THE ‘WILD NINETIES’ AND THE RISE OF THE AVTORITETY
Two bears cannot live in the same den.
Russian proverb
Dangerous the life of the man who would be king, and whose life is worth, it transpires, a middle-sized Lada family car. Otari ‘Otarik’ Kvantrishvili was a powerfully built man, at the age of forty-six still showing something of the physical power that had made him a championship-standard wrestler, until a conviction for rape ended his sporting career. He was also a cautious man, known to wear a bullet-proof vest under his suit when out and about. Perhaps that explains why the sniper who shot him dead as he left his favourite bathhouse did so through his left shoulder, the three bullets bypassing the vest through the arm-hole and ripping into his torso.
This was April 1994, in the middle of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, when the new, post-Soviet Russian state was going through a time of violent turbulence, and when contract killings were commonplace. Even so, Kvantrishvili’s assassination marked a turning point in the country’s underworld history. An ethnic Georgian, Kvantrishvili and his brother Amiran had both been members of ‘The Mongol’s’ gang – Amiran was a card-sharp, Otari muscle – but when that group was disbanded, ‘Otarik’ set up on his own. He gathered an assemblage of sportsmen including ‘Alexander the Bull’, a judo champion, and ‘Ivan the Gypsy’, a boxer, and embarked on all kinds of criminal activities, from protection racketeering to illegal currency dealing.1
However, Kvantrishvili soon moved into the ostensibly legal sector, as one of the entrepreneurial gangsters who took fullest advantage of the opportunities of the liberalisation of the 1980s. He established the Fund for the Social Protection of Athletes, which acted as a convenient front to recruit and maintain hired muscle, as well as being a smuggling and black-market organisation. Then, in 1988, he founded the XXI Century Association. This organised concerts and charity events and claimed to be committed to raising funds for sports, but was actually a holding company of sorts for a wide range of criminal businesses. Another of his enterprises, the Sports Academy – which despite its name was a closed joint-stock company – was granted freedom from import and export taxes in 1993 by Boris Yeltsin himself. It did no sports training, but did end up becoming the agent for deals involving hundreds of thousands of tonnes of Russian aluminium, cement and titanium sold abroad, and millions of dollars of consumer imports then retailed through networks of the sales kiosks that organised crime had so monopolised.2
Nonetheless, Kvantrishvili not only escaped prosecution, he became something of a celebrity, denying his criminal status, but always with a knowing nod and a wink. In 1990, for example, he was photographed at a tennis match close to Yeltsin.3 He became a fixture in Moscow high society, and a friend of singer Iosif Kobzon, often called the ‘Russian Frank Sinatra’ for his close ties with alleged gangsters,4 as well as shanson stalwart Alexander Rozenbaum, who attended his funeral and lamented that ‘the country has lost – I’m not afraid of this word – a leader’.5
He proved an adept underworld politician, manoeuvring his way round the disputes raging between other gangs, notably Chechen and Russian ones, but this seems to have gone to his head. In late 1993, he declared that he would be entering legitimate politics, forming the Party of Sportsmen. At the same time, he made it clear within Moscow’s criminal circles that he intended to assert a claim to being boss of the capital’s underworld. He was undoubtedly the most powerful individual criminal in the city. However, he had failed to appreciate the essentially egalitarian, contrarian nature of the vorovskoi mir. In 1994, leaders of the other gangs in the city held a skhodka. They decided that Kvantrishvili had to go and charged Sergei Butorin, head of the Orekhovo–Medvedkovo gang, with arranging this. Soon thereafter, Kvantrishvili was gunned down by Butorin’s right-hand man Alexei Sherstobitov (‘Lyosha the Soldier’), as an object lesson that no one – and especially not a Georgian – was going to become the boss of bosses, Italian-style. As one of the hangers-on at that meeting later told me, ‘Moscow is not Sicily.’6
Sherstobitov, who was convicted of the killing fourteen years later, was given that Lada for his marksmanship.7 Everyone else got a resumption of the underworld struggles of all-against-all that mirrored the chaos in the country as a whole. Just as the 1990s saw Russia go through financial and political crises as it tried to define itself and its place in the world, its underworld spent most of the decade expanding rapidly into every corner of the economy and society but also getting involved in running turf wars as gangs rose, fell, united, divided and competed. This was a decade of drive-by shootings, car bombs and the virtual theft of whole industries, in which the forces of order seemed powerless. In 1994, President Yeltsin declared that Russia was the ‘biggest mafia state in the world’.8 He almost sounded proud of it; certainly he did not do much to stop it, and cronies of his were deeply involved in this arrant criminalisation of the country. From this anarchy, though, a new order would emerge, as major underworld combines formed, pecking orders emerged and territorial boundaries became established. As for the vory, it was time for another renewal, another reinvention to fit the very different needs and opportunities of the time.
