GANGS, NETWORKS AND BROTHERHOODS
Many friends means no friends.
Russian proverb
Konstantin Yakovlev’s underworld nickname was ‘Kostya Mogila’, or ‘Kostya the Grave’, and, while he was given that klichka for his first job as a gravedigger, he more than earned it for the bloody path he trod through the underworld until his death in 2003. During the 1990s, he had done well in St Petersburg, and was even becoming a powerful behind-the-scenes political player, bankrolling a national meeting of the nascent Fatherland–All Russia Party in 1999 through a front company.1 Nonetheless, much of his business was based in Moscow, and he was in effect the smotryashchy, or ‘watcher’, for its criminals in Russia’s second city. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Moscow-based gangs began to make attempts to extend their authority over St Petersburg. As is often the case, an external enemy led to a closing of ranks, and the Muscovites were rebuffed by a local alliance uniting not just the dominant Tambovskaya network, but also the smaller Kazanskaya group and other gangs. This culminated in 2003 when a skhodka of criminal leaders – a ‘sit-down’ in mafia parlance – summoned Kostya to talk. He may have been a formidable figure, but, in the face of this united front, he had no choice but to switch sides. Not that it saved him: later that year, when back in Moscow for a few days, a motorbike carrying two men pulled up next to his car in traffic and raked it with Kalashnikov fire. He died on the spot, but made one final, posthumous trip back to St Petersburg and, as befits his former calling, was interred in an especially ornate tomb in the grounds of the St Alexander Nevsky monastery.2
Kostya’s story encapsulates many of the features of this thoroughly post-modern underworld. At first, he was a member of a gang, then later a gang leader and criminal-businessman in his own right. He was also a member of wider networks. He was initially loosely connected with a St Petersburg network and strongly tied to a Muscovite one, and then later (briefly) swapped over. Compared with other underworlds where identity is relatively fixed and allegiance determined by birth or ethnicity, Russia’s criminals enjoy a protean existence in which everything can be redefined or even combined, as the needs of the moment require.
Individual gangs within Russia largely fit the same shape as those elsewhere, with one or more dominant figures, a circle of core gangsters and a wider array of loosely affiliated occasional members, ‘wannabes’ eager to join, and contacts who provide or receive services but are not actual members. Some are ad hoc and fluid in their structure, especially those which are little more than local street gangs. Others may adopt a more formalised structure, with ranks and specialised roles. Most, though, will not go to such lengths; within the gang, those who need to know already know who is the enforcer, who has the best contacts within the police, and so forth: they do not need titles to remind them.
Overall, the Russian underworld is defined not by hierarchical structures like the Italian mafia or Japanese yakuza but by a complex and varied underworld ecosystem. There are myriad territorially based groups, some controlling just a housing estate or a neighbourhood, others cities and regions, such as Uralmash, described below. However, there is no single nationwide hierarchy. In so far as there are major structures reaching across city limits, regional boundaries and even national borders, there are a few gruppirovki: loose, flexible organisations more like networks than anything else. How many? Precisely because of their loose, sometimes overlapping natures, there is no consensus.3 I have heard figures from a very implausible three (presented by an academic at the Interior Ministry Academy in 2014, who said they were the Slavic, Chechen and Georgian networks) through to twenty-plus. It all depends on how one counts and defines them, but the consensus seems to be between six and twelve.
Personally, and this is just my own count at the time of writing, I would suggest at least eight. Some are very loose networks, defined really by common interest (Solntsevo, discussed in this chapter) or culture (the Chechens, discussed in chapter 10), but little more. Others are anchored around individuals (such as those dominated still by Tariel Oniani and once by Aslan Usoyan, covered in chapter 11). Then there are those with a clear territorial focus (St Petersburg’s Tambovskaya and the Far Eastern Association of Thieves, both considered in this chapter) or very loose ones dominated by specific criminal businesses, such as those concerned with the ‘Northern Route’ smuggling Afghan heroin, or the interconnected ‘Ukrainians’, who are often not Ukrainians as such, but work across the Russian–Ukrainian border and now also seek to exploit the undeclared war in south-eastern Ukraine.
Each network will have authority figures who either give orders or, more often, have the social, physical, economic and coercive power to ensure that in the main people heed their views. Most, though, have relatively little hierarchy and no sense of wider strategy. Instead, it is the component elements – the term brigady (‘brigades’) is often used for the larger ones4 – which will typically have some more distinct sense of structure and hierarchy.
Gangs and networks
Deal with the people you know, the ones you were in prison with.
Former mob lawyer Valery Karyshev, on vor attitudes5
These larger networks exist to provide a series of benefits for their members, whether gangs or individuals. They provide access to criminal opportunities and services and presumably reliable contacts who can help a member develop some new venture or respond to a challenge. In a rapidly evolving business climate, today’s protection racketeer may want tomorrow to get involved in heroin trafficking: where to find the drugs or venture capital such an operation needs? The network thus acts as a source of proven and hopefully reliable investment and capacity.
Diego Gambetta in particular has explored the vexed question of trust in the underworld: who to rely on in a world which by definition is outside the remit of credit-rating agencies, court-enforced contracts and business directories?6 The network provides an answer to these dilemmas: new members have presumably been vetted by existing ones, and will have needed to demonstrate their effectiveness, their security, and their ability and willingness to follow through on their undertakings. Should they fail to do so, they face the passive risks of reputational harm and being frozen out of future collaborations, as well as being judged and even penalised by other members of the network.
The network also provides mutual security, especially in the face of common threats, encroachments or bad faith from outsiders. Networks rarely seek to establish territorial monopolies: Moscow is home to three major ones (Solntsevo and the Oniani and Usoyan groups), has a strong presence from another (the Chechens) and also hosts a plethora of smaller groups such as the Mazutkinskaya, Izmailovskaya–Golyanovskaya and Lyubertsy gangs, which rise, fall and sometimes persist, perhaps loosely associated with one of the big groupings, but often with none or several. This is business as usual, but sometimes an attempt to upset the status quo in a major way will require a collective response.
