empire. Odessa for example, thriving and cosmopolitan, acquired a reputation for its flamboyant and entrepreneurial crooks: ‘the registers of investigative police agents from St Petersburg and Moscow to Warsaw, Kherson and Nikolaev were heavy with the names of Odessa thieves, “kings” and “queens” of crime whose mug shots graced “rogues’ gallery” albums circulated widely throughout the empire’.64 Especially notorious criminals were not only wanted by the authorities across Russia, they even became celebrities within the national underworld. Figures such as Faivel Rubin, the notor-ious pickpocket,65 and the bandit Vasily Churkin66 were at once inspirations for the underworld and the subject of exaggerated concern and prurient fascination within the legal world.
‘Mishka Yaponchik’ – his real name was Mikhail Vinnitsky – was a particular such legend in his own lifetime. The son of a carter, given his nickname ‘the Japanese’ apparently for his bony face and dark, slanted eyes, he was an ambitious and audacious gangster from an early age, with the charisma to attract others of the same mould to his side. He soon acquired a formidable reputation in Odessa and the police would reportedly turn a blind eye so long as he avoided them and left the neighbourhoods of the rich be. As he rose to become the foremost mobster of the city, he became rich on tributes from other gangs and extorted from businesses. He made no efforts to hide this status, promenading through the most fashionable haunts in a dandyish cream-coloured suit, bow tie and straw boater, always accompanied by his bodyguards. He would hold court in Café Fankoni, where a table was always reserved for him, alongside the city’s other successful businessmen. From time to time, like any magnanimous monarch, he would hold street parties, with tin buckets of vodka and tables of free food. ‘Yaponchik’ would end up a casualty of the post-revolutionary civil war, killed in Voznesensk in 1920, but for five years the so-called ‘King of the Moldavanka’ would stand as a symbol of the Odessan gangster made good. He would even inspire a successor in the late Soviet years, the notorious Vyacheslav Ivankov, the man sent to America as a virtual underworld plenipotentiary, who also took the nickname ‘Yaponchik’.67
A rigidly hierarchical tsarist society, in which officials from clerks to station masters had their uniforms and place, was reflected in an underworld which not only had its own castes and ranks but also learned to turn the characteristics of the ‘upperworld’ against itself. The fraudsters were the acknowledged aristocrats of the vorovskoi mir, not only because they could pass as the well-to-do or even aristocrats, and then rob their betters blind. They were typically smart, sometimes very well educated – just as modern Russian organised crime includes people with PhDs – and demonstrated that the corrupt, oligarchic nature of tsarist Russia meant that, if you could persuade people that you had power, you could get away with anything. Again, the parallels with modern Russia are striking, especially as these conmen also acted as patrons, bankers and brokers for the thuggish gangsters, just as many contemporary Russian businessmen can, when they need to, whistle up a corrupt cop or judge or a handful of leg breakers in leather jackets. It is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest that in the 1990s, when going through a period of terrible social and economic turmoil and political disruption, post-Soviet Russia had more than a spoonful of Khitrovka soup.