Yeltsin’s ‘superpower of crime’
Russia is becoming a superpower of crime.
Boris Yeltsin, 19949
Yeltsin’s presidency offered organised crime the perfect incubator. This was a time of extraordinary change, including a massive widening of the gap between haves and have-nots. Moscow began to be decked in gaudy neon, and Mercedes-Benz was selling more armoured limousines in Russia than the rest of the world put together. But outside the metro stations you would see lines of desperate pensioners selling anything they had – a chair, a half-used tube of toothpaste, a wedding ring – just to try and make ends meet. The police, underpaid and outgunned, often lacked fuel for their cars and bullets for their weapons. Once, I was invited on a ‘ride along’ with a patrol through Golyanovo, in eastern Moscow, a long way away from the tourist sites and investment hotspots. It was alarming enough to be handed an army surplus bullet-proof vest; doubly so to realise it hardly lived up to the billing, as it had neat bullet-holes through both breast and back plates. No wonder, perhaps, that the ‘patrol’ was a high-speed rush through the main streets, blue lights flashing, the officer next to me clutching an AKR submachine gun, stopping for nothing until we were back in the safety of the police station. There was no sense that they regarded themselves as being in charge of the streets, and I was reminded of the accounts of tsarist police only venturing into the slums when they must, and then mob-handed.
The headlong rush to privatise state assets transferred many into criminal hands at bargain basement prices. Likewise, limited democratisation created corrupt local fiefdoms which resembled nothing so much as the snake-pit municipalities of interwar America, familiar from Dashiell Hammett’s noir thrillers – but with Kalashnikovs and the internet. Perhaps most insidious and corrosive was the widespread sense of insecurity and uncertainty; the new laws were contradictory, the old certainties were gone. If you needed a contract enforcing or a debt collecting, to whom could you turn when the courts were corrupt and backlogged? If you needed protection and security, who could provide it when the police were corrupt and inefficient? The answer, needless to say, was organised crime, which emerged perversely as an entrepreneurial Robin Hood, offering these very services – for a fee.
This was a period of experimental state building on a massive scale and in the midst of economic crisis. Between 1991 and 1998, when Russia’s stock, bond and currency markets collapsed, GDP fell by 30 per cent, unemployment rose and inflation hit 2,500 per cent in 1992 before falling to tolerable levels later in the decade – but only after wiping out savings and devaluing benefits.10 By 1999, more than a third of Russians lived below the poverty line. The hurried and ill-thought-through crash privatisation campaign saw state assets being transferred into private hands at a fraction of their true value, a process exploited by those who already had cash and connections: corrupt officials, underground entrepreneurs and criminals.
Just as the gangsters had helped and in some cases suborned politicians as democracy emerged by providing street-level assets to hustle the vote and crowd out rivals, so too were they able to leverage their capacities during the privatisation campaign. Some of the more entrepreneurial ones simply used it as an opportunity to convert illicit earnings into legal assets. But during 1992–4, reformists desperate to move assets out of state hands adopted a voucher privatisation programme. Every Russian citizen was entitled to a voucher notionally worth 10,000 rubles – this may sound impressive, but it was perhaps equivalent to $8.30 by the end of 1993 – to exchange for shares in a range of companies that were being divested by the state. For many Russians, unsure whether they would have food on the table tomorrow, the promise of potential dividends at some time in the future offered little appeal. Instead, most sold their vouchers, for a tiny fraction of their face value, not least to the myriad street corner buyers who stood there with a sign saying ‘I Buy Vouchers’ and a pocket full of hard cash. Some of these may have been entrepreneurial individuals, but many were working for organised crime (and, as I observed on a visit to Moscow in 1993, were bussed to their respective corners in groups, and typically had a minder attached, whether watching out for them or simply watching them). The gangs aggregated the vouchers into meaningful batches and either used them or, far more often, sold them on to managers eager to take over their own enterprise, or to the rising oligarchs out shopping for bargains. Thus, Russian organised crime was from the first not just part of the emerging system but a stakeholder able to help shape its evolution.
