Preface
1. Notably Valery Chalidze, in his Criminal Russia: Essays on Crime in the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1977), but it was also buried within the memoirs of many survivors of the Gulag labour camps.
Introduction
1. The details came from a retired police officer who had served in the Leningrad police but did not experience this case first hand. The best guide to the tattoos of the Soviet underworld is Danzig Baldaev’s three-volume Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (London: Fuel, 2006–8).
2. See Kelly Barksby, ‘Constructing criminals: the creation of identity within criminal mafias’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Keele University, 2013.
3. Mark Galeotti, ‘Criminal histories: an introduction’, Global Crime 9, 1–2 (2008), p. 5.
4. Attributed to John Gotti, cited in New York Magazine, 7 November 1994, p. 54.
1. Kain’s Land
1. Conversation, Moscow, 1993. ‘Graf’ was a so-called brigadir, a gang boss’s local lieutenant.
2. Explored in great depth in Barend ter Haar’s Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads: Creating an Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2000).
3. See Peter Hill, The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 36–41.
4. Especially and gaudily evident in their extravagant tombstones and mausolea; see Olga Matich, ‘Mobster gravestones in 1990s Russia’, Global Crime 7, 1 (2006).
5. For accounts of this progression, see Joseph Serio and Viacheslav Razinkin, ‘Thieves professing the code: the traditional role of the vory v zakone in Russia’s criminal world and adaptations to a new social reality’, Low Intensity Conflict & Law Enforcement 4, 1 (1995); Alena Ledeneva, ‘Organized crime in Russia today’, Jamestown Foundation Prism 4, 8 (1998); Federico Varese, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Mark Galeotti, ‘The Russian “Mafiya”: consolidation and globalisation’, Global Crime 6, 1 (2004); Joseph Serio, Investigating the Russian Mafia (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2008).
6. Peter Gattrell, The Tsarist Economy, 1850–1917 (London: Batsford, 1986), p. 32.
7. V. I. Lenin, ‘On the question of national policy’ (1914), in Lenin: Collected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1972), p. 218.
8. W. H. Parker, An Historical Geography of Russia (London: University of London Press, 1968), p. 312.
9. Neil Weissman, ‘The regular police in tsarist Russia, 1900–1914’, Russian Review 44, 1 (1985) p. 51.
10. Renamed the Razboinyi prikaz, ‘Banditry Bureau’, in 1571; J. L. H. Keep, ‘Bandits and the law in Muscovy’, Slavonic & East European Review 35, 84 (1956).
11. Robert Abbott, ‘Police reform in the Russian province of Iaroslavl, 1856–1876’, Slavic Review 32, 2 (1973), p. 293.
12. Respectively the 1856 Pamyatnaya kniga politseiskikh zakonov dlya chinov gorodskoi politsii (Memorandum Book of Police Duties for Members of the City Police) and the companion volume for rural police, the 1857 Pamyatnaya kniga politseiskikh zakonov dlya zemskoi politsii.
13. Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Russia (London: Cassell, 1905), vol. 2, p. 14.
14. This is explored further in several contributions to Stephen Lovell, Alena Ledeneva and Andrei Rogachevskii (eds), Bribery and Blat in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), especially Vadim Volkov, ‘Patrimonialism versus rational bureaucracy’; Janet Hartley, ‘Bribery and justice in the provinces in the reign of Catherine II’; and Mark Galeotti, ‘ “Who’s the boss, us or the law?” The corrupt art of governing Russia’.
15. Valery Chalidze, Criminal Russia: Essays on Crime in the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 28.
16. David Christian, ‘Vodka and corruption in Russia on the eve of Emancipation’, Slavic Review 46, 3–4 (1987), p. 472.
17. Robert Abbott, ‘Police reform in Russia, 1858–1878’, PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1971, p. 26.
18. Robert Thurston, ‘Police and people in Moscow, 1906–1914’, Russian Review 39, 3 (1980), p. 334.
19. New York Times, 31 October 1909.
20. Vestnik politsii, 22 September 1910.
21. Ben Eklof and Stephen Frank (eds), The World of the Russian Peasant: Post-Emancipation Culture and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 147.
22. Alexander Pushkin, The Captain’s Daughter and Other Tales (originally 1836) (New York: Vintage, 2012), p. 107.
23. Cathy Frierson, All Russia Is Burning! A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), p. 100.
24. Daniel Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 196.
25. Cathy Frierson, ‘Crime and punishment in the Russian village: rural concepts of criminality at the end of the nineteenth century’, Slavic Review 46, 1 (1987).
26. Chalidze, Criminal Russia, p. 12.
27. Frierson, ‘Crime and punishment in the Russian village’, p. 65.
28. Christine Worobec, ‘Horse thieves and peasant justice in post-Emancipation Imperial Russia’, Journal of Social History 21, 2 (1987), p. 284.
29. V. V. Tenishev, Administrativnoe polozhenie russkogo krest’yanina (St Petersburg, 1908), pp. 54–5, quoted in Neil Weissman, ‘Rural crime in tsarist Russia: the question of hooliganism, 1905–1914’, Slavic Review 37, 2 (1978), p. 236.
30. Weissman, ‘Rural crime in tsarist Russia’, p. 233.
31. Stephen Frank, ‘Narratives within numbers: women, crime and judicial statistics in Imperial Russia, 1834–1913’, Russian Review 55, 4 (1996), p. 552.
32. George Yaney has developed this notion of a traditional Russian duality in laws between those of the state and those from below: see George Yaney, ‘Law, society and the domestic regime in Russia, in historical perspective’, American Political Science Review 59, 2 (1965).
33. Frierson, ‘Crime and punishment in the Russian village’, p. 60.
34. Ibid., p. 59.
35. Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia (New York: Anchor, [1843] 1989) pp. 124–5.
36. Vestnik politsii, no. 18 (1908), quoted in Weissman, ‘The regular police in tsarist Russia’, p. 51.
37. Weissman, ‘The regular police in tsarist Russia’, p. 47.
38. Istoricheskii ocherk obrazovaniya i razvitiya politseiskikh uchrezhdenii v Rossii, 1913, cited in ibid., p. 49.
39. Anton Blok, ‘Bandits and boundaries: robber bands and secret societies on the Dutch frontier (1730–1778)’, in Blok, Honour and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
40. Peter Laven, ‘Banditry and lawlessness on the Venetian Terraferma in the later Cinquecento’ in Trevor Dean and Kate Lowe (eds), Crime, Society, and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
41. He became the hero of a whole series of tales, especially those serialised in the Moskovskii listok newspaper; see James von Geldern and Louise McReynolds, Entertaining Tsarist Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 221–30.
42. Chalidze, Criminal Russia, p. 12.
43. Georgi Breitman, Prestupniy mir (Kiev, 1901), quoted in Stephen Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 128.
44. Worobec, ‘Horse thieves and peasant justice’, p. 283.
45. L Vesin, ‘Konokradstvo, ego organizatsiya i sposoby bor’by s nim nasleniya’, Trudy Imperatorskogo vol’nogo ekonomichestogo obshchestva 1, 3 (1885), cited in ibid., p. 283.
46. Vesin, ‘Konokradstvo, ego organizatsiya i sposoby bor’by s nim nasleniya’, cited in Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, p. 130.
47. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, p. 130.
48. Worobec, ‘Horse thieves and peasant justice’, p. 287.
49. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, pp. 276–8.
50. Eklof and Frank (eds), The World of the Russian Peasant, p. 145.
51. Worobec, ‘Horse thieves and peasant justice’, p. 283.
52. Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917– 1921 (London: Phoenix, 2001), pp. 340–6.
