GORBACHEV’S GANGSTERS
The humble suffer from the folly of the great.
Russian proverb
While I was in Moscow in 1990, a callow PhD student watching the slow-motion train wreck of the Soviet system around me, I was able to line up a meeting with the deputy head of mission of one of the larger Warsaw Pact states. I felt very impressed with myself as I sat in his apartment, hearing tales of meetings in the Kremlin and classified briefings. After a while, though, he apologetically excused himself, picking up a clanking plastic bag full of bottles of spirit from his homeland. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I have a meeting with someone who has some toilet paper to sell.’ He paused, and added reverentially, ‘Soft toilet paper.’ For someone used to the reliable plenty of the West, it made a deep impression on me: that even one of the few dozen most senior diplomats in Moscow had to go nalevo – ‘to the left’, to the informal economy – just to wipe his bottom in comfort.
Poor Mikhail Gorbachev. When, after his accession to the general secretary’s position in 1985, he launched his futile bid to reform the Soviet Union and create his own version of ‘socialism with a human face’, he – and everyone else – had no idea that in the process he would ensure a sudden and unexpected rise in the criminals’ fortunes. His perestroika (restructuring) reforms would position them well to benefit from the very collapse of the USSR that his campaign would accelerate. Indeed, if anything, he began with a crackdown on corrupt officials that looked promising (or alarming, depending on which side of the fence you were on). For example, Vladimir Kantor, director of the Sokolniki univermag or department store, was an infamous profiteer who had assumed the patronage of Moscow Party boss Viktor Grishin would keep him safe. Until, that is, he was arrested on the first day of April 1985, while Grishin was on an official trip to Hungary. Behind what turned out to be the armoured door of his home was a trove of precious metals, jewellery, antiques and luxuries.1 He ended up sentenced to eight years in prison, and had more than 600,000 rubles in possessions confiscated.
Three key aspects of the Gorbachev era were crucial in revolutionising organised crime. First, his well-intentioned but ill-conceived anti-alcohol campaign did for Soviet gangsters something a little like what prohibition did for their North American counterparts. Second, a limited liberalisation of the economy and the creation of a new form of private business (the so-called cooperatives) provided the criminals with new victims for extortion and opportunities to launder all the cash they were making through alcohol sales. Finally, the collapse in the authority of the state meant that just at the time when they were acquiring unprecedented financial and coercive resources – money and muscle – the criminals also faced no serious controls. They no longer had to rely on the payments of the black-market barons as they had their own sources of income; the corrupt Party bosses now needed their protection rather than the other way round. In short, the pyramid upended itself, leaving the gangsters on top for a while.
The Bootleg Revolution
Drinking is the joy of all Rus’. We cannot exist without that pleasure.
Apocryphal remark by Prince Vladimir of Kiev, 9882
The anti-alcohol campaign was a naïve and mishandled attempt to address a serious issue: the levels of drunkenness that were reducing labour productivity and burdening the health system. Soviet citizens were the world’s heaviest drinkers, on average consuming the equivalent of 11.2 litres of pure alcohol a year, and by 1980 the typical family spent up to a half of its household budget on drink.3 As a result, in 1995 Gorbachev – incidentally not much of a drinker himself, unlike bibulous predecessors such as Brezhnev – pushed the Party’s Central Committee to issue its Resolution on Measures to Overcome Drinking and Alcoholism. The idea was that coercive measures such as higher drink prices, limited supply and tougher penalties for public drunkenness would be combined with more imaginative public information campaigns and the provision of alternatives, such as non-alcoholic drinks and juice bars where people could still socialise. That was not allowing for the stodgy and essentially authoritarian habits of the system, though, and while vineyards were uprooted and alcohol barred from restaurants before two in the afternoon, the alternatives never really appeared and the propaganda remained as leaden and easy to ignore as ever. Gorbachev, generalny sekretar (general secretary), became known derisively as the mineralny sekretar, the mineral-water secretary.