Overall, this was a time of legal, cultural and social crisis. The laws were being rewritten on the fly and were thus often confused and contradictory. For example, although Russia was now supposedly a liberal market economy, the old Soviet law on ‘speculation’ – unauthorised trade for profit – remained on the statute books for years. The police and courts were overstretched, underfunded, demoralised and uncertain of their very role. ‘Capitalism’ was too often seen as a licence to make money through whatever means was available, and so much of the Yeltsin era was marked by economic anarchy. Gangs and corrupt officials alike plundered the economy on a massive scale. In particular, this led to the consolidation of local criminalised baronies and the hollowing out of surviving state institutions. Even charities often became nothing more than organised-crime fronts: two successive heads of the Afghan War veterans’ union were murdered in bomb attacks in a struggle over the lucrative tax exemptions the association had been granted, for example. The boundaries between politics, business and crime were at best hazy, at worse meaningless, as criminals and politicians openly hobnobbed with each other and the tools and attitudes of organised crime came to permeate the system as a whole.
Meanwhile, the Russian underworld was wracked by an almost-decade-long struggle between gangs and their allies and patrons for turf, precedence and resources. Indeed, the bandity (‘bandits’) as often fought amongst themselves. To give just one example, the Shkabara–Labotski–Gnezdich gang was established by two ex-Spetsnaz (special forces) commandos in Novokuznetsk in 1992, but having become dominant in that city decided to expand to exploit the bigger opportunities of Moscow. When they did this, they were challenged by the Lyubertsy group, at the time one of the city’s largest, but the newcomers faced them down with a show of firepower. However, the group soon began to tear itself apart. One gang leader felt that one of his lieutenants had ambitions on his position: he tried to kill his underling with a bomb, but instead was injured in the blast and shot by his understandably disgruntled subordinate. Meanwhile, a new gang was rising in Novokuznetsk, but when three gunmen were sent to murder its head they failed. Two of the three were killed by their own godfather as punishment and the third sent back out to kill the rival, this time successfully. Nonetheless, members of the gang began to be known even amongst themselves as the ‘disposables’ for their rate of attrition, and a mix of fear, vendetta and greed led to a series of fratricidal killings that had effectively destroyed the group by 1995.11 This case illustrates three key features of that time: gangs rose and fell depending on firepower but also cohesion, with the former far easier to accumulate; this was a time of anarchy in the underworld, with no meaningful internal or external limits on the gangsters’ actions; and the situation was ultimately unsustainable.
The protection market and its understandings
The most important business decision I can make is knowing whose roof to shelter under . . . If I get that right, everything else should fall into place.
Russian entrepreneur, 199712
As the state declined and organised crime ascended, for a while business people ended up coming to treat gangs simply as alternative service providers, different sources of the krysha – ‘roof’, slang for protection – so crucial to any venture in such uncertain times: ‘The harder the rain, the tighter the roof has to be.’13 Vadim Volkov wrote of ‘violent entrepreneurship . . . the way in which groups and organizations that specialize in the use of force make money’,14 and Federico Varese applied to Russia the model developed by Diego Gambetta, of a mafia as ‘a particular type of organized crime that specializes in one particular criminal commodity . . . the supply of protection’.15 Either way, the essence is that credible and deployable violence and threat can be monetised, in a market in which numerous suppliers compete on price, effectiveness, perceived reliability and brand name. In this context, protection meant more than just not being shaken down; it also meant not being cheated. The courts were corrupt, and, even if one could get a judgment in one’s favour, enforcing it would be problematic. Besides, this could take years and the best the courts could often do was order repayment of any outstanding debts or damages at the original rate. Given that, even after inflation had subsided from the crippling levels of the early 1990s, it remained high (in 1999 it was still running at 37 per cent), in that time the real value of the financial loss would have shrunk dramatically. As a result, businesses were often willing to turn to organised crime to adjudicate disputes and enforce judgments, as they could do so promptly, even if the cost could be as high as 50 per cent of the total sum in question.16
In the words of Vladimir Vyshenkov, once a police investigator and then a crime journalist, ‘a market is born, and it has to be regulated. What does it mean to regulate? “You’re right, you’re wrong. Give it to him.” Who is going to do that? Suddenly athletes see a niche. They enter this market and say, “We’ll decide who’s right and who’s wrong. But we’re going to collect taxes in exchange.”’17 Amongst the first to seize this opportunity were sportsmen, typically wrestlers, boxers and martial artists, but where they led, all kinds of other groups followed, from corrupt cops to Chechens, Afghan War veterans to street gangs.