53. Andrei Konstantinov and Mal’kol’m Dikselius, Banditskaya Rossiya (St Petersburg: Bibliopolis, 1997), pp. 58–9. See also Aleksandr Sidorov, Zhigany, urkagany, blatari: podlinnaya istoriya vorovskogo bratstva, 1917–1940 (Moscow: Eksmo, 2005), and I. M. Matskevich, Mify prestupnogo mira: o zhizni i smerti izvestnykh prestupnikov proshlogo i nastoyashchego (Moscow: Prospekt, 2015), pp. 147–218.
54. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, pp. 352–3.
55. Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 178.
56. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 183.
2. Eating Khitrovka soup
1. W. Bruce Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow: The Russians before the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 128.
2. Vladimir Gilyarovskii, Moskva i moskvichi (Moscow: AST, 2005).
3. Roshanna Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), p. 39.
4. L. M. Vasilevskii, Detskaya ‘prestupnost’ i detskii sud (Tver: Oktyabr’, 1923) p. 38, quoted in Peter Juviler, Revolutionary Law and Order: Politics and Social Change in the USSR (London: Free Press, 1976), p. 8.
5. Evgenii Akel’ev, Povsednevnaya zhizn’ vorovskogo mira Moskvy vo vremena Van´ki Kaina (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2012).
6. Peter Gattrell, The Tsarist Economy, 1850–1917 (London: Batsford, 1986), p. 67.
7. Ibid., p. 50.
8. Nicolas Spulber, Russia’s Economic Transitions: From Late Tsarism to the New Millennium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 52
9. Gattrell, The Tsarist Economy, p. 67.
10. Robert Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), p. 84
11. Reginald Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St Petersburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), pp. 52–6.
12. Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow, p. 118.
13. The most compelling account of the miserable life led by the urban workers is the chapter ‘Life in the lower depths’ in Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow, pp. 103–34. A fictionalised but still effective study is Henri Troyat, Daily Life in Russia under the Last Tsar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961) – especially relevant are chapters 5, ‘Baths, traktirs and night shelters’ (pp. 51–62), and 7, ‘The workers’ (pp. 87–107).
14. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia, p. 250.
15. In Moscow in 1902, for example, there were only thirty-nine women aged 15–39 for every hundred men. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian, p. 56.
16. See Laurie Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters: Prostitutes and their Regulation in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 99–100.
17. Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) pp. 64–5, 229.
18. Fedor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer, [1866] 1982), pp. 14, 68.
19. Vsevolod Krestovskii, Peterburgskie trushchoby (1864), excerpted in James von Geldern and Louise McReynolds, Entertaining Tsarist Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 121–8.
20. Alexander Kuprin, Yama: The Pit (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, [1909] 2006), p. 21.
21. Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths (Mineola, NY: Dover, [1902] 2000).
22. James von Geldern, ‘Life in-between: migration and popular culture in late Imperial Russia’, Russian Review 55, 3 (1996) p. 369.
23. Rachel Rubin, Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 21.
24. Something which even some police officers admitted: see R. S. Mulukaev, Obshcheugolovnaya politsiya dorevolutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), p. 25.
25. Daniel Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 197.
26. Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow, p. 126.
27. Peterburgskii listok, 7 July 1906, quoted in Joan Neuberger, ‘Stories of the street: hooliganism in the St Petersburg popular press’, Slavic Review 48, 2 (1989), p. 190.
28. Aleksei Svirskii, Peterburgskie khuligany (1914), p. 260, quoted in Neuberger, Hooliganism, p. 247.
29. Fredric Zuckerman, The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880–1917 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 105; Iain Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek: The Tsarist Secret Police in St Petersburg, 1906–1914 (Helsinki: SKS-FLS, 2002), p. 303.
30. Robert Thurston, ‘Police and people in Moscow, 1906–1914’, Russian Review 39, 3 (1980), p. 335.
31. The ‘strengthened guard’ (usilennaya okhrana) provisions granted officials the right to ban public gatherings, close businesses, impose various administrative penalties and have cases transferred from civilian to military courts. The tougher ‘extraordinary guard’ (chrezvychainaya okhrana) provisions also included the establishment of special military units to help the police maintain public order.
32. Theofanis Stavrou (ed.), Russia under the Last Czar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), pp. 97–8.
33. Best discussed in Neuberger, Hooliganism. For a definition of the boulevard press, see in particular pp. 15–22. For a useful digest, see her ‘Stories of the street’.
34. George Dobson, Russia (London: A. & C. Black, 1913), p. 143.
35. Vestnik politsii, 31 August 1909.
36. Thurston, ‘Police and people in Moscow’, pp. 334, 325.
37. Neil Weissman, ‘The regular police in tsarist Russia, 1900–1914’, Russian Review 44, 1 (1985), p. 47.
38. Ibid., p. 48.
39. Ibid., p. 48.
40. Thurston, ‘Police and people in Moscow’, p. 326.
41. Vestnik politsii, 4 February 1910.
42. Vladimir Gilyarovskii, Moscow and Muscovites (Montpelier, VT: Russian Information Services, 2013), p. 39.
43. Brower, The Russian City, pp. 141–2.
44. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa, p. 40.
45. Odesskie novosti, 19 August 1917, quoted in Boris Briker, ‘The underworld of Benia Krik and I. Babel’s Odessa Stories’, Canadian Slavonic Papers 36, 1–2 (1994), p. 119.
46. This is especially explored in Valery Chalidze, Criminal Russia: Essays on Crime in the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 37–44; and Yakov Gilinskiy and Yakov Kostjukovsky, ‘From thievish artel to criminal corporation: the history of organised crime in Russia’, in Cyrille Fijnaut and Letizia Paoli (eds), Organised Crime in Europe: Concepts, Patterns and Control Policies in the European Union and Beyond (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004).
47. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian, pp. 91–2.
48. See Hiroaki Kuromiya, ‘Workers artels and Soviet production methods’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick et al. (eds), Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)
49. Andrei Konstantinov and Mal’kol’m Dikselius, Prestupnyi mir Rossii (St Petersburg: Bibliopolis, 1995), p. 27.
50. D. A. Dril, ‘O merakh bor’by s prestupnost’yu nesovershennoletnikh’, in Trudy sed’mogo s”ezda predstavitelei russkikh ispravitel’nykh zavedenii dlya maloletnikh, okt. 1908 goda (Moscow, 1909), p. 18, quoted in Neuberger, Hooliganism, p. 182.
51. V. P. Semenov, Bytovye usloviya zhizni mal’chikov (St Petersburg, n.d.) p. 6, quoted in Neuberger, Hooliganism, p. 179.
52. Neuberger, Hooliganism, pp. 171–2.
53. Ibid., p. 190.
54. Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow, pp. 126–7.
55. Isaac Babel, ‘The King’, in Babel, Collected Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 181.
56. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa, p. 55.
57. Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow, p. 127.
58. Neuberger, Hooliganism, pp. 241–2.
59. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa, p. 32.
60. Conversation, Moscow, 1989.
61. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia, p. 21. Daniel Brower makes the point that in the closing decades of tsarism peasant workers were less likely to move as an artel, but even so, the institution has deep social roots, and would indeed re-emerge within the Soviet system as both part of and also a rival to the ‘brigade’ structure. Brower, The Russian City, p. 144; Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 89.
62. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa, p. 58.
63. Maximilien de Santerre, Sovetskie poslevoennye kontslageri i ikh obitateli (Munich: IPI SSSR, 1960), p. 55.
64. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa, p. 24.
65. Ibid., p. 56.
66. Brower, The Russian City, pp. 178–80.
67. For Mishka Yaponchik’s career, see Oleg Kapchinskii, Mishka Yaponchik i drugie: kriminal i vlast’ v gody Grazhdanskoi voiny v Odesse (Moscow: Kraft+, 2015); Fedor Razzakov, Bandity vremen sotsializma: khronika ros. prestupnosti, 1917–1991 (Moscow: Eksmo, 1996), pp. 63–4.