Attempting to identify the main networks is harder than it may seem, not least as many of these groupings are very diffuse and others merge together. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify some on which most underworld and police sources alike agree. Of the Slavic ones, Solntsevo is the most extensive, certainly the most transnational, but in many ways a victim of its own success. It is now so large that it is too diffuse to be more than a loose array of contacts and local and personal groups. Solntsevo is based – as much as anywhere, these days – in Moscow, while St Petersburg is the home of their rival organisation once known as Tambovskaya (or just ‘Tambov’), even though it is not really called by its old name any more, nor has it acquired a new one. The very fact that names matter so much less is in itself a signal that these are not conventional hierarchical organised crime structures. Moving out into the provinces, the Yekaterinburg-based network still generally known as Uralmash and the remnants of the Far Eastern Association of Thieves are the most powerful in central Siberia and the Russian Far East respectively. The Association was never as organised as its name suggests, and has become less so since the death in 2001 of founder Yevgeny Vasin (‘Dzhem’). In many ways it can almost be considered the trade association of the ‘Easterners,’ not least in their relations with the varyagy (‘Varangians’), the gangsters from European Russia. Within the ‘highlanders’ from the Caucasus, the main movers are the organisations dominated by Tariel ‘Taro’ Oniani and, until his death in 2013, Aslan ‘Ded Khasan’ Usoyan, the diffuse but notorious Chechens and a group of insurgent young bloods who cohered originally around the Azeri Rovshan Dzhaniyev. Each of these various groupings will be explored in more detail below.
The question of the actual degree of organisation in Russian organised crime is therefore obviously a vexing one, although it speaks to a wider criminological debate as to just where one draws the line between ‘organised crime’ and ‘crime that is organised’. A useful study by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime identified five main types of organised crime grouping:
‘Standard hierarchy’: Single hierarchical group with strong internal systems of discipline.
‘Regional hierarchy’: Hierarchically structured groups, with strong internal lines of control and discipline, but with relative autonomy for regional components.
‘Clustered hierarchy’: A set of criminal groups which have established a system of coordination/control, ranging from weak to strong, over all their various activities.
‘Core group’: A relatively tightly organized but unstructured group, surrounded in some cases by a network of individuals engaged in criminal activities.
‘Criminal network’: A loose and fluid network of individuals, often drawing on individuals with particular skills, who constitute themselves around an ongoing series of criminal projects.7
In Russia, all five types are evident. However, the larger, the more important and the more geographically and functionally extensive they are, the more likely groupings are to have adopted the latter forms.
The ‘standard hierarchy’ and the Uralmash brigade
Uralmash is a financial group, not an organised criminal society . . . Uralmash has the most civilised and democratic style of work. Nobody stifles businessmen, many problems were resolved, and their fear of partnership disappeared.
Yekaterinburg businessman Andrei Panpurin, 19938
The ‘standard hierarchy’ is generally found in two main kinds of gang: the very local ones involved largely in protection racketeering and the provision of illegal goods and services, and those groups which emerge within disciplined state agencies, typically the police, military and security apparatus, and which replicate their formal chain of command. Such a structure, though, struggles to embrace widely varied interests and members. It works for military-style gangs, but is less effective in managing ones which may be dominated by a mix of old-school thugs, modern criminal-businessmen and corrupt officials. This tends to make them brittle, prone to fracture under stress. This was particularly evident in the case of the Uralmash gruppirovka, which rose as a classic ‘standard hierarchy’, but has only been able to survive by reforming itself as a very different kind of gang.9
In February 2006 Major General Alexander Yelin, deputy head of the MVD’s Organised Crime Directorate, claimed that in 2005 ‘a gang called Uralmash was eradicated in Sverdlovsk Region’.10 At the time, this assertion was widely mocked, not least in Yekaterinburg, capital of the region and home of the gang. It certainly suffered body-blows in the first half of the 2000s, but even the MVD was forced later to quietly drop its proud claim: when the police arrested the vor ‘Sukhy Novik’ in 2009, they accused him of being a Uralmash kingpin, even though the gang was meant to have been destroyed four years before. However, the real impact of a decade’s police pressure had been to prevent it from either evolving into a complex network like so many other groups, or emerging from the underworld altogether. Instead, it reverted to its original, closely knit form.
A city in the Urals, halfway across Russia, Yekaterinburg has a long criminal history. The Soviets renamed it Sverdlovsk and it became a transit station for convicts destined for the Gulags. When the camps were opened, the region was afflicted by mobs of rootless ex-convicts, known as ‘blue gangs’ because of their extensive tattoos, as we saw in chapter 6. Until the late 1980s, organised crime in Yekaterinburg was largely concerned with protection and smuggling rackets, in the hands of a succession of vory v zakone. But then a new generation of gangsters arose in the local sports clubs and gymnasia. A gang of two dozen such athlete-gangsters keen to turn muscle into cash emerged, including a skier, a wrestler, two boxers, a footballer and his black-marketeering brother. At first, they began shaking down stallholders at local markets and setting up illegal distilleries to profit from the anti-alcohol campaign. However, they needed space for expansion, and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and its consequent economic crisis provided just that.
The gigantic Uralsky Mashinostroitelny Zavod (Ural Machine-Building Plant – generally just called Uralmash) was the city’s headline employer; its northern working-class Ordzhonikidze neighbourhood was likewise generally known as Uralmash because it housed so many of the factory’s workers, and the gang derived its name from this. Desperate for revenue, the plant’s management began renting out and selling properties, and the newly moneyed gang began buying. Almost overnight, racketeers became rentiers. In the process, they also began to become significant enough to gain the attention of the ‘blue’ criminals who still dominated the local underworld. In 1992–3, the newly renamed Yekaterinburg was ripped apart by a gang war which in many ways replicated the ‘bitch wars’ of the 1950s: the ‘blues’ under the vor ‘Trifon’ were individually tough, but less unified and disciplined than the ‘sportsmen’. The latter also benefited from the tacit support of the local political elite, whom they bribed widely and generously, acquiring a reputation as ‘reasonable gangsters’ (a term a former local police officer used describing them to me).