Quickly, it became institutionalised, interwoven into national and local social, economic and political structures. These ‘enforcement partnerships’ as Volkov called them could be one off, or else regularised and long term, typically costing 25–30 per cent of a firm’s revenues.18 As they began operating increasingly behind apparently legitimate structures, whether charities, holding companies or private security agencies, gangs were less likely to extort money from businesses with the overt threat of violence.
As will be discussed in more detail later, for this to work, the gangsters had to be, in that classic vor phrase, ‘honest criminals’. Yes, they were law breakers, and sometimes leg breakers, but they also had to be true to their word. The early 1990s may have offered opportunities for some bandity to do well today without thinking of tomorrow, but even in that decade, the scope and tolerance for such disorganised organised crime was relatively limited. The gangs that prospered, and especially those profiled later in the book which became the major corporations of the underworld, did so because they understood the importance of the ponyatiya, the notion of the informal but nonetheless powerful ‘understandings’ defining underworld life. In Russian street gangs, as Svetlana Stephenson’s field work has demonstrated, the emphasis of the ponyatiya is especially on issues of ‘manly’ values such as being tough and not backing down, as well as staying loyal to the gang.19 This is in many ways very reminiscent of the original vor code.
The ‘adult’ organised crime structures likewise internalised some of the same macho culture, although already in the age of the gun and its hired wielder, personal physical prowess was less important than being smart and ruthless. An apocryphal story recounted by Volkov about the resolution of a dispute between a vor who used the name Vasia Brianski and some Azeri gangsters outside St Petersburg helps illustrate this: ‘The bandit Vasia Brianski pulled out a gun, but a cool Azerbaijani displayed no fear and, pointing to his own forehead, said: “Okay, shoot me.” The trick, which was intended to demonstrate to others Vasia’s lack of resolve and thus win the contest, did not work. Vasia put the gun to the man’s forehead and shot him.’20
The reason I suggest this story might be folklore more than history is that I heard similar tales about gangsters from both Moscow and Vladivostok, always told by someone who had himself heard it second- (or third-) hand. The key point is that the moral drawn was not that the Azeri had guts (which may well have been the case, and that would probably have been the lesson in the classic days of the 1930s vory) but that his killer both understood the challenge and didn’t shirk from doing what was needed. As one of the storytellers put it, ‘you do what you have to do, even if it means getting wet’ – in other words, bloody – ‘but you let the other guy start it’.21
In the violence, there was a hint of restraint, a sense that you tried to avoid wars, even if you won them when they must be fought, and a clear commitment to following through on threats and promises alike. Reflecting the role of these ‘enforcement partnerships’, though – and without some form of trust, how can there be a partnership in a time without enforcement mechanisms? – their ponyatiya also put great emphasis on being reliable in positive as well as negative terms. It was not enough simply not to make threats without being able to back them up, it was necessary to make good on one’s promises, too. The old code had essentially considered promises made to frayery, non-criminals, as having no real weight. Now, that was bad for business and, in the form of the post-Soviet ponyatiya, the code once again rewrote itself to adapt to the needs of the times.
There were, of course, essentially predatory gangs, the cost of protection was a hidden tax on a new generation of entrepreneurs, and there remained all kinds of uncertainties within this market.22 It could certainly not be considered a good thing, merely an understandable response to a bad situation. But in the main, organised criminals increasingly sought to reach understandings with their clients and with each other, offering a smooth life so long as the right officials were paid off, the right firms received contracts. Indeed, the criminals now often considered themselves as protectors and arbiters. As one put it to Nancy Ries, ‘well, the traders and speculators are always cheating each other . . . We protect the businessmen from each other. We ensure the collection of debts and recover stolen goods. Our clients’ partners known who is protecting them . . . A good krysha means good business.’23
In this respect, organised crime was simply another business sector, a facilitator within Russia’s still-unruly business environment. In the words of one middle-ranking Moscow mobster I spoke to, ‘in the early years, we fought because we had to or because we didn’t know better, but by [1996–7] we could settle down and become businessmen rather than generals’.24
From bandity to biznismeny: the 2000s
Very often the most likely to succeed in these stormy oceans are not the picture-perfect, clean-shaved, deep-tanned, well-built, and fashionably attired yachtsmen under the immaculate white sails, but unpleasant-looking ugly skippers in command of a pirate ship. One should not be appalled. These are the laws of initial capital acquisition, applicable everywhere.