3. The birth of the vory
1. Kirill Ashotov, ‘Korsar Koba’, Versiya, 18 January 2016.
2. David Shub, ‘Kamo: the legendary Old Bolshevik of the Caucasus’, Russian Review 19, 3 (1960).
3. Conversation, Kiev, 1991.
4. Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Golden Calf (1931).
5. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 400.
6. Mark Galeotti, ‘Private security and public insecurity: outsourced vigilantism in modern Russia’, in David Pratten and Atreyee Sen (eds), Global Vigilantes (London: Hurst, 2007), pp. 267–89.
7. Robert Daniels, Russia: The Roots of Confrontation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 111.
8. Quoted in Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009), p. 27.
9. Joseph Douillet, Moscow Unmasked (London: Pilot Press, 1930), pp. 163–5.
10. Oleg Kapchinskii, Mishka Yaponchik i drugie: kriminal i vlast’ v gody Grazhdanskoi voiny v Odesse (Moscow: Kraft+, 2015), pp. 88–255; Fedor Razzakov, Bandity vremen sotsializma: khronika ros. prestupnosti, 1917–1991 (Moscow: Eksmo, 1996), p. 64.
11. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1958–65), vol. 26, p. 372, quoted in Steven Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 250.
12. Quoted in International Herald Tribune, 15 April 1994.
13. Quoted in Peter Juviler, Revolutionary Law and Order: Politics and Social Change in the USSR (London: Free Press, 1976), p. 15.
14. Ibid., p. 19.
15. Svobodnaya pressa, 27 June 2015; Vechernaya Moskva, 7 December 2016.
16. Petrovka–38, 11 August 2015.
17. Moskovskaya Pravda, 27 July 2012.
18. Margaret Stolee, ‘Homeless children in the USSR, 1917–1957’, Soviet Studies 40, 1 (1988); Alan Ball, ‘The roots of besprizornost’ in Soviet Russia’s first decade’, Slavic Review 51, 2 (1992).
19. Alan Ball, And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 70–6.
20. Douillet, Moscow Unmasked, pp. 118–19.
21. Ball, And Now My Soul Is Hardened, p. 83.
22. Douillet, Moscow Unmasked, p. 124.
23. Conversation, Moscow, 2005.
24. Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police, p. 37.
25. Razzakov, Bandity vremen sotsializma, pp. 13–16.
26. Ibid., pp. 10–11.
27. Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police, p. 41.
28. V. P. Khaustov et al. (eds), Lubyanka: Stalin i VChK-GPU-OGPU-NKVD, yanvar’ 1922–dekabr’ 1936 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2003), p. 113.
29. Pavel Stuchka (ed.), Entsiklopediya gosudarstva i prava (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo kommunisticheskoi partii, 1927), vol. 3, p. 1594.
30. Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police, p. 118.
31. Jacques Rossi, The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labor Camps (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 200.
32. For a magisterial analysis of this system, see Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003).
33. Ibid., p. 581.
34. Wilson Bell, ‘Was the Gulag an archipelago? De-convoyed prisoners and porous borders in the camps of western Siberia’, Russian Review 72, 1 (2013).
35. Quoted in ibid., p. 117.
36. Roger Brunet, ‘Geography of the Gulag archipelago’, Espace géographique, special issue (1993), p. 230.
37. Sarah Young, ‘Knowing Russia’s convicts: the other in narratives of imprisonment and exile of the late imperial era’, Europe-Asia Studies 65, 9 (2013).
38. Svetlana Stephenson, Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness, and Social Displacement in Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 76–83.
39. Conversation, Moscow, 2005.
40. Quoted in Mark Vincent, ‘Cult of the “urka”: criminal subculture in the Gulag, 1924–1953’, PhD dissertation, University of East Anglia, 2015, p. 76.
41. Aleksandr Gurov, Professional’naya prestupnost’: proshloe i sovremennost’ (Moscow: Yuridicheskaya literatura, 1990), p. 108.
42. Alexander Dolgun, Alexander Dolgun’s Story: An American in the Gulag (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 140.
43. Alexander Gorbatov, Years of my Life: Memoirs of a General of the Soviet Army (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), pp. 140–1.
44. Michael Solomon, Magadan (Princeton: Vertex, 1971), pp. 134–5.
45. Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 411; Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 12.
46. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, p. 400.
47. Dimitri Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin (London: Hutchinson, 1976), p. 85.
4. Thieves and bitches
1. The best source of these songs appears to be Maikl Dzhekobson and Lidiya Dzhekobson, Pesennyi fol’klor GULAGa kak istoricheskii istochnik, 2 vols (Moscow: Sovremennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1998–2001), and I have drawn from references in Mark Vincent, ‘Cult of the “urka”: criminal subculture in the Gulag, 1924–1953’, PhD dissertation, University of East Anglia, 2015.
2. Michael Solomon, Magadan (Princeton: Vertex, 1971), pp. 185–6.
3. Quoted in Yuri Glazov, ‘ “Thieves” in the USSR as a social phenomenon’, in The Russian Mind since Stalin’s Death (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1985), pp. 37–8.
4. Gustav Herling, A World Apart (London: William Heinemann, 1951), p. 65.
5. Solomon, Magadan, p. 127.
6. Galina Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet totalitarian system (Abingdon: Routledge, [2000] 2015), p. 169.
7. Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977), p. 234.
8. Wilson Bell, ‘Was the Gulag an archipelago? De-convoyed prisoners and porous borders in the camps of western Siberia’, Russian Review 72, 1 (2013), pp. 135–6.
9. Sergei Dovlatov, The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard’s Story (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011), p. 58. Dovlatov was a prison guard in the 1960s and his book, originally published in 1982, while fictional, draws heavily on those experiences.
10. Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, p. 222.
11. Dzhekobson and Dzhekobson, Pesennyi fol’klor GULAGa, quoted in Vincent, ‘Cult of the “urka” ’, p. 66.
12. Varlam Shalamov, Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1998), p. 63.
13. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 446.
14. Dimitri Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin (London: Hutchinson, 1976), pp. 150–1.
15. Edwin Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 93.
16. Vladimir Kuts, Poedinok s sud’boi (Moscow: RIO Uprpoligrafizdata, 1999), quoted in Applebaum, Gulag, p. 466.
17. Joseph Scholmer, Vorkuta (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954), p. 22.
18. Applebaum, Gulag, p. 302.
19. Conversation, Moscow, 2009.
20. Scholmer, Vorkuta, p, 204.
21. Shalamov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2, pp. 60–1.
22. Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov, Ruk tvoikh zhar (Tel Aviv: Krug, 1979), p. 276.
23. Quoted in Applebaum, Gulag, p. 470.
24. See ibid., chapters 22–4; Steven Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), chapter 5.
25. Valerii Abramkin and Valentina Chesnokova, Ugolovnaya Rossiya: tyurmi i lagerya (Moscow: TsSRUP, 2001), pp. 10–11.
26. Maximilien de Santerre, Sovetskie poslevoennye kontslageri i ikh obitateli (Munich: IPI SSSR, 1960), pp. 59–60.
27. Golfo Alexopoulos, ‘A torture memo: reading violence in the Gulag’, in Golfo Alexopoulos et al. (eds), Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 166.
28. Barnes, Death and Redemption, p. 180.
29. Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism, p. 122; Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 239.
30. Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, p. 239.
31. Ibid., p. 240.
32. Quoted in Applebaum, Gulag, p. 476.
33. Ibid., pp. 478–9.
34. Andrea Graziosi, ‘The great strikes of 1953 in Soviet labor camps in the accounts of their participants: a review’, Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 33, 4 (1992).
35. Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 109.
5. Thief life
1. Conversation, Moscow, 2005.
2. Andrei Konstantinov and Mal’kol’m Dikselius, Prestupnyi mir Rossii (St Petersburg: Bibliopolis, 1995), p. 6.
3. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 283–4.