The ‘blues’ were broken, followed by Uralmash’s other main rival, the Tsentralnaya gang. By 1993, Uralmash was dominant in Yekaterinburg. It moved quickly to establish its legitimate and illegitimate business empire and also sought political legitimacy by funding youth clubs, running charity campaigns and presenting itself as a club of concerned local businessmen. When the police arrested one of its alleged leading lights in 1993 on extortion charges, carefully orchestrated public protests followed, leading business figures extolled his charitable work, and political pressure was brought to bear. He was released within a few months.11
Uralmash could have gone either way. It had founded or taken over a wide range of companies, some of which were highly profitable within the essentially legitimate sector. It involved itself in local politics through regional governor Eduard Rossel – whom it had publicly supported in his 1995 election – and in 1999 it was formally registered as a political organisation, the Uralmash Social-Political Union. Perhaps because it was a provincial gang with less direct opposition, but also fewer opportunities, Uralmash retained the tight hierarchy of its inception, enforced by a so-called ‘security squad’ trained by former commando instructors.12 There was a clear leadership, and an equally clear pecking order of lieutenants (known as brigadiers in old vorovskoi mir style). Uralmash’s various enterprises managed to avoid duplication and competition, in part because of often micro-managing control from above. In many ways, the model was military in its insistence on the chain of command.
This worked for a while, but it left Uralmash vulnerable. In Putin’s new era, it made the mistake of remaining too visible, too potentially powerful. Its chief at the time, Alexander Khabarov, overreached himself in both upperworld and underworld politics. He supported the muscular City Without Drugs initiative in Yekaterinburg while seeking to drive away gangs from the Caucasus. In part this was, ironically enough, a bid to control the local drug trade. He held a seat on Yekaterinburg city council between 2002 and 2005, even running for mayor in 2003. Just as alarming to Moscow, Uralmash had become involved in struggles over the region’s potentially lucrative resources, something the capital wanted to be able to dispense itself. In 2001, for example, the Ural Mining and Metals Company and the Kyshtym Electrolytic Copper Plant were duelling for the Karabashsky copper-smelting works. When Kyshtym Electrolytic Copper was facing defeat, it is alleged that Uralmash got involved. Ural Mining and Metals suddenly and unexpectedly agreed to create a joint venture with its erstwhile rival. Law enforcement sources suggested to me that this decision may have been in part made because they had been contacted by Uralmash and encouraged to ponder the still-fresh memory of the fate of Oleg Belonenko, managing director of the Uralmash plant. He had been shot dead after he launched a campaign to cleanse his company of any links with the gang of the same name.
Uralmash became regarded in Moscow as a test case and the police and procuracy were tasked with making an example of it. Khabarov was arrested in 2004 and charged with racketeering. He died in prison the next year, his death apparently suicide but widely considered murder. His deputy fled the country ahead of an arrest warrant. Uralmash’s hierarchical structure, once a strength, became a key weakness. The police – and criminal rivals – knew whom to target, and the operations of the system required management from above and thus regular contact between leaders and led. The plausible deniability that is often the godfather’s best friend was hard to maintain when there were telephone taps and other information attesting to people’s direct role in managing the gang’s operations.
Uralmash seemed doomed and rival gangs began to circle. However, a new generation of leaders emerged who proved decisive and flexible. With some retrenchment, they restructured to present a less visible target and to retreat from politics. They even tried to avoid using the name Uralmash so as to downplay the extent to which their various smaller criminal enterprises were still part of a single network. Uralmash has become something more like a club of powerful criminal-businessmen, numbering between fourteen and eighteen, who closely coordinate the operations of their respective outfits, maintaining tight discipline but a low profile. It retains many of the characteristics of its earlier incarnations, including a reluctance to include non-Slavs, probably reflecting both the relatively crude nationalism of its founders and their continued struggle to hold their position on east–west trafficking routes against encroachments of north Caucasian gangs from the south-west and Central Asians from the south-east. Its evolution demonstrates both that many local gangs within Russia will tend to adopt more basic and traditional forms, and also that these models have distinct limitations when the organisations acquire greater economic and political ambitions. As Uralmash demonstrated, when those contradictions bite, the group can either diffuse into a network or retrench back onto its core criminal activities. In many places, we see the former, but Uralmash decided on the latter, simpler course.
The ‘regional hierarchy’ and the Far Eastern Association of Thieves
This is my district, and I want order here!
Vor v zakone Yevgeny Vasin, in a TV interview, 200013
In 1890, Anton Chekhov wrote to a friend regarding the Russian Far East, ‘What crying poverty! The poverty, ignorance and pettiness are enough to drive you to despair. For every honest man there are ninety-nine thieves, who are a disgrace to the Russian people.’14 Sadly, he would probably have recognised the region a century later. From its distinctive state emerged a relatively unusual form of organised thuggery and exploitation.
‘Regional hierarchies’ are relatively rare, and the Russian experience would seem to suggest they are generally only encountered in circumstances in which an artificial degree of centralisation is required by some kind of external pressure. This could be a political leadership that insists on dealing with a single counterpart and in turn demands that this interlocutor be able to discipline his subordinates as the price for continued survival. Or else it could be an external threat that forces otherwise hostile gangs to create a common structure in the face of a greater foe. The rise (and fall) of the Far Eastern Association of Thieves demonstrates both.
Even by the unruly standards of the 1990s, the Russian Far East – sparsely populated, far from Moscow, characterised by sources of valuable natural resources and widespread poverty – witnessed violent struggles between gangs. Many were over relative pittances. Others, though, were about, or else could impact on, the massive potential profits to be made from the region’s extractive and fishing industries. In general terms, the functional near-collapse of the state apparatus gave regional bosses across Russia much freedom of manoeuvre to engage in or sanction criminal deals, but the relative isolation of the Far East (and its seeming irrelevance to politics in Moscow) made for even greater scope for the predatory exploitation of the region’s resources.
The underworld of the Russian Far East was thus relatively primitive. Many settlements could not sustain more than one, quite small local gang, typically working with the administration. Cities such as Vladivostok, capital of the Maritime Region, had more, but even then had nothing like the complexity of the criminal ecosystems of a Moscow or a St Petersburg. The paucity of resources and a lack of mutually beneficial interactions between these gangs, along with weaknesses in local law enforcement, tended to make competition more common and more bloody. The strelka (‘little arrow’), a meeting held between competing gangs to resolve their differences, increasingly became little more than an excuse for a firefight. Turf wars were common, with conflicts in 1995–6 and 1997–8 almost seamlessly merging.15 The 1997–8 war, triggered by struggles over the fishing industry and the December 1997 regional parliamentary elections (and the subsequent redistribution of spoils and sinecures) led to a particular bloodletting.16 Several gang bosses were killed, including Anatoly ‘Koval’ Kovalev and Igor ‘Karp’ Karpov; two entrepreneurs were tortured and buried alive; the CEOs of several local companies were gunned down; a hitman from St Petersburg, Artur Altynov, was murdered, probably to conceal the identity of his employer. Allegations were made that elements of the local military and security apparatus were involved and even that one murder was sanctioned at a high ranking official level.