There were some successes, to be sure. Time lost through alcohol-related disabilities fell 30 per cent between 1984 and 1987, and drink-driving deaths fell by 20 per cent.4 However, for too many Soviet citizens, alcohol had become an increasingly important, though destructive, escape from the drabness and hopelessness of everyday life. Already accustomed to using the black market to make up for the shortfalls of the legal economy, they turned nalevo for drink too. The result was a demand that far outstripped the capacities of the tsekhoviki, not least because in the main they had never tried to compete with the state on quantity, just quality. Organised crime networks, which had for years become used to the ways of the informal economy, exploited the gap, gladly supplying imported, homebrewed, black market and stolen drink of every kind. Home brewing remained a cottage industry, with all kinds of vicious rotguts being produced in people’s cupboards, in sheds, and even in the bath. The gangsters helped distribution for those whose production outstripped the market they could easily supply through their own informal networks. Indeed, so great was the upsurge in illegal production of alcohol that it led to a nationwide shortage of sugar, which was needed for the process. Arkady Vaksberg recalled that in Ukraine, in 1986 alone, the demand for sugar went up 24 per cent.5 Elsewhere, the vory played a key role in using their contacts to divert alcohol stocks from those factories which still ran to sell for inflated black-market prices, or even in some cases selling on drink that had been earmarked for destruction. Sometimes this was stolen by the gangsters themselves, or more often corrupt officials would write it off, but as they needed help getting it onto the black market, they had to turn to the vory.
This illegal industry provided the criminals with not only a market but a constituency. Their submerged role within the Soviet state had meant that they rarely interacted directly with most of society; the days when ordinary people might encounter professional criminals in the Gulags were essentially gone, and the days of overt gangsterism on the streets had not yet arrived. For most people, the first time they ever knowingly encountered the vory was not as predators but as suppliers. The gangsters found themselves making more money than ever, in the unexpected role of friend and ally. One young man who was at that time a mere shestyorka, a gang runner or gofer, described the surreal experience of his first time accompanying an older criminal on his rounds in a housing estate in Moscow’s southern Chertanovo neighbourhood: ‘People were pleased to see us, they would smile and joke, offer us cigarettes. They would ask us what we had today, like we were shopkeepers.’6
Because of course that is what they were. The criminals who first sold people alcohol were connected to wider black-market networks that allowed them also to supply other defitsitny goods, from clothes and cigar-ettes to household goods and medicines, at a time of increasing scarcity and rationing.7 Furthermore, their connections to corrupt officials meant that they could also broker deals. It was not, after all, as though ordinary Soviet citizens had not had connections with black marketeers before, or that they had not used corruption to ease their lives. Instead, the obstacles had more to do with networks and trust. Did a particular person know whom to bribe for a particular service, did they have access, did they know the ‘right’ rate, could they trust the recipient?
The gangsters emerged as ad hoc brokers able to make the necessary connections and also, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, guaranteeing the transaction. They had a reputational stake in the deal going smoothly, not least as future business would depend on this. Federico Varese has written incisively about the mafiya as a source of private protection and enforcement of contracts in post-Soviet Russia, and in many ways the genesis of this was to be found in the grimy halls and crumbling stairwells of Gorbachev-era housing estates.8 In cheerless Chertanovo, for example, the young shestyorka remembered how early in the rounds people would take the initiative to encourage the gangsters into diversifying: ‘Hey lads, thanks for the booze; how about finding some cigarettes for next time?’ ‘Do you know anyone at the polyclinic? I’m sure my daughter needs to be looked at.’ For a rookie criminal it was a bewildering experience to suddenly be treated more like the local wholesaler. For his bosses, it was both enriching and a source of unexpected legitimation and revelation as they began to appreciate the new opportunities Gorbachev was unwittingly opening up to them.
Gangster-entrepreneurs
It was clear that the militia [police] would be of little use . . . so I got onto the crime boss, an authority, and even got to know a couple of vory v zakone . . . We agreed that we’d admit them [to our restaurants], and they’d not hassle us.
Entrepreneur, discussing arranging protection for
his new businesses9
Gorbachev’s general programme of reform became more ambitious (and desperate) over time as he began to appreciate both the scale of the challenge and the degree of resistance from the corrupt elite. Early Plan-driven attempts to improve the economy failed, so he took a leaf out of Lenin’s book and began his own version of his predecessor’s liberalising NEP. In a comparable effort to tap the energies of the market, Gorbachev opened up the economy to cooperatives, small-scale private enterprises such as restaurants and services. A new generation of kooperativniki emerged, in a way a legal counterpart to the black market’s tsekhoviki.