4. For the best English-language discussion of these rituals, see Federico Varese, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 147–52; Federico Varese, Mafia Life: Love, Death and Money at the Heart of Organised Crime (London: Profile, 2017), pp. 17–22.
5. Varlam Shalamov refers to kombedy in the same context, a Bolshevik contraction for their Committees of Poor Peasants, an emergency measure introduced in 1918 and used to requisition and distribute food, and consolidate Soviet power in the countryside. The term could as easily have been used ironically as not. Shalamov, Kolyma Tales (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 200.
6. Quoted in Herman Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature, 1917–1991 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), p. 56.
7. Anne Applebaum concludes that ‘there are enough similar sources, told by a wide enough range of prisoners, from camps from the early 1930s to the late 1940s, to be certain that they did take place’. Appelbaum, Gulag, pp. 398–9.
8. David Robson, ‘Are there really 50 Eskimo words for snow?’, New Scientist, no. 2896 (2012).
9. Viktor Berdinskikh, Vyatlag, quoted in Applebaum, Gulag, p. 286.
10. There are several good dictionaries of prison and criminal slang, including Aleksandr Sidorov, Slovar’ sovremennogo blatnogo i lagernogo zhargona (Rostov-on-Don: Germes, 1992); and Yurii Dubyagin and A. G. Bronnikov, Tolkovyi slovar’ ugolovnykh zhargonov (Moscow: Inter-OMNIS, 1991). Yurii Dubyagin and E. A. Teplitskii, Kratkii anglo-russkii i russko-angliiskii slovar’ ugolovnogo zhargona / Concise English-Russian and Russian-English Dictionary of the Underworld (Moscow: Terra, 1993) is especially useful.
11. Victor Herman, Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 193.
12. Zhigany comes from zhiganut’, ‘to lash’, a term used in the tsarist-era penal colonies for the most pathetic and destitute convicts. Vlas Doroshevich, Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East (London: Anthem Press, 2011), pp. 191–4; Andrew Gentes, Exile to Siberia, 1590–1822 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 176.
13. Caroline Humphrey, ‘Dangerous words: taboos, evasions, and silence in Soviet Russia’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture, no. 2 (2005), p. 389.
14. Serguei Cheloukhine, ‘The roots of Russian organized crime: from old-fashioned professionals to the organized criminal groups of today’, Crime, Law and Social Change 50, 4–5 (2008), p. 356.
15. Cited in Humphrey, ‘Dangerous words’, pp. 376–7.
16. In 1839, I. I. Sreznevskii produced the crucial Ofensko-russki i russko-ofenskii slovar’ (‘Ofenya-Russian and Russian-Ofenya Dictionary’). M. N. Priemysheva, ‘I. I. Sreznevskii ob ofenskom yazyke’, Acta Linguistica Petropolitana 3, 3 (2007), pp. 335–61.
17. Valery Chalidze, Criminal Russia: Essays on Crime in the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 57; Leonid Finkelstein, ‘The Russian lexicon, 2001’, Jamestown Foundation Prism 7, 3 (2001).
18. Such as German/Swiss Rotwelsch and the French vagrants’ and thieves’ cant identified from the register of Paris’s Châtelet prison.
19. It is hard to be certain, but it seems likely that this particular usage only emerged in the late 1920s (that certainly appears the earliest that it is recorded by police accounts).
20. James Davie, ‘Missing presumed dead? – the baikovyi iazyk of the St Petersburg mazuriki and other pre-Soviet argots’, Slavonica 4, 1 (1997).
21. Ibid., p. 34.
22. Peter Juviler, Revolutionary Law and Order: Politics and Social Change in the USSR (London: Free Press, 1976), pp. 35, 56.
23. For good studies of this, see Steven Smith, ‘The social meanings of swearing: workers and bad language in late imperial and early Soviet Russia’, Past and Present, no. 160 (1998); Manuela Kovalev, ‘The function of Russian obscene language in late Soviet and post-Soviet prose’, PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 2014.
24. Paweł Mączewski, ‘The visual encyclopedia of Russian jail tattoos’, Vice, 15 October 2014, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/9bzvbp/russian-criminal-tattoo-fuel-damon-murray-interview–876 (accessed 6 October 2017).
25. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper & Row, 1974–8), vol. 2, p. 441.
26. Alix Lambert, Russian Prison Tattoos: Codes of Authority, Domination, and Struggle (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2003), p. 19.
27. See for example Danzig Baldaev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (London: FUEL, 2006–8); Lambert, Russian Prison Tattoos. It is, however, necessary to add one warning note, as much of the general discussion of tattoos depends heavily on Baldaev’s illustrations, which are sometimes contradictory and hard to confirm.
28. Baldaev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia, vol. 3, pp. 33–5.
29. Thomas Sgovio, Dear America! Why I turned against Communism (Kenmore, NY: Partners’ Press, 1979), pp. 166–9.
30. Mihajlo Mihajlov, ‘Moscow Summer’ (1966), quoted in Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 120.
31. Federico Varese, ‘The society of the vory-v-zakone, 1930s–1950s’, Cahiers du monde russe 39, 4 (1998), p. 523.
32. Varese, The Russian Mafia, pp. 147–50.
33. Quoted in ibid., p. 150.
34. For some useful ruminations on Russian gangster nicknames, see ibid., pp. 192–201.
35. Nanci Condee, ‘Body graphics: tattooing the fall of communism’, in Adele Marie Barker (ed.), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex and Society since Gorbachev (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 350.
36. Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 316.
37. Conversation, Moscow, 1990.
38. Applebaum, Gulag, p. 288
39. Doroshevich, Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East, p. 292. He uses the word zhigany, but from context clearly means blatnye.
40. Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, p. 7; Michael Solomon, Magadan (Princeton: Vertex, 1971), p. 134.
41. Maximilien de Santerre, Sovetskie poslevoennye kontslageri i ikh obitateli (Munich: IPI SSSR, 1960), p. 63.
42. Applebaum, Gulag, p. 287.
43. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, p. 121.
44. Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, p. 427.
45. Applebaum, Gulag, pp. 307–17; Steven Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 99–105.
46. Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, p. 415.
47. Ibid., pp. 427–9.
48. Chalidze, Criminal Russia, p. 52.
49. Gustav Herling, A World Apart (London: William Heinemann, 1951), p. 31.
50. Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), pp. 353–4.
51. Chalidze, Criminal Russia, p. 59.
52. See for example the female tattoos in Dubyagin and Teplitskii, Kratkii anglo-russkii i russko-angliiskii slovar’, pp. 266–77.
6. The unholy trinities
1. Fedor Razzakov, Bandity semidesyatykh, 1970–1979 (Moscow: Eksmo, 2008), p. 30; Zdenek Šámal, Ruské Mafie (Prague: Ivo Železný, 2000), pp. 23–4; Segodnya, 18 October 1994.
2. Razzakov, Bandity semidesyatykh, p. 480.
3. Quoted in Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 125. Quite what a ‘thieves’ tone of voice’ might have been was sadly left unexplained.
4. Lydia Rosner, The Soviet Way of Crime: Beating the System in the Soviet Union and the USA (Boston: Praeger, 1986), p. 29.
5. Yuli Daniel, This is Moscow Speaking (London: Collins Harvill, 1968), pp. 77–8.
6. Their ground-breaking chronicler was Yurii Shchekochikhin, notably in ‘Predislovie k razgovoru’, Literaturnaya gazeta, 6 June 1984; Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya 1/1997; and Allo, my vas slyshim: iz khroniki nashego vremeni (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1987).
7. Conversation, Moscow, 1991.
8. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, p. 112.
9. Conversation, Moscow, 1990.
10. Quoted in Jeffrey Hardy, ‘ “The camp is not a resort”: the campaign against privileges in the Soviet Gulag, 1957–61’, Kritika 13, 1 (2012), fn. 37.