However, there were also forces pressing for an end to these hostilities. First of all, the political and economic leadership, cohering around the administration of Maritime Region governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko – a survivor, he remained in office from 1993 until 2001 – became increasingly alarmed that these conflicts impeded their ability to exploit the region’s resources to their own advantage and might even induce Moscow to take a hand. (Indeed, this was to happen under Putin.) Secondly, the arrival of representatives of gangs from European Russia – so-called varyagy (‘Varangians’) in local criminal parlance – demanding tribute or obedience also focused the minds of the vostoki (‘easterners’). Believing, like Milton’s Satan, that it was ‘better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven’, they looked to ways of resisting the encroachments of their richer, more numerous and politically better connected brothers from over the Urals.
The outcome was the rise of the Far Eastern Association of Thieves, whose grandiose title belies its ramshackle nature. This was closer to a trade association or guild for criminals of the Russian Far East, presided over by senior vor v zakone Yevgeny Vasin (‘Dzhem’) until his death (by natural causes) in 2001. Under Vasin, who was based in Komsomolsk-na-Amure, the Association became a confederation of local gangs (most of the ‘standard hierarchy’ variety and many quite antediluvian, still clinging to the obshchak and the old ways of the voroskoi mir). They had considerable autonomy within their agreed territories and businesses, but had to accept the rulings of Vasin and the Association’s inner council in disputes. This did not prevent turf wars, by any means, but it did ensure that they did not spread as far as they might and would always take second place to the strategic interests of the collective. When, for example, a group of varyagy – themselves having just been driven out of their core business in Krasnoyarsk – tried to take over a haulage firm servicing the eastern stations on the Trans-Siberian Railway, feuding gangs in Khabarovsk called a truce to repel the outsiders (after which, they returned to their war).
As well as uniting the region’s gangs, Vasin had an additional card to play against the varyagy, which became a third factor for unity in its own right: the Chinese. The Russian Far East quickly became an area of interest for Chinese criminals, even before the legitimate investment that is now reshaping the region.17 Chinese merchants established shuttle-trading networks across the border to sell cheap, stolen and counterfeit goods. These traders were prey to protection racketeers on both sides of the border. Russo-Chinese joint ventures proved particular targets: in 1994, the deputy director of one was killed in Nakhodka; in 1995 the Khabarovsk offices of another were gutted by grenades; in 1996, Chinese gangsters tried to kidnap three Chinese business people in Vladivostok. However, these commercial contacts also brought with them interested potential collaborators from the Chinese underworld. Drugs, weapons, illegal migrants and then eventually timber, raw materials, rare wildlife and other more recondite commodities began to be traded, and the Russians also became launderers for a growing share of Chinese criminal cash. As it became clear that the potential profits were immense, gangs in such gateway cities as Vladivostok, Blagoveshchensk and Khabarovsk fought over these connections. However, the Chinese criminal market was just too big for any one or two gangs to service, the local political authorities wanted to ensure no one scared off this gold-egg-laying goose, and the varyag threat loomed.
As a result, Vasin drew on the Chinese to help fight off the European Russians – not with men or guns, but with money – and also used them to consolidate the position of the Association. If you wanted to be able to get a cut of the Chinese action, you needed to be a member in good standing. Despite all the jostling and sporadic violence which marked the underworld of the Russian Far East, this combination of carrot and stick helped keep the Association together through the 1990s. These were unusual circumstances, though, and Vasin, in fairness, was an unusual man, a vor of the old school who managed to combine ruthlessness, authority and diplomacy. Power-broker and elder statesman, he was in effect also the Association’s ambassador, able to deal with his counterparts in Moscow, the Urals and St Petersburg in its name. Even before his death, though, the Association was breaking apart. Connections with China and its underworld had become increasingly deep, dense – and destabilising. In places such as Blagoveshchensk and along the river Amur, gangs from south of the border had become virtually dominant thanks to the influx of Chinese legal and illegal migrants and, more often, Chinese money. Elsewhere, such as in Vladivostok, there was greater parity: Chinese partners tended to have the economic strength, Russians the political cover. However, as always, it was over the division of spoils that the criminals fell out. Gangs along the southern coast or border could tap into these new profits and saw little reason to share the proceeds with those from the interior.
Furthermore, the new-model varyagy were less interested in the region, and its political elite, while no less rapacious, was less able to maintain a cosy condominium with the gangsters. The overall political situation changed after Nazdratenko resigned in 2001 (ostensibly after a heart attack although persistent rumours suggest it was at the Kremlin’s behest) and the Maritime Region came under closer scrutiny from Moscow. With Vasin’s death that same year, the Far Eastern Association of Thieves was also fatally wounded, even if it would take a few years for it to realise this. No successor of comparable stature emerged and the Chinese are now happy to establish their own bilateral relationships rather than work through the Association. After all, the importance of the Chinese connection is only growing. Everything from fish to timber is smuggled out of Russia and finished goods and illegal migrants are smuggled in. Perhaps $1 billion of the $8 billion-plus Chinese heroin market now comes from Afghan drugs smuggled across Russia and Central Asia,18 but that pales before the tallies of these other products. Even illegally logged Russian timber for the Chinese construction market is a massive industry, worth perhaps $620 million.19
Although from time to time the Association is still mentioned, in practice it faded from existence around 2005, leaving a patchwork of gangs based around territories, ethnicity, leaders and specialities, caught – like a metaphor of the Russian Far East as a whole – between a receding European Russia and a rising China. Indeed, according to Bertil Lintner, Vasin was succeeded by his main Chinese contact, the enigmatic Lao Da (‘Elder Brother’), as ‘the main organised crime figure in Vladivostok’.20 This is something of an overstatement, not least given that between 2004 and 2008 the city’s mayor was Vladimir Nikolayev, the kickboxer and convicted gang leader known by the unlikely nickname ‘Vinni-Pukh’ (‘Winnie-the-Pooh’).21 Nonetheless, the very fact that some believed a Chinese gangster could have risen to such heights demonstrates the extent to which the Association may have ultimately done no more than delay the incorporation of Russian Far Eastern crime into wider, more powerful regional criminal economies.