One might think this was an advantage, but in practice it proved a crippling weakness. They proved even more vulnerable than the tsekhoviki in the 1960s and 1970s, lacking their established contacts and protection, and soon ran into hostility from the public and authorities alike. The cooperatives typically offered greater quality and flexibility, but at a higher price. A public seeing their own standards of living decline perversely scapegoated these ‘profiteers’. Admittedly, they were not always wrong. The management of the Yava cigarette factory in Moscow, for example, spotted an opportunity and, thanks to allies within the city’s state distribution system, organised an artificial shortage. At the same time, they set up a chain of cooperative shops, through which they sold their cigarettes at inflated prices.10 Meanwhile, this new generation of would-be entrepreneurs represented a challenge to both an ossified orthodoxy and also the sweetheart deals on which the elite had come to rely. Whatever the Kremlin may have wanted for them, the kooperativniki faced hostility from the public, obstruction from local authorities and a wilful refusal from the police to offer proper protection.
Looking for places to launder and reinvest their new-found wealth, and with the capacity to easily intimidate these vulnerable entrepreneurs, the gangsters were able to move into this sector on a massive scale. Protection rackets were rife, so much so that some gangs, desperate to exploit this new opportunity, had to learn how best to do this from scratch. One member of a Lyubery gang – discussed below – recollected that ‘our major manuals were videos about the American and Hong Kong mafia: we watched them in video salons to get some experience’.11
Many businesses were taken over or driven into the ground. By late 1989, the criminals controlled or were being paid off by an estimated 75 per cent of cooperatives.12 As a report in the magazine Ogonyok admitted:
For a certain percentage, racketeers can provide a wide variety of services, from protecting cooperative property to obtaining supplies and ruining the competition . . . In the event that a racketeer’s services are refused, all kinds of things can happen: a fire may break out in a cooperative café, or government inspectors may take a sudden interest in a sportswear manufacturer.13
In the process, the criminals – who until recently had depended largely on the black market and on black marketeers for their revenue – found themselves increasingly financially solvent. Criminals who had once run small-time rackets were now dreaming bigger. In Perm, for example, the gangster Vladimir Plotnikov (‘Plotnik’) had largely concentrated on fraudulent street games of chance until the mid-1980s, but then moved into black-market business, smuggling chainsaws from the local Dzerzhinsky plant across the USSR, 200 at a time.14 In 2004, he went on to become a local parliamentarian. Other gangsters became service providers even more explicitly; the Muscovite vor Pavel Zikharov (‘Pavel Tsirul’) began as a pickpocket in the 1950s, but by the later 1980s he was living in a three-storey villa outside the city and lending money off the official record to kooperativniki who could not get commercial loans.15 A thuggish generation of predators was having to evolve, or else it would be supplemented or replaced by a new breed of gangster-businessmen.
Do you know how difficult it was for us to get used to a peaceful way of life? There, during the fighting, you can see straight away who is who. White was white there, and black was black.
Afghan War veteran, 198716
Even these gangster-businessmen needed muscle, though, and amongst all the expressions of the grass-roots entrepreneurialism of the Gorbachev era, few were as pernicious as the rise of the professionals of coercion. Russian sociologist Vadim Volkov called them the ‘violent entrepreneurs’, who monetised their muscle, turning the will and capacity to use or threaten force into a resource.17 Many simply filled the lower ranks of the gangs, most of which could always find room for another byk (‘bull’, a heavy) or a torpedo (hitman). However, in other cases groups with a particular and credible capacity to deploy violence became the basis for organised crime gangs. Three particular examples were sportsmen, unofficial bodybuilders (kachki) and afgantsy, veterans of the Soviet Union’s ten-year (1979–88) war in Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union spent considerable effort on its sportsmen, both to garner a rich crop of medals in international competition – which had become a proxy battlefield of the Cold War – and also to build the capacities for effective workers and soldiers. In the 1980s, the generous salaries and subsidies on which this industry had relied came under increasing pressure. Many fit young men, including wrestlers, boxers and martial artists, found themselves underemployed and unloved. Furthermore, there was a burgeoning official and underground fitness and martial arts scene, providing further potential recruits for the new racketeering outfits.