11. David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 183.
12. Yuri Brokhin, Hustling on Gorky Street: Sex and Crime in Russia Today (New York: Dial Press, 1975), p. 111.
13. Fedor Razzakov, Bandity vremen sotsializma (Moscow: Eksmo, 1996), p. 68.
14. Conversation, Moscow, 1990.
15. Ogonek 29/1988, p. 20.
16. Best explored by Svetlana Stephenson, in her Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015) and her earlier ‘The Kazan Leviathan: Russian street gangs as agents of social order’, Sociological Review 59, 2 (2011).
17. Razzakov, Bandity vremen sotsializma, p. 93.
18. Stephenson, Gangs of Russia, pp. 23–32. See also Lyubov’ Ageeva, Kazanskii fenomen: mif i real’nost’ (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1991).
19. This is the exchange not of goods or services so much as obligations, often traded for future considerations, best explored by Alena Ledeneva in her Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
20. James Millar, ‘The Little Deal: Brezhnev’s contribution to acquisitive socialism’, Slavic Review 44, 4 (1985).
21. Reproduced in James Heinzen, The Art of the Bribe: Corruption under Stalin, 1943–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 148.
22. Ibid., p. 37.
23. The tolkach’s role was best explored by Joseph Berliner, in his Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957) and ‘The informal organization of the Soviet firm’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 66, 3 (1952).
24. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) p. 69
25. Quoted in William Clark, Crime and Punishment in Soviet Officialdom: Combating Corruption in the Political Elite, 1965–1990 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharp, 1993), p. 190.
26. Fedor Burlatskii, ‘ “Mirnyi zagovor” protiv N. S. Khrushcheva’, in Yurii Aksyutin (ed.), N. S. Khrushchev: materialy k biografii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1988), p. 211.
27. For the best description of Rokotov’s career, see Brokhin, Hustling on Gorky Street.
28. Sotsialisticheskaya industriya, 9 and 10 April 1981; Trud, 9 April 1981.
29. CIA, Military Compensation in the Soviet Union (1980), p. 11.
30. William Clark, Crime and Punishment in Soviet Officialdom, pp. 153–7; Fedor Razzakov, Bandity vremen sotsializma, pp. 49–50.
31. Conversation, Moscow, 1990.
32. Literaturnaya gazeta, 20 July 1988; Razzakov, Bandity semidesyatykh.
33. Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 62.
7. Gorbachev’s gangsters
1. Fedor Razzakov, Bandity vremen sotisalizma (Moscow: Eksmo, 1996), pp. 64–5.
2. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian text (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, [1953] 2012), p. 97.
3. Sandra Anderson and Valerie Hibbs, ‘Alcoholism in the Soviet Union’, International Social Work 35, 4 (1992), p. 441.
4. N. N. Ivanets and M. I. Lukomskaya, ‘The USSR’s new alcohol policy’, World Health Forum 11 (1990), pp. 250–1.
5. Arkady Vaksberg, The Soviet Mafia (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991), p. 234.
6. Conversation, Moscow, 1990.
7. Well illustrated in Caroline Humphrey, ‘ “Icebergs”, barter, and the mafia in provincial Russia’, Anthropology Today 7, 2 (1991).
8. Federico Varese, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
9. V. Semenov, ‘Krutye parni’, Ekonomika i zhizn’, January 1991, p. 180.
10. Anthony Jones and William Moskoff, Ko-ops: The Rebirth of Entrepreneurship in the Soviet Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 80.
11. Valerii Karyshev, Zapiski banditskogo advokata (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 1998), p. 31.
12. Krasnaya zvezda, 4 October 1989.
13. Ogonek 29/1988.
14. Varese, The Russian Mafia, pp. 127–8.
15. Nikolai Modestov, Moskva banditskaya: dokumenty khronika kriminal’nogo bespredela 80–90-kh gg. (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 1996), pp. 103–5.
16. Pravda, 4 April 1987 (this individual, incidentally, went on to become a police commando).
17. Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Vadim Volkov, Silovoe predprinimatel’stvo, XXI vek (St Petersburg: European University of St Petersburg, 2012).
18. Andrei Konstantinov, Banditskii Peterburg (St Petersburg: Folio-Press, 1997), pp. 140–6.
19. Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs, p. 10.
20. Dmitrii Gromov, ‘Lyuberetskie ulichnye molodezhnye kompanii 1980-kh godov: subkul’tura na pereput’e istorii’, Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 4/2006. See also Svetlana Stephenson, ‘The violent practices of youth territorial groups in Moscow’, Europe-Asia Studies 64, 1 (2012); Hilary Pilkington, Russia’s Youth and its Culture: A Nation’s Constructors and Constructed (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 141–50.
21. Vladimir Yakovlev, ‘Kontora “Liuberov” ’, Ogonek, May 1987.
22. Mark Galeotti, Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Last War (London: Frank Cass, 1995), pp. 45–102.
23. Personal communication, 1990.
24. Pobratim (SVA newspaper), no. 10 (1991).
25. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 29 April 1989.
26. Krasnaya zvezda, 4 October 1989.
27. Conversation, Kiev, 1991.
28. Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
29. Kruchina left a suicide note, expressing fear for the future, but many still question whether he truly took his own life, considering how convenient his death was for so many people.
30. Rossiiskie militseiskie vedomosti, September 1993, October 1993.
31. Literaturnaya gazeta, 20 July 1988.
32. Stephen Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), pp. 18–20.
8. The ‘Wild Nineties’ and the rise of the avtoritety
1. Vyacheslav Razinkin and Aleksei Tarabrin, Elita prestupnogo mira: tsvetnaya mast’ (Moscow: Veche, 1997), p. 17.
2. New York Times, 14 April 1994.
3. Federico Varese, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 184.
4. Ibid., p. 181; Moscow Times, 25 April 2012; Alexander Kan, ‘Profile: Iosif Kobzon: Russian crooner and MP’, BBC News, 17 February 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe–31497039 (accessed 3 January 2018).
5. Valeriya Bashkirova et al., Geroi 90-kh: lyudi i den’gi – noveishaya istoriya kapitalizma v Rossii (Moscow: Kommersant/ANF, 2012), p. 254.
6. Conversation, Moscow, 2005.
7. Kommersant, 30 September 2008.
8. Associated Press, 7 June 1994.
9. Ibid.
10. William Cooper, ‘Russia’s economic performance and policies and their implications for the United States’, Library of Congress Congressional Research Service, June 2009, p. 2.
11. Kommersant, 2 June 1995.
12. Conversation, Cambridge, 1997.
13. Tobias Holzlehner, ‘ “The harder the rain, the tighter the roof”: evolution of organized crime networks in the Russian Far East’, Sibirica 6, 2 (2007), p. 56.
14. Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 27.
15. Varese, The Russian Mafia, p. 4 (emphasis in the original).
16. Petr Skoblikov, Vzyskanie dolgov i kriminal (Moscow: Yurist, 1999), pp. 76–81.
17. Carl Schreck, ‘Blood sport: the rise of Russia’s gangster athletes’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 8 May 2016.
18. Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs, p. 51.
19. Svetlana Stephenson, Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), chapter 7, especially pp. 172–9.
20. Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs, p. 71.
21. Conversation, Moscow, 1993.
22. Varese, The Russian Mafia, pp. 102–20.
23. Nancy Ries, ‘ “Honest bandits” and “warped people”: Russian narratives about money, corruption, and moral decay’, in Carol Greenhouse et al. (eds), Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 279.