The ‘clustered hierarchy’ and the Northern Route
Afghan drug traffic is like a tsunami constantly breaking over Russia – we are sinking in it.
Viktor Ivanov, head of the Federal Anti-Narcotics Service, 201322
Gangs which seem to fit the ‘clustered hierarchy’ model – in other words, constellations of individual, semi-autonomous groups which nonetheless have to work together extensively – tend to be confined to those primarily involved in a single, specific activity which requires such cooperation. The classic fields are drug and people trafficking. In Russia, this is especially associated with the heroin-trafficking structures servicing the so-called Northern Route from Afghanistan. This is actually a constantly changing array of routes, with streams of drugs merging, separating and paralleling each other as they writhe west and east. It stretches from Central Asia into and through Russia (also satisfying the domestic market) to Europe, China and even beyond. Some shipments travel all the way to South America (where it is typically swapped for cocaine), North America and Africa. The Northern Route accounts for up to 30 per cent of the total global heroin flow, and the proportion is rising.23
This is a trade largely carried out by a sequence of criminal organisations: according to the United Nations, 80 per cent of the opiate trafficked through Central Asia is controlled by organised groups using long-term routes.24 Afghan criminal networks, local warlords and insurgents dominate production and processing in-country and bring the drugs to, or just over, the country’s borders. At that point they are typically sold on to Central Asian gangs – small, based around family, clan or neighbourhood – and then perhaps from gang to gang. For example, a typical arrangement for Turkmen gangs is that they sell on to Uzbeks who, in turn, sell on to Russians in Tashkent or Samarkand. Occasionally, Russian networks seek (to use the jargon of business) to bring vertical integration into their supply chains and procure heroin directly, but this depends on contacts and the protection and sanction of local criminal and political elites (in so far as there is a difference between the two).
From Turkmenistan, drugs move to the port of Turkmenbashi for trafficking across the Caspian Sea to Baku, or else by land into Uzbekistan and thence Kazakhstan. From Tajikistan they flow into Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan, then north into Kazakhstan and then Russia, or else east from Kyrgyzstan into China. Some of this trafficking is by car or even mule or horse, but the aim is to feed it into the region’s transport infrastructure, so road, rail and air hubs such as Dushanbe, Tashkent, Samarkand and Almaty are key interim destinations.25 The Russian leg of this Northern Route is largely dominated by ethnic Russian and Russian-based gangs (including Georgian and Chechen gruppirovki), with a small proportion handled by Central Asian criminals, often using the diaspora of migrant labourers in Russia, and largely selling to and through those expatriates.
Of the route’s total flow, more than a third stays in Russia. According to official figures, almost 6 per cent of the country’s population, some 8.5 million people, are drug addicts or regular users.26 The key challenge is the growing proportion of users becoming addicts and the use of harder and more dangerous narcotics. Some 90 per cent of drug addicts use heroin at least part of the time, making Russia the world’s leading heroin-using nation per capita; highly dangerous drugs such as krokodil (desomorphine), which rots away users’ flesh, are also making considerable headway, with the consequent impact on mortality. Russians consume some 20 per cent of global heroin production.27 The remainder heads west into Europe or east and south into China, where it is largely sold in wholesale quantities to local gangs for resale.28
Unsurprisingly, access to and control over this lucrative and growing business has become a source of considerable rivalry between gangs (and corrupt officials). Some major groupings have tried to build their own structures as far along the supply chain as makes sense, which generally means to Kazakhstan, and managing the shipment westward. Networks including Solntsevo and Tambovskaya, the Oniani group and the Chechens, for example, have been known to move large, consolidated shipments by road, rail or air along the primary transport arteries: the Trans-Siberian and Baikal–Amur railway lines, the federal highways and air links. In the process, they may subcontract aspects of the work to local gangs but tend instead to deal with corrupt officials and business people able to expedite their trafficking. A very crude estimate I was given by a Russian police officer in 2011 suggested that such wholesale transfers account for more than half the total throughput of the Northern Route. However, a few large drug seizures at the time probably coloured his view; my personal and unscientific guesstimate would put the total share handled in this way at a quarter, if that.
At the other end of the scale, 15–20 per cent is handled by individual criminal-entrepreneurs who buy the drugs in or close to Central Asia. These are often people whose regular work fits this pattern, such as shuttle traders, airline staff and commercial truckers, or else foreign gangs, predominantly Central Asians. However, these traffickers often operate at the sufferance of the larger and more politically protected Russian groups and thus typically pay tribute – in the form of a share of the drugs or a cut of the profits – to local gangs.
The bulk of the route’s drug trafficking is in the hands of collectives of local gangs, which over time may assume the characteristics of a ‘clustered hierarchy’ as their relationships become settled and they come to depend on the heroin business, which entails everyone carrying out their role within the enterprise. The shipments handled in this way tend to be individually smaller but more numerous than those of the major networks, and are generally transported by couriers and in cars or trucks. The component gangs usually take their fee in a share of the heroin, to be sold locally for profit and to defray operational costs, or even passed on to gang members as compensation for their work. Thus, this form of trafficking disproportionately contributes to the domestic heroin market. This is also the main way trafficking to China is handled, not least as the major networks have not yet reached an agreement over access. Gangs therefore tend to move drugs to border cities and then sell on to Chinese counterparts operating under the cover of import–export businesses or shuttle traders.
One particular operation active in 2012 helps illustrate these relationships.29 A heroin shipment worth around $1.2 million when finally sold on the street was assembled from consignments of opium bought from several Afghan suppliers by ‘Behruz’, an Uzbek criminal-entrepreneur directly related to a senior figure within the customs service. Behruz paid the Afghans in cash and goods and passed a fee on to his relative in order to ensure he remained safe and unhindered. He managed a processing facility outside Andizhan in eastern Uzbekistan, where the opium was converted into heroin. Then, he gathered the shipment in Tashkent, having agreed to sell it to a Kazakh gang.