Controversial former aluminium tycoon Lev Chernoy, 200025
Vladimir Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin as acting president in 1999 before a snap – and carefully managed – election in 2000, is widely credited as having tamed the bandity. The anarchy of the 1990s passed, and with it the indiscriminate violence and the public fear. He deserves some credit, to be sure. Unlike Yeltsin, he had a clear vision for Russia, anchored on a strong state. There was no room in it for anything suggesting that the government was not in charge, whether opposition in parliament or gangsterism on the streets. However, Putin was as much symptom as cause: his elevation coincided with deeper political and economic pressures that permitted and indeed demanded this partial reassertion of central state authority. Putin made it clear that he would not tolerate overt or implicit challenges to the government. In the months leading up to his election, the flight of criminal capital out of Russia rose as gangsters hurriedly prepared themselves for a swift exit, in case Putin’s tough law-and-order rhetoric was more than just campaign theatre. One gangster told me that, in an echo of how people lived during Stalin’s time, he always kept a packed suitcase under the bed. However, whereas in the 1930s this was done so that one had essentials to take when the secret police arrived, for him it was in case he had to make a dash for the airport after one of his informants in the police tipped him off that he was going to be arrested.
This was ironic considering that, during his time as deputy mayor of St Petersburg, Putin had regularly encountered the city’s underworld, and particularly the powerful Tambovskaya group.26 Putin’s official spokesman Dmitri Peskov has claimed that ‘[s]ome public organisations, non-governmental organisations, security services of foreign countries and certain media’ have been trying to ‘rock the boat in our country’, and above all to ‘discredit President Putin’, by linking him with criminals.27 But it has been reported widely in Russian and international media, and explored by Karen Dawisha in her book Putin’s Kleptocracy, that Putin’s job as deputy mayor had been to manage relations with a variety of powerful interests. It was important for the city administration to have a smooth relationship with the criminals, and this allowed them to expand their empire so long as they also enriched local officialdom and accepted its overall political control.28 This was in many ways the model for Putin’s national policy, and the criminals soon realised that what was available to them was an implicit social contract, their own ‘little deal’. So long as they were more discreet, so long as they cut officials into part of the action, then the state would not treat them as a threat. Of course, the police would still try to catch criminals, but they did not need to fear any sustained, comprehensive crackdown. Indeed, one gangster remembers being in effect briefed on this new line by a police officer: ‘They’d find reasons to bring us in or meet us at one of our usual places. Then this man, a major, told me that times had changed, but it need not be a problem. We just had to be cooler, smarter, and everything would be fine.’29
In many ways this paralleled Putin’s taming of the oligarchs, the mega-rich businessmen who had become such a politically powerful force under Yeltsin: they were offered a quiet life so long as they didn’t challenge the Kremlin. The three who were least willing to accept Putin’s terms, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, were forced into exile in the UK or, in the last case, sent to prison, but the rest fell into line. Likewise, most gangs were happy to accept these new rules of the game, not least because the mob wars of the 1990s had already played themselves out. Turf boundaries had largely been agreed and hierarchies established, and further conflicts would be bad for business. The result was that higher-order organised crime became increasingly regularised, corpor-ately minded and integrated with elements of the state. When gangs did turn to razborka, the violent settling of scores – as sometimes they inevitably did – it was in a far more precise and targeted way, the sniper’s bullet supplanting the indiscriminate car bomb or drive-by shooting that had been such a bloody fixture of the 1990s.
The end of the vorovskoi mir?
We should recognise that our criminals are now so much more like yours. The old ways and understandings that used to define Russia’s underworld are fading. I suppose this is a good thing, but there is even a part of me that wonders what will survive of Russia’s traditions, even the bad ones.
Former Russian police investigator, 201630
The old-style vory v zakone, with their prison records, garish tattoos and clannish rituals, increasingly became anachronisms. The name and the mythology would survive, but lose their strength and meaning. In their heyday, the vory v zakone were called on to arbitrate disputes between gangs and individual criminals and also to manage the obshchak, the common fund that groups would maintain to support members and their dependants. The obshchak was at once a pension plan and a life insurance policy, and to steal from or misuse it was one of the greatest sins in the criminals’ eyes. Vory v zakone were thus chosen by their peers on the basis of, ironically enough, their moral standing: they were thieves and murderers, but they were trusted to resolve disputes fairly and administer the obshchak honestly.