24. Conversation, Moscow, 2011.
25. Fortune 141, 12 (2000), p. 194.
26. This is lengthily explored in Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, especially chapter 3. These allegations, while never proved, have been widely made and discussed both in Russia and abroad. Putin and his spokespeople have rejected these claims, but they have not been challenged in court. For a representative sample, see: ‘Ot Tambovskoi OPG do massazhista Putina’, Dozhd-TV, 6 September 2017; ‘Russia: Putin’s Past Becoming a Hot Internet Topic in Moscow’, EurasiaNet, 6 January 2016; ‘Vladimir Putin linked to shady property deals’, The Australian, 31 August 2015; ‘“Putin involved in drug smuggling ring” says ex-KGB officer’, Newsweek, 13 March 2015; ‘Malen’kaya prachechnaya prem’er-klassa’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 10 April 2011; Jurgen Roth, Die Gangster aus dem Osten (Munich: Europe-Verlag, 2004); ‘Gryaznaya zona Evropy’, Sovershenno sekretno, 1 July 2000; ‘Le nom de M. Poutine apparaît en marge des affaires de blanchiment au Liechtenstein’, Le Monde, 26 May 2000. The court papers for the major Spanish case launched against members of Tambovskaya and associated gangs in 2015 several times mention both Putin specifically and also those close to him as patrons of people within Tambovskaya. Indeed, the US National Security Agency specifically sought to tap the telephone of Tambovskaya leader Barsukov/Kumarin to investigate whether he was in touch with Putin after the latter’s rise to the presidency; see The Intercept, 16 May 2016.
27. Guardian, ‘Kremlin accuses foreign parties of Putin smear campaign before elections’, 28 March 2016, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/28/kremlin-foreign-putin-smear-campaign-election (accessed 25 January 2018).
28. Dawisha, pp. 128–41.
29. Conversation, Moscow, 2010.
30. Conversation, Moscow, 2016.
31. For more on Sogoyan, see ‘Court sentences alleged member of Russian criminal group to 22 years’, ČTK, 28 February 2013.
9. Gangs, networks and brotherhoods
1. Moscow Times, 4 June 2003.
2. Andrei Konstantinov, Banditskii Peterburg, rev. ed. (St Petersburg: Amfora, 2009).
3. Joseph Serio is especially acute on the ridiculous variation in numbers and the general problems with statistics in his Investigating the Russian Mafia (Durham, NC: Carolina University Press, 2008), chapter 4.
4. An interesting carry-over from Gulag days, when brigady were work details, under an appointed or elected brigadir.
5. Valerii Karyshev, Zapiski banditskogo advokata (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 1998), p. 254.
6. See Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
7. UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Results of a Pilot Survey of Forty Selected Organized Criminal Groups in Sixteen Countries (Vienna: United Nations, 2002), p. 34.
8. Vechernyi Ekaterinburg, 29 May 1993, quoted in Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 118.
9. This section draws on my article ‘Behind the scenes: Uralmash gang retreats into the shadows’, Jane’s Intelligence Review 21, 9 (2009), used with permission. See also Andrei Konstantinov and Mal’kol’m Dikselius, Banditskaya Rossiya (St Petersburg: Bibliopolis, 1997), pp. 311–18; Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs, pp. 116–22.
10. RIA Novosti, 7 February 2006.
11. Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs, p. 118.
12. James Finckenauer and Yuri Voronin, The Threat of Russian Organized Crime (Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, 2001), p. 15.
13. Quoted in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 25 October 2001.
14. Simon Karlinsky (ed.), Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1973] 1997), p. 173.
15. Tobias Holzlehner, ‘ “The harder the rain, the tighter the roof”: evolution of organized crime networks in the Russian Far East’, Sibirica 6, 2 (2007).
16. V. A. Nomokonov and V. I. Shulga, ‘Murder for hire as a manifestation of organized crime’, Demokratizatsiya 6, 4 (1998).
17. Vladimir Ovchinsky, ‘The 21st century mafia: made in China’, Russia in Global Affairs, January 2007; Eric Hyer, ‘Dreams and nightmares: Chinese trade and immigration in the Russian Far East’, Journal of East Asian Affairs 10, 2 (1996).
18. UN Office on Drugs and Crime, The Global Afghan Opium Trade: A Threat Assessment (Vienna: United Nations, 2011).
19. Daniela Kleinschmit et al. (eds), Illegal Logging and Related Timber Trade: Dimensions, Drivers, Impacts and Responses (Vienna: International Union of Forest Research Organizations, 2016), p. 49; see also Tanya Wyatt, ‘The Russian Far East’s illegal timber trade: an organized crime?’ Crime, Law and Social Change 61, 1 (2014).
20. Bertil Lintner, ‘Chinese organised crime’, Global Crime 6, 1 (2004), p. 93.
21. He already had a criminal record by the time of his election, when he was widely known by his nickname. Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 18 August 2004. He was later arrested, charged and convicted of abuse of his office in 2007. Izvestiya, 25 December 2007.
22. Russia Beyond the Headlines, 13 September 2013.
23. It was 25 per cent in 2009, according to UN Office on Drugs and Crime, The Global Afghan Opium Trade, p. 20.
24. UN Office on Drugs and Crime, The Global Afghan Opium Trade, p. 46.
25. Ibid., p. 45.
26. RIA Novosti, 17 September 2013.
27. RIA Novosti, 12 March 2013; Interfax, 11 July 2013.
28. UN Office on Drugs and Crime, The Global Afghan Opium Trade.
29. This is drawn from operational materials shared with me by law enforcement agencies; some details have been changed as this is at the time of writing an ongoing investigation.
30. Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs, p. 115.
31. See Andrei Konstantinov, Banditskii Peterburg (St Petersburg: Folio-Press, 1997); Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs, pp. 108–16.
32. Konstantinov, Banditskii Peterburg, pp. 364–6.
33. Conversation, Cambridge, 1997.
34. This is a key claim in Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, pp. 141–5.
35. Interfax, 8 August 2001.
36. Boston Globe, 6 December 1998.
37. Leningradskaya Pravda, 23 May 2003; Izvestiya, 3 March 2009; Novaya gazeta, 1 November 2009.
38. New York Times, 14 May 2009.
39. The smaller Malyshevskaya group has largely been integrated into the Tambovskaya, especially outside Russia.
40. Conversation, The Hague, 2013.
41. United States Government Interagency Working Group, International Crime Threat Assessment (2000), p. 74.
42. This section draws on my article ‘Empire of the sun: Russian organised crime’s global network’, Jane’s Intelligence Review 20, 6 (2008), used with permission. See also Valerii Karyshev, Solntsevskaya bratva: istoriya gruppirovki (Moscow: EKSMO-Press, 1998); Konstantinov, Banditskaya Rossiya, pp. 73–168.
43. Moskovskie novosti, 26 November 1995.
44. From operational materials shared with me, 2006.
10. The Chechen
1. Conversation, Moscow, 2009.
2. Conversation, Moscow, 2009.
3. Conversation, Moscow, 2012. The actual word he used was ‘blacks’, a disparaging Russian slang term for people from the Caucasus.
4. Georgi Glonti and Givi Lobjanidze, Professional’naya prestupnost’ v Gruzii: vory-v-zakone (Tbilisi: TraCCC, 2004), p. 34.
5. Dina Siegel and Henk van de Bunt (eds), Traditional Organized Crime in the Modern World: Responses to Socioeconomic Change (New York: Springer, 2012), pp. 35, 39.
6. Izvestiya, 27 January 1994.
7. Federico Varese, ‘Is Sicily the future of Russia? Private protection and the rise of the Russian Mafia’, European Journal of Sociology 35, 2 (1994).
8. This section draws on my article ‘Blood brotherhood: Chechen organised crime’, Jane’s Intelligence Review 20, 9 (2008), used with permission.