Managing such long-range games of pass-the-parcel is a complex and delicate business, especially given that the aim is always to establish links with the European market, where the prices are highest. There has to be considerable trust that upstream groups are not short-changing their partners, and that downstream groups are not stealing from the shipment. A typical response, evident in this case, is for a trusted third party to confirm both the initial size of the shipment and – considering that heroin can be (and is, before consumption) ‘cut’ or adulterated– its purity. In this case, the shipment in Tashkent was inspected and inventoried by ‘Parovoz’ (‘Locomotive’), a Russian vor v zakone largely retired from active crime, but who maintains a side-line precisely in such work, trading on his reputation as an ‘honest thief’.
The Kazakhs took control of the heroin in Tashkent, broke the shipment into a few consignments and loaded them onto commercial trucks bound for Shymkent, just over the border. From there, it was flown to Almaty in the north. The Kazakhs were a relatively small and southern-based gang with few contacts and protectors in Almaty, so they were eager to monetise their heroin quickly and have it off their hands. They retained a portion of the drugs to sell on their home turf and handed the rest over to a Russian gang whose representatives were waiting. From Almaty, the heroin was flown to Samara in southern Russia, the buyers’ home city.
Again, the Russian gang took a portion of the shipment to sell locally and handed the rest on to ‘Yura Serbskoi’ (‘Serbian Yura’), a trusted lieutenant of a Moscow-based Georgian gangster, ‘Khveli’. The Samara gang was not paid, though; this transaction was actually making good on a debt accrued the year before when a similar shipment was seized by the police. The drugs moved by train to Moscow, under ‘Yura’s’ supervision. ‘Khveli’ was actually working with two partners: ‘Seryozha’, a gangster from Kaluga, and ‘Mikhail Taksista’ (‘Mikhail the Taxi Driver’). At this point, ‘Parovoz’ re-entered the scene, checking the purity of the remainder of the heroin and assessing whether as much was left as there should be. The partners divided what they had. ‘Seryozha’ took his portion back to Kaluga for his gang to sell direct or to trade with other local gangs, while ‘Khveli’ and ‘Mikhail’ decided to try to reach the European market. They lacked direct contacts, so ‘Parovoz’ – again for a consideration – put them in touch with another gangster in Moscow, ‘Vadik’, who had a partner in Warsaw with whom he trafficked drugs regularly.
Throughout such a process, there has to be operational security against rival gangs, law enforcement and gang members. There has to be close coordination to manage the handovers and limit how long the drugs are in the pipeline, time in which they are vulnerable and unprofitable. In this case, the journey from Tashkent to Moscow took just nine days. Furthermore, given that the main profit is downstream, where the drugs are sold close to the retail dealers, and the main costs upstream, where they are initially bought, there has to be faith in an equitable distribution of revenues. Successfully and profitably navigating this complex process thus encourages long-term relationships. There is a huge potential profit to be made, but the time and risks involved in establishing the relationships in the first place are considerable. Having done so, the incentive is to maintain those sequential relationships, something which will often require the subordination of gangs’ individual autonomy to the collective venture. Over time, there has been a tendency for the most durable and effective operations to become increasingly integrated and, in particular, for a common set of rules and procedures to be established. These rules will be enforced by some coordinating body, made up sometimes of trusted third parties paid for their role (this is a classic job for vory v zakone) or, more often, a council of representatives of all the stakeholding gangs. In this case, ‘Khveli’, ‘Mikhail Taksista’ and ‘Behruz’ formed the unofficial governing council. They paid ‘Parovoz’ for his role directly out of their share as they had a common interest in keeping the process ‘honest’. After all, they had sunk considerable time, money and social capital into establishing this route and they wanted it to last.
The ‘core group’ and the Tambovskaya
Petersburg – the criminal capital of Russia.
Slogan used by opponents of St Petersburg governor Vladimir Yakovlev in his 2000 re-election campaign30
The ‘core group’ and the ‘criminal network’ are the main models for the largest and most significant Russian structures. Both are similar, the key distinction being whether or not they have a dominant constituent group that does not seek to manage every aspect of day-to-day operations by the structure’s members but does expect obedience when it chooses to assert it. This leadership role is a difficult and often dangerous one to claim and maintain, though. In 1994, for instance, Georgian godfather Otari Kvantrishvili tried to leverage his undoubted status as the most powerful individual kingpin in Moscow into dominance within his network, with fatal results.
‘Core group’ networks are thus quite rare. At the time of writing, Tariel Oniani’s predominantly Georgian group would seem the be the best exemplar of this model, and it is discussed in chapter 11. However, especially in its heyday, St Petersburg’s Tambov (or Tambovskaya) group offered a particularly good example of such an organisation, as well as the shift away from the bandity and towards the criminal-business elite.31 It was established in 1988 by ‘Valery the Baboon’ and Vladimir Kumarin (later also known as Barsukov, when he took his mother’s maiden name), both hailing from the Tambov region, around 500 kilometres south-east of Moscow, but living and working in St Petersburg (then still called Leningrad). ‘The Baboon’ was a boxer and he attracted a following of like-minded thugs and martial artists as the initial core of the gang, but Kumarin provided direction and business sense. Thanks to him, they moved quickly from racketeering, organised theft and drug trafficking into the growing private business of Gorbachev’s cooperative era. As a result, from the very first the group developed as both a seemingly legitimate and overtly criminal structure. Ironically enough, it was also an unintended beneficiary of Gorbachev’s relaxation of censorship. Local television journalist Alexander Nevzorov ran sensationalist exposés of the ‘Tambov boys’ that perversely made their name, establishing their reputation for ruthlessness and effectiveness.32 These are two powerful assets in the underworld. As a result, the group grew quickly. It survived an early turf war with the rival and more traditional Malyshevskaya gang. It would later mount what in business terms would be a leveraged takeover of this group, but its real challenge was managing its success and consequent rapid expansion. It grew so quickly and incorporated so many disparate and often competing members that conflict was almost inevitable. By 1993, an internal struggle for power had broken out, which lasted two years but led to the consolidation of the organisation under Kumarin, even though he lost his right arm in an assassination attempt in 1994. His aim was to bring renewed discipline and cohesion to the network and push it away from its roots in street crime.