For example, from perhaps 1985 to 1987, Leningrad’s foremost gangster was Nikolai Sedyuk, known as ‘Kolya Karate’ for his martial arts prowess, whose entourage included dozens of young men from his training club, the Ring.18 Vadim Volkov notes that certain staff and students from all three of the city’s specialised sporting training centres – the Lesgaft Institute of Physical Culture, the Military Institute of Physical Culture (VIFK) and the High School of Sports Mastery (ShVSM) – formed their own criminal outfits. The chief enforcer of the city’s infamous Tambovskaya group was a sports coach and graduate of the Lesgaft. VIFK cadets formed Shvonder’s Brigade, which extorted businesses around the nearby Finland station, while the ShVSM had its own Wrestler’s Brigade.19 Likewise, the Yekaterinburg Uralmash gang, discussed later, was formed on the basis of a core of these sportsmen.
An offshoot of the sportsmen’s gangs was that some street gangs developed a particular cult of bodybuilding and martial arts training. Most infamous were the Lyubery, named after Lyubertsy, the miserable industrial east Moscow suburb from which they hailed. In the early 1980s, body-building became a local fad, and the basements of housing blocks were turned into informal gyms. Some of the blue-collar young kachki formed gangs which combined low-level hustling with a confused ideology that somehow muddled Young Communist rhetoric, fascistic impulses and a heavy dose of racism and class envy.20 One day, they might be heading into the city to throw their weight around and beat up non-Russians, or hippies, or any well-dressed young Muscovite mazhory (‘privileged ones’) who caught their eye. The next, they might be attacking neo-fascists or just brawling with a rival gang from the next street along.
At first, the police and authorities seemed to turn a blind eye to much of their violence. They saw in them a potential weapon against anti-government agitators, but the street gangs proved unwilling to be deniable stormtroopers of reaction. More to the point, as the phenomenon began to spread to other poorer Moscow suburbs, and, indeed, to other cities, the result was a moral panic that portrayed them as apocalyptic harbingers of brutish chaos. The parallel with the hooliganism crisis of late tsarism is compelling. An article in the influential magazine Ogonyok that presented them not as a disparate collection of muscle-bound thugs but as a movement with its own uniform and ‘kings’ who could muster a couple of hundred soldiers within a few hours did much to fan the flames.21 By 1987–8, the police were beginning to crack down on them, but that only accelerated a trend that had already begun: the recruitment of these young toughs into organised crime gangs.
As for the afgantsy, they were typically marked by their experiences not only in war, but also in peace. Veterans of a conflict Moscow did not want to acknowledge (in the early years, the state flatly denied that there were Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan and veterans were ordered to keep quiet about it), they were often scapegoated by society and neglected by the state. Promises of proper medical attention, of jobs, of decent housing, all tended to be broken. This was less because of any real prejudice against them than because they were a politically marginalised group competing for resources in a time of extreme scarcity.22 Nonetheless, for many this led to a degree of ‘shadow socialisation’ in which they actively turned against mainstream society and its values.
Most of the million-or-so afgantsy, of course, got over their experiences, but even so a fair number – perhaps a quarter – became involved in some way in the veterans’ movement, joining the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan (SVA) or other structures. Many got jobs on this basis in military-patriotic education, a massive sector in the USSR, where every school had its military educator and there were all kinds of programmes to instil the skills and attitudes advantageous for future national service. The 1987 Law on Amateur Associations and Hobby Clubs laid the first foundations for genuinely independent groups, at which point some afgantsy moved much more actively into lobbying for veterans’ rights. They were rarely especially successful, though, given the crisis then gripping the state, and as a result often went into business themselves, from making and selling records of Afghan War songs through to running their own cooperatives.
Cooperatives run by Afghan War veterans were, needless to say, rather less amenable to gangster shakedowns. One veteran, in 1990, told me what happened when two scrawny shestyorky tried to intimidate the one-legged shop assistant in the little kiosk his group ran in Leningrad: ‘He just banged on the door to the storeroom, and I and my three mates came out and showed the punks what we’d been taught in the VDV [paratroopers]. They didn’t come back.’23 Especially given that one of the particular market sectors for which they were suited was establishing and running gymnasia, martial arts studios and the like, the transition to private security on the one hand, and crime on the other, was a relatively obvious one. The SVA, for example, set up its own private security firm, Soyuznik.24 The police also sought to recruit veterans, especially for their new OMON riot police units and similar special forces. In 1989, Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin said that their ‘colossal authority and undiscovered potential must be made use of . . . to act against the affront of the bandits, speculators, racketeers and other crooks’.25 However, an officer from the MVD’s organised crime squad admitted that afgantsy were often the first choice when gangs were looking for muscle.26
For both the sportsmen and the Afghan War veterans, the post-Soviet 1990s would see their criminal careers at their peak. The combination of generous tax exemptions (which created opportunities for smuggling), struggling law enforcement and seemingly boundless opportunities for racketeering and corruption briefly opened up bloody new vistas for them, before they were again brought under the control of state and conventional gangsters in the 2000s. However, even in the later 1980s, already it was clear that new markets for violence and protection were emerging, and power and money would flow to those groups and individuals best able to secure and service them.