9. For excellent studies of the abreg tradition, see Bruce Grant, The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Rebecca Gould, ‘Transgressive sanctity: the abrek in Chechen culture’, Kritika 8, 2 (2007). For Russian studies, see Yurii Botyakov, Abreki na Kavkaze: sotsiokul’turnyi aspekt yavleniya (St Petersburg: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 2004); V. O. Bobrovnikov, Musul’mane Severnogo Kavkaza: obichai, pravo, nasilie (Moscow: Vostochnaya literatura, 2002).
10. Suzanne Goldenberg, The Pride of Small Nations: The Caucasus and Post-Soviet Disorder (London: Zed, 1994), p. 2.
11. Gould, ‘Transgressive sanctity’, p. 275.
12. Memoirs of Baron Tornau, quoted in John Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), p. 266.
13. Aude Merlin and Silvia Serrano (eds), Ordres et désordres au Caucase (Brussels: Editions universitaires de Bruxelles, 2010), pp. 134–5.
14. Sebastian Smith, Allah’s Mountains: Politics and War in the Russian Caucasus, rev. edn (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 133.
15. In the first half of 2011, for example, there were 1.9 reported crimes per thousand residents, but where crimes did take place they were more likely to be serious ones: almost 40 per cent were classified as serious, compared with national averages in recent years of 25–30 per cent. RIA Novosti, 18 August 2011.
16. Pravda.ru, 9 May 2004.
17. ITAR-Tass news agency, 7 October 1996.
18. Jeff Myers, The Criminal–Terror Nexus in Chechnya: A Historical, Social, and Religious Analysis (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017), p. 121.
19. This was confirmed to me by one person who was at the meeting, and another who heard about it second-hand.
20. Artem Rudakov, Chechenskaya mafiya (Moscow: EKSMO-Press, 2002), pp. 323–4.
21. This is drawn from operational reports from Russian and other intelligence sources.
22. Yossef Bodansky, Chechen Jihad: Al Qaeda’s Training Ground and the Next Wave of Terror (New York: Harper, 2007), p. 108.
23. Delivered to a closed meeting on organised crime, London, 1997.
24. Andrei Konstantinov, Banditskii Peterburg (St Petersburg: Folio-Press, 1997), p. 155.
25. Ibid., p. 158.
26. This is drawn from operational reports from Russian police sources.
27. Rudakov, Chechenskaya mafiya, pp. 28–9.
28. Rossiiskie militseiskie vedomosti, September 1993, October 1993.
29. Rudakov, Chechenskaya mafiya, pp. 318–20.
30. Quoted in Aleksandr Zhilin, ‘The Shadow of Chechen Crime over Moscow’, Jamestown Foundation Prism 2, 6 (1996).
31. Rudakov, Chechenskaya mafiya, pp. 362–7.
32. Konstantinov, Banditskii Peterburg, p. 160.
33. Conversation, Moscow, 2009.
34. Roustam Kaliyev, ‘Can “power ministries” be transformed?’, Perspective 13, 1 (2002); see also Library of Congress Federal Research Division, Involvement of Russian Organized Crime Syndicates, Criminal Elements in the Russian Military, and Regional Terrorist Groups in Narcotics Trafficking in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Chechnya (2002), p. 27.
35. Conversation, Kiev, 1993.
36. Stephen Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), p. 178.
37. Misha Glenny, McMafia: Crime without Frontiers (London, Bodley Head, 2008), p. 77.
38. New York Times, 31 January 2009.
39. Der Spiegel, 21 June 2007; I was also told about the incident first-hand from a then-junior FSB security officer in Moscow in 2014.
40. This cable, ‘Subject: Chechnya, the once and future war’, 30 May 2006, was subsequently released by WikiLeaks.
41. Ilya Yashin, Ugroza Natsional’noi bezopasnosti (independent expert report, Moscow, 2016) available at: https://openrussia.org/post/view/12965/ (accessed 5 January 2018). Kadyrov’s official spokesperson says this report is ‘crude slander, insults and unfounded accusations’; see FreeNews, 14 March 2016, available at http://freenews-en.tk/2016/03/14/spokesman-kadyrov-asks-to-have-a-thing-for-yashin-because-of-the-report-about-chechnya/ (accessed 25 January 2018).
42. According to his 2015 income declaration.
43. Moscow Times, 25 February 2010; Reuters, 5 March 2011; Meduza, 1 February 2016; Washington Post, 24 May 2016.
44. Joel Schectman, ‘U.S. sanctions Chechen leader, four others under Magnitsky Act’, 20 December 2017, available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-sanctions/u-s-sanctions-chechen-leader-four-others-under-magnitsky-act-idUSKBN1EE260 (accessed 25 January 2018).
45. In December 2017, the US government placed sanctions on Kadyrov under the terms of the Magnitsky Law for human rights abuses and involvement in extrajudicial killings. ‘Chechnya: “Disappearances” a Crime Against Humanity’, Human Rights Watch, 20 March 2005; European Court of Human Rights judgments in Imakayeva v. Russia (2006) and Khantiyev v. Russia (2009).
46. European Union, European Asylum Support Office Country of Origin Information Report – Russian Federation – State Actors Of Protection (EASO, 2017); Emil Souleimanov and Jasutis Grazvydas, ‘The Dynamics of Kadyrov’s Regime: Between Autonomy and Dependence’, Caucasus Survey 4, 2 (2016), pp. 115–28; Vanessa Kogan, ‘Implementing the Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights from the North Caucasus: A Closing Window for Accountability or a Continuing Process of Transitional Justice?’, in Natalia Szablewska and Sascha-Dominik Bachmann (eds), Current Issues in Transitional Justice (Cham: Springer, 2015); United Kingdom: Parliament, House of Commons All-Party Group, Parliamentary Human Rights Group (PHRG) Report, Chechnya Fact-Finding Mission, 10 June 2010, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/4cc7ed2a2.html (accessed 5 January 2018); International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, Chechnya: Impunity, Disappearances, Torture, and the Denial of Political Rights (2003).
11. The Georgian
1. This was observed by American criminologist Louise Shelley. Louise Shelley et al. (eds), Organized Crime and Corruption in Georgia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 54.
2. Kommersant-vlast’, 10 March 2003.
3. Georgia Times, 26 January 2012.
4. Izvestiya, 5 October 2006.
5. Interviewed by Gavin Slade, in his ‘No country for made men: The decline of the mafia in post-Soviet Georgia’, Law & Society Review 46, 3 (2012), p. 631.
6. George Grossman, ‘The “second economy” of the USSR’, Problems of Communism 26, 5 (1977), p. 35.
7. Georgi Glonti and Givi Lobjanidze. Professional’naya prestupnost’ v Gruzii: vory-v-zakone (Tbilisi: TraCCC, 2004), p. 53.
8. Georgi Glonti, Organizovannaya prestupnost’ kak odin iz osnovykh istochnikov nasil’stvennoi prestupnosti i etnicheskikh konfliktov (Tbilisi: Azri, 1998), p. 140.
9. Moskovskii komsomolets, 10 November 1996.
10. Kommersant-vlast’, 10 March 2003.
11. Quoted in Alexander Kupatadze, Organized Crime, Political Transitions, and State Formation in Post-Soviet Eurasia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 118.
12. Slade, ‘No country for made men’.
13. Conversation, Moscow, 2014.
14. Lenta, 1 April 2006.
15. Kommersant, 15 June 2009.
16. Gazeta.ru, 13 June 2009.
17. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 12 October 2015.
18. Interviewed in Vremya novostei, quoted in New York Times, 30 July 2008.
19. This section draws on my article ‘Retirement plans: Russian mafia boss considers his future’, Jane’s Intelligence Review 23, 1 (2011), used with permission.
20. Moskovskii komsomolets, 16 January 2013.
21. Kommersant, 7 March 1997
22. Just as ‘Yaponchik’ spearheaded the Slavic gangs’ fight against the Chechens and other ‘highlanders’ in Moscow, so too ‘Yakutyonok’ had fought a bitter struggle against Georgian gangsters in Perm. Federico Varese, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 132.