Although there are now still criminals calling themselves vory v zakone and funds called obshchaki, these mean very different things. The title has become a largely empty honorific, often one bestowed as a favour or bought as a vanity perk. These faux vory are known by the surviving traditionalists as apelsiny, ‘oranges’. The etymology of the term is disputed: it reflects either a view amongst Slavic gangsters – and probably an accurate one – that they are disproportionately from the Caucasus, a region they associate with fruit sellers, or else the belief that this type of poseur-criminal is the kind of vain soul who spends a lot of his time topping up his tan on the beaches of the Mediterranean, Black or Caspian seas. Either way, the overwhelming majority of the modern vory are such ‘oranges’ who use the title but have not earned it according to the old traditions, nor do they accept any accompanying limitations on their behaviour.
For example, Andranik Sogoyan, an Armenian gangster convicted in absentia in 2013 in Prague on attempted murder charges, was ‘crowned’ as a vor v zakone in 1994 according to the old rules. Following long-standing Russian usage, Sogoyan has a criminal nickname, in this case ‘Zap’ or ‘Zaporozhets’, after an ancient small Soviet car, which his face is meant to resemble. However, police reports suggest he does not maintain an obshchak and he arranged for a young relative to be ‘crowned’ in 2012 by a group of his cronies. In other words, even those who rose through the hard old ways are often happy to see the rules relaxed for their family and friends.31
Likewise, although there are still funds known by the term obshchak, they are no longer the idealised social security of old, beyond some smaller, local gangs which retain the former sense of all-for-one mutuality. Instead, they are essentially groups’ operational budgets and escrow accounts, moneys held in store to pay off higher-order gangs and corrupt officials, seed-corn capital for new ventures, and profits awaiting distribution. In this way, the forms of the old underworld continue, but in a very different context. This context is the world of the new breed of gangster, the avtoritet (‘authority’). He – and it almost always is still he – is a criminal-businessman. His portfolios of interests will typically span the legitimate and illegitimate economies but also politics, as will be discussed in the following chapters.
In many ways, the murder in Moscow of legendary vor Vyacheslav Ivankov (‘Yaponchik’) in 2009 marked the beginning of the end for the old generation and the conclusive rise of the avtoritet and the entrepreneur. Ivankov was as old-school a vor v zakone as can be, a graduate of ‘The Mongol’s’ gang and numerous terms behind barbed wire. When released from his most recent stretch in 1991, he was already something of an anachronism to Moscow’s avtoritety, with little interest in the new opportunities in business and political alliances, yet enough status to become a problem. So, as will be discussed in chapter 12, he was encouraged to head to America, ostensibly as a representative of the Motherland’s vorovskoi mir, but in reality more as an exile. True to form, he immediately became personally involved in a range of violent activities and was duly arrested in 1995. In 2004, he was deported to Russia to stand trial in a murder case, a trial which collapsed mysteriously, allowing him to walk free the next year. He at once started to resume his activities, doing what he felt a vor v zakone ought to do: resolving disputes, grooming the next generation of gangsters, enforcing contracts and the criminal code. Yet the days when vory v zakone were sacrosanct within the underworld and their word was law had long since passed. When he incautiously sought to mediate a dispute between two Georgian-born gangsters, Aslan ‘Ded Khasan’ Usoyan and Tariel ‘Taro’ Oniani (see chapter 11), Ivankov literally put himself in the firing line. On the evening of 28 July 2009, he had just finished a working dinner at a Thai restaurant in northern Moscow when, even though he was accompanied by a bodyguard, a sniper using a Dragunov SVD rifle shot him in the stomach, fatally wounding him.
His funeral at Moscow’s Vagankovskoye cemetery was an exercise in gangster cliché. His tombstone is, in keeping with the usual pomposity of vor vernacular, a black construct with a life-sized statue of ‘Yaponchik’ looking uncharacteristically thoughtful, sitting in a corner between walls of crosses. Elaborate wreaths from criminals and gangs across the former Soviet Union were piled on his grave, including an especially large one from Usoyan, whose side Ivankov was expected to have taken in the dispute. Pinstriped bosses were each surrounded by their contingent of shaven-headed ‘bulls’, while police videographers carefully recorded the scene. Oniani, tellingly, sent no flowers. But behind the theatricality, part of the reason for the scale of the funeral was that it was putting to rest not just one vor v zakone, but a whole era. The avtoritety may have been mourning a man and the culture that once would have kept him safe – but they were also likely breathing a sigh of relief. The future truly did now belong to them.