Tomorrow belonged to them
You can already see it in the regions, and it’s probably here too, and in Moscow: organised-crime authorities are now people to look up to . . . Soon enough, officials will be inviting them to visit their dachas and offering them partnerships, because that’s the way of the future.
Police officer, Kiev, 199127
In many ways, though, the most dramatic development was the collapse of the Communist Party thanks to Gorbachev’s liberal reforms. Glasnost, a new openness about contemporary affairs and past horrors, knocked away much of the legitimacy of the Party, and the economic hardships produced by botched economic reforms ate away at the rest. Facing growing resistance from an alarmed and self-interested elite, Gorbachev was simply radicalised, and turned to a limited democratisation campaign to give himself a power base independent of the Party, shattering its fragile unity. This liberalisation also encouraged local nationalist movements which, in turn, threatened the very existence of the Soviet state, which for all its notionally federative status was to a large extent a Slavic-dominated multi-ethnic empire.
In this context, the officials who once had held the literal power of life and death over the vory were generally too busy to be bothered with them. Sometimes they found themselves needing their services, whether getting out the vote or, more often, helping them amass the money they would need when their positions were no longer guaranteed. Even the central Communist Party, worried that it was seeing the writing on the wall, began salting away funds.28 In 1990, a secret Central Committee decree ordered the KGB to start building a network of businesses and accounts covertly connected to the Party for the day when it might not be able to count on state funds. An unknown amount of money – billions of dollars – was spirited from the coffers of a state which could scarcely afford it and into hundreds of these accounts. Nikolai Kruchina, head of the Central Committee Administrative Department, was a key figure, and to some the only man who knew where all the money was. During the chaos of a short-lived anti-Gorbachev coup in August 1991, he fatally fell, jumped or was pushed out of his fifth-floor apartment window.29 That money was officially never found, but no doubt many of the individuals involved, from KGB officers to Party accountants and managers, had little reason to mourn Kruchina’s unexpected and precipitous passing.
Put together, all these processes meant that the contours of the overt gangsterism of the 1990s were already becoming visible in the late 1980s. Organised crime was increasingly powerful, wealthy and self-confident. The fragmented little gangs of the 1970s, spiritual successors of the tsarist criminal artely, were being replaced by or coalescing into large, powerful combines. The interethnic tensions which would explode with such violence soon enough were already growing. From around 1988, for instance, the division in Moscow between the Slavic gangs and those of the ‘Chechen brotherhood’ (chechenskaya bratva) and their allies from elsewhere in the north Caucasus was visible. Chechen-dominated gangs such as Avtomobilnaya and Ostankinskaya – named after the neighbourhoods they controlled – were beginning to be name-checked in public discussion.30 The heavyweight newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta admitted that year how things had changed: ‘Even five years ago, the question as to the existence of the Soviet mafia caused the leaders of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs to raise their eyebrows. “You’ve been reading too many detective novels.” ’31
By the time Gorbachev was forced to bow to the inevitable and, at the end of 1991, sign the USSR out of existence, organised crime had become a visible and powerful presence in the streets, in the economy and even within the political scene. A few days before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some thirty senior vory from across the country had gathered for a skhodka at a dacha near Moscow.32 The aim was nothing less than to hammer out some understandings about the Soviet underworld, even as the whole Soviet state was near death. There was an agreement about a common front against the gangs from the north Caucasus, and tentative accords about dividing the country between them.
What on one level looked like a marvel of coordination, though, actually proved quite marginal in its real impact. For the collapse of the USSR would overturn old assumptions, throw open new opportunities, and plunge the Russian underworld into vicious struggles for markets, turf and precedence seemingly unheeding of the state and its forces. Before, the gangsters had been the weakest partner in an underworld triumvirate alongside corrupt officials and black-market magnates. Now, for a short while, they would appear dominant. To sum up, if Gorbachev was one of the midwives of Russian organised crime, the first president of post-Soviet Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was to prove its wet nurse.