By the end of the 1990s, the organisation had become the city’s dominant group. Whereas once protection racketeering had essentially been regarded simply as a means of extorting payments from local businesses (typically demanding 20–30 per cent of targets’ profits), now it became a weapon to take over a controlling interest in them instead. Increasingly the Tambovskaya looked to partnerships, either setting up new businesses or investing in existing ones. These companies not only served as fronts for criminal rackets, they also operated within the legitimate sector. For example, the group’s private security firms employed Tambovskaya enforcers, who were thus given an excuse legally to carry weapons, but they also provided genuine protection services for clients. Indeed, according to one former customer, they actually proved very cost effective: ‘You paid more than the market rate for the fat ex-cop they sent, but in practice everyone knew that you were as a result under the “roof” of the Tambov, so no one would try and rob you.’33 In this way, the Tambovskaya was at the forefront of a general trend within Russia as power within the underworld shifted from the vory to the avtoritety.
In particular, the organisation entrenched itself within the local energy and transport sectors, including, it was alleged, the Petersburg Fuel Company (PTK), apparently unopposed by the local administration.34 In 2001, Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov claimed that the Tambovskaya controlled up to 100 industrial enterprises in St Petersburg, as well as key interests relating to the four main sea ports of north-western Russia: St Petersburg itself, plus Arkhangelsk, Kaliningrad and Murmansk.35 However, like the expansion of the mid-1990s, this proved a mixed blessing. The more legitimate business interests the Tambovskaya leaders acquired, the more they were forced to operate to legitimate standards and the wider the gulf grew between the avtoritety and the rank-and-file bandity. Just as the leaders of the Tambovskaya were gaining in legitimacy and political power in the upperworld – Kumarin/Barsukov even gained the nickname of the ‘night governor’, as the shadow administrator of the city – they were losing it in the underworld.
The result was another gang war. In 1999, local politician – and Tambovskaya protector – Viktor Novoselov was killed when someone slapped a mine on the roof of his official car, decapitating him in the blast. Another ally, nightclub owner Sergei Shevchenko, who stood for election proudly and publicly admitting ‘Of course I’m backed by criminal money, I’m a bandit!’,36 was arrested and charged with extortion. He was subsequently murdered in an apparent contract killing in Cyprus in 2004. Facing claims that St Petersburg was becoming a focus for organised crime – claims which both deterred investors and were embarrassing to the new Russian prime minister and soon-to-be president, local boy Vladimir Putin – the St Petersburg authorities began to impose a degree of order. PTK, which had been a closed joint-stock company, was made an open joint-stock holding, and a process was begun to cleanse it of Tambovskaya influence.37 Kumarin/Barsukov was unexpectedly arrested in 2007 and convicted two years later on fraud and money-laundering charges, bearing a fourteen-year sentence.38
The business-minded avtoritety remained dominant within the organisation, but they had to accept that they lacked the ability to run the gang like a single integrated business and also that they could not move wholly away from their street crime roots. They could also not afford to appear to be challenging the state. As a result, the name Tambovskaya is now little heard in St Petersburg, even though the network remains a key player not just in the city and the surrounding Leningrad region but throughout the Russian north-west. Its operations stretch over 1,000 kilometres north to Murmansk, over 700 kilometres north-east to Arkhangelsk and almost 1,000 kilometres south-west to Kaliningrad. It has largely devolved to numerous smaller outfits and operators and moved into new businesses such as methamphetamines and counterfeit goods. The role of the core appears now primarily be to resolve disputes, protect the network as a whole (especially against incursions by ‘highlanders’ from the north Caucasus) and to manage international flows of goods – drugs, people, stolen cars, counterfeit wares – and money.
Indeed, in many ways the primary role of the core is to operate abroad. Many of the leaders of the Tambovskaya (or Tambovskaya–Malyshevskaya39) have ended up operating in Spain, and others are to be found in Germany, the Baltic states and further afield. It is not that violence and coercion are no longer factors, but the core retains its influence over this loose network (one that has diffused to the point where it does not even have much of a distinctive identity) by controlling access to the money, opportunities and lifestyle to be found abroad. The bandity may be powerful at home, but, in the words of a Spanish police officer, ‘if they want to play a full part in Tambovskaya’s activities abroad, they need to stay in favour with the avtoritety’.40
Nonetheless, if they lose this position as gatekeepers, the avtoritety will maintain control at home only so long as they have the money to corrupt officials and pay off the bandity. With officials facing an anti-corruption campaign from Moscow, the profits of white-collar crime under pressure, and the bandity feeling stronger, the Tambovskaya network may shift back towards more violent and overt criminal businesses, especially drug and people trafficking. However, while it will hope to draw on the contacts, business assets and skills built up during the years in which the avtoritety held sway, its days may be numbered. It could well fracture, or be replaced by other, newer structures. The Tambovskaya may be an organisation already fading.
The ‘criminal network’ and Solntsevo
The most powerful Russian crime syndicate in terms of wealth, influence, and financial control . . . [whose] leadership, structure, and operations exemplify the new breed of Russian criminals that emerged with the breakup of the Soviet system.
US government’s International Crime Threat Assessment, 200041
What happens when your organisation is so successful, it grows too big to manage? The natural tendency has been for structures instead to drift towards the true ‘criminal network’, and this is best exemplified by the infamous Solntsevo or Solntsevskaya network. Named after the south-western suburb of Moscow in which it originally emerged, it has steadily grown – but in the process has arguably lost much of its focus and identity. It began as a ‘core group’ but has devolved into a looser structure in which there are stronger and weaker members, but no one asserts true control.42
Solntsevo was founded in the mid-1980s by two relatively young gangsters going by the underworld nicknames of ‘Mikhas’ and ‘Avera’. Neither, tellingly enough, were vory v zakone. Instead, they were forerunners of the modern Russian avtoritety, criminal businessmen interested in keeping a low profile while maximising their profits. They were fortunate enough to be able to draw on the city’s criminal roots, though, not least by recruiting former members of the gang of Gennady Karkov, ‘The Mongol’. Karkov had been one of Moscow’s underworld kingpins, possibly even its foremost, until his arrest and conviction on charges of extortion with violence in 1972. His gang continued to operate while he was in prison, though, and represented a formidable asset for ‘Mikhas’ and ‘Avera’ in their rise to power, allowing them to trade on existing underworld reputations and muscle.