23. Izvestiya, 1 June 1995.
24. Nezavisimaya gazeta, 2 December 1996.
25. Novaya gazeta, 26 September 2010; Moskovskie komsomolets, 16 January 2013; Lenta, 16 February 2013.
26. Novaya gazeta, 26 September 2010; Vesti, 20 January 2013; Rosbalt, 2 January 2014; Rosbalt, 20 January 2014.
27. Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 17 September 2009; Rosbalt, 4 January 2014.
28. NEWSru.com, 27 May 2010.
29. Novaya gazeta, 26 September 2010.
30. Rosbalt, 29 October 2010.
31. Rosbalt, 4 January 2014; police investigator tasked with following the network’s operations, Moscow, 2015.
32. Izvestiya, 23 January 2013.
33. Komsomol’skaya Pravda v Ukraine, 7 February 2013.
34. Argumenty i fakty, ‘Moskva’ supplement, March 1997.
35. Rosbalt, 4 January 2014.
36. Novaya gazeta, 4 June 2014; Rosbalt, 9 October 2009; BBC Russian Service, 10 June 2014; Republic, 29 December 2016.
37. Moskovskii komsomolets, 16 January 2013.
38. Comment recounted by a former colleague, Moscow, 2016.
39. Gavin Slade has usefully questioned ‘the essentialist idea that there is anything specifically in “Georgian mentality” or national culture that makes the power of the mafia inevitable there’. Gavin Slade, Reorganizing Crime: Mafia and Anti-Mafia in Post-Soviet Georgia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 172.
12. The gangster-internationalist
1. William Webster et al. (eds), Russian Organized Crime and Corruption (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1997), p. 1.
2. House Foreign Relations Committee Hearings on International Organized Crime, 10 October 1997.
3. Independent, 25 May 1993.
4. Federico Varese, Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 8.
5. Ibid., p. 8
6. Conversation, London, 1996.
7. For useful studies of the Georgian underworld, see Louise Shelley et al. (eds), Organized Crime and Corruption in Georgia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); Gavin Slade, ‘The threat of the thief: who has normative influence in Georgian society?’, Global Crime 8, 2 (2007); Gavin Slade, ‘No country for made men: The decline of the mafia in post-Soviet Georgia’, Law & Society Review 46, 3 (2012). For Ukraine, see Andrei Kokotyuka and Gennadii Grebnev, Kriminal’naya Ukraina (Kharkov: Folio, 2004); Taras Kuzio, ‘Crime, politics and business in 1990s Ukraine’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 47, 2 (2014); Graham Stack, ‘Money laundering in Ukraine: tax evasion, embezzlement, illicit international flows and state capture’, Journal of Money Laundering Control 18, 3 (2015); Organized Crime Observatory, Ukraine and the EU: Overcoming Criminal Exploitation toward a Modern Democracy? (Geneva: Organized Crime Observatory, 2015). For Central Asia, see Filippo De Danieli, ‘Beyond the drug–terror nexus: drug trafficking and state–crime relations in Central Asia’, International Journal of Drug Policy 25, 6 (2014); David Lewis, ‘Crime, terror and the state in Central Asia’, Global Crime 15, 3–4 (2014). For more general studies, see Svante Cornell and Michael Jonsson (eds), Conflict, Crime, and the State in Postcommunist Eurasia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Alexander Kupatadze, Organized Crime, Political Transitions and State Formation in Post-Soviet Eurasia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
8. Conversation, Chisinau, 2006.
9. Kyiv Post, 27 December 2011.
10. In his book, Luke Harding, Mafia State (London: Guardian Books, 2011), published in the USA as Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent into the Russian Mafia State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
11. See Sławomir Matuszak, The Oligarchic Democracy: The Influence of Business Groups on Ukrainian Politics (Warsaw: Ośrodek Studiów Wschodnich, 2012).
12. I explore this more in Mark Galeotti, ‘Crime and Crimea: criminals as allies and agents’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 3 November 2014.
13. Conversation, Kiev, 2016.
14. OCCRP, ‘The Azerbaijani Laundromat’, available at: https://www.occrp.org/en/azerbaijanilaundromat/ (accessed 5 January 2018); Sarah Chayes, ‘The Structure of Corruption in Azerbaijan’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016, available at: http://carnegieendowment.org/2016/06/30/structure-of-corruption-systemic-analysis-using-eurasian-cases-pub-63991 (accessed 5 January 2018); Alexander Kupatadze, ‘Political corruption in Eurasia: Understanding Collusion between States, Organized Crime and Business’, Theoretical Criminology 19, 2 (2015), pp. 198–215.
15. Erica Marat, ‘Impact of drug trade and organized crime on state functioning in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’, China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, 4, 1 (2006); Erica Marat, ‘The changing dynamics of state–crime relations in Kyrgyzstan’, Central Asia–Caucasus Analyst, 21 February 2008.
16. See for example Helge Blakkisrud and Pål Kolstø, ‘From secessionist conflict toward a functioning state: processes of state- and nation-building in Transnistria’, Post-Soviet Affairs 27, 2 (2011).
17. Jan Marinus Wiersma, ‘European Parliament ad hoc delegation to Moldova 5–6 June 2002’, European Parliament, July 2002.
18. See Michael Bobick, ‘Profits of disorder: images of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic’, Global Crime 12, 4 (2011).
19. Conversation, Kiev, 2006.
20. Walter Kegö and Alexandru Molcean (eds), Russian Organized Crime: Recent Trends in the Baltic Sea Region (Stockholm: Institute for Security and Development Policy, 2012), p. 58.
21. AFP, 8 September 1996.
22. Mark Galeotti, ‘Israel organised crime is fragmented, but growing’, Jane’s Intelligence Review 17, 7 (2005).
23. This is now something even the Russian government implicitly acknowledges. Former president Dmitry Medvedev said in 2011 that ‘there is hardly any doubt who won [that race]. It was not Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.’ Time, 24 February 2012.
24. Conversation, Tallinn, 2015.
25. Robert Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob has Invaded America (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), p. xx.
26. The best analysis of this episode is in Varese, Mafias on the Move. The identities of some of the individuals Varese anonymises have been added.
27. Varese, Mafias on the Move, p. 74.
28. Servizio Centrale Operativo, Rapporto operativo, Yesin et alii (Rome: Polizia di Stato, 1997), p. 21, cited and translated in Varese, Mafias on the Move, p. 73.
29. Varese, Mafias on the Move, pp. 70–1, 85–6.
30. Hyon Shin and Robert Kominski, ‘Language use in the United States: 2007’ (Suitland, MD: US Census Bureau, 2010).
31. These transitions are best chronicled in Friedman, Red Mafiya.
32. James Finckenauer and Elin Waring, The Russian Mafia in America: Immigration, Culture, and Crime (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998).
33. Vesti, 9 October 2009.
34. Conversation, Moscow, 2011.
35. BIS, Annual Report of the Security Information Service (BIS) of the Czech Republic for 2008 (Prague: BIS, 2008), p. 12.
36. Kelly Hignett, ‘Organised crime in east central Europe: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland’, Global Crime 6, 1 (2004); Miroslav Nožina, ‘Crime networks in Vietnamese diasporas: the Czech Republic case’, Crime, Law and Social Change 53, 3 (2010).
37. BIS, Annual Report of the Security Information Service (BIS) of the Czech Republic for 2010 (Prague: BIS, 2010), pp. 11–12.
38. Conversation, Prague, 2016.
39. California Department of Justice, Organized Crime in California 2010: annual report to the Legislature, p. 33.
40. Observer, 16 June 2002; New York Times, 9 November 2005.
41. For example, in 2004 Garri Grigorian, a Russian national living in the USA, was convicted of helping launder more than $130 million through shell company bank