First of all, they were able to attract Vyacheslav ‘Yaponchik’ Ivankov, the notorious vor v zakone of the old school. A former boxer, Ivankov was arrested and sentenced to fourteen years’ hard labour in 1982, and while in prison was formally ‘crowned’ a vor v zakone by his peers. Meanwhile, Solntsevo also formed an alliance with Sergei ‘Silvestr’ Timofeyev and his Orekhovo gang, another rising power. Founded in 1988, the core members of Orekhovo (or Orekhovskaya) were young sportsmen and military veterans. What they lacked in business acumen they made up for in their ability to deploy violence with enthusiastic overkill. As such, they represented the ideal complement to Solntsevo’s increasingly extensive business empire, built on the back of Gorbachev’s reforms.
At this time, a conflict was raging in Moscow’s underworld between Slavs and ‘highlanders’ from the Caucasus. Solntsevo, especially once it was linked with Orekhovo, assumed an increasingly influential role as de facto coordinator of the Russian gangs. Their ability to combine the business and diplomatic skills of the avtoritety with the ruthlessness and brutality of the vory became most evident once Ivankov was released early in 1991. He led the counter-attack against the ‘highlanders’, using his authority within the vorovskoi mir to gather support from gangs across the country. By the end of the year, an uneasy peace of sorts had been concluded between the two sides.43
Even after the ‘highlander’ threat had receded, most Slav gangs in Moscow accepted Solntsevo’s role as first amongst equals. Solntsevo directly controlled underworld operations in the south-west of the city and parts of the centre, but Orekhovo split away as Timofeyev chafed at the more low-key approach favoured by ‘Mikhas’. For a while, Orekhovo became notorious for its violence and its willingness to flout the law and underworld convention alike, but in 1994 Timofeyev was killed and the gang fragmented. Most of these splinters were incorporated into Solntsevo, especially after the murder of Timofeyev’s successor, Igor ‘Max’ Maximov, in 1995.
It was clear that the city’s unruly gangs would accept no single overlord. Georgian godfather Otari Kvantrishvili had been assassinated in 1994 largely because of his empire-building ambitions in Moscow. On the other hand, the profits to be made in an orderly underworld economy – as well as the need to maintain the balance between Slavs and ‘highlanders’ – meant that some form of arbitrating body would be useful. This was the role Solntsevo was able to assume. By the mid-1990s, it had become the dominant grouping in Moscow, alongside the more local and hierarchical Izmailovskaya–Golyanovskaya combine and Chechen-dominated groupings, such as the Tsentralnaya, Avtomobilnaya and Ostankinskaya gangs.
More to the point, Solntsevo expanded its network of contacts and members across Russia. It was an early and enthusiastic exploiter of the opportunities opened by Yeltsin’s clumsy and underregulated adoption of a market economy. It moved into banking and finance. The business ethic fostered by the network’s founders certainly did not preclude Solntsevo’s involvement in violent extortion and protection racketeering, but it did mean that in many cases this krysha was more than just a levy demanded by force and threat. Solntsevo established a role as a pseudo-state agency for the enforcement of contracts. Given that the Russian arbitrazh courts responsible for commercial cases were in the 1990s inefficient, backlogged and corrupt, retrieving unpaid debts or winning damages for broken contracts could be a lengthy and uncertain process. Solntsevo, on the other hand, could offer to resolve such disputes in its own way for a cut of the sum in question (typically a market-beating 20 per cent), discreetly and far more quickly. In this way, Solntsevo not only profited from the inefficiencies of the Russian state, it turned an essentially parasitic process into an active partnership with the very companies it was extorting.
Nothing succeeds like success, and Solntsevo continued to grow, especially thanks to the 1998 ruble crash, which forced many local gangs into near-bankruptcy and sent them looking for more powerful and solvent partners to bail them out. By the 2000s, while Solntsevo was largely based in Moscow and the surrounding regions, including the Tver, Ryazan, Samara and Tula districts, it also had particular concentrations of constituent groups in Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Perm. Further afield, it was present in Ukraine (notably Crimea and the ethnically Russian Donetsk region), Lithuania and ethnically Russian northern Kazakhstan, as well as Europe, Israel and the United States.
However, this very expansion itself made the gruppirovka increasingly diffuse. Its boundaries became permeable, with gangs affiliating themselves with it while maintaining links, even owing primary allegiance, to other underworld combines. For example, one European-based member was overheard in a wiretapped conversation expressing uncertainty as to how to get in touch with network members back in Moscow when his main contact changed his mobile phone provider and in the process his telephone number.44 It had no common obshchak, even if some of its component gangs and brigady did, because of the problems both in administering such a fund and in collecting dues from members strung out across the country – and world – for whom Solntsevo could well not be their primary allegiance.
Instead, Solntsevo became a true network, of smaller gangs, criminalised enterprises and individuals largely concerned with their own operations and whose interaction with the rest of the network may be minimal much of the time. Such networks can in a sense best be conceptualised as clubs: membership tends to be informal, bestowed through connections and the sponsorship of key individuals. Some of these individuals are the heads of more powerful brigady within the organisation, but others are simply rich, connected or charismatic enough to have authority. The links may be ongoing or occasional, strong or weak, tense or harmonious. They can easily be based on sentiment: while the Orekhovo gang is no more, there is still a perceptible core of criminals who used to work for Sergei Timofeyev and retain close connections, for old times’ sake as much as anything else. The fundamental point, though, is that for at least a decade it has been impossible to talk of Solntsevo, as an organisation, actually doing anything. There is no central control, no real discipline to do more than expel or punish those who break the informal rules of the network. Solntsevo has become so successful it has transcended criminal organisation.
Whatever else one may say, then, Russia has a rich, intricate criminal ecosystem. From street gangs and small-scale brigady up to transnational networks, its organised crime has expanded to fill voids and seize opportunities not just in Russia but along the chains of trade, investment, migration and even cultural communication that now lead across the globe. Further-more, it includes within it specialised subcultures, characterised by professional and ethnic roots, and it is to those that we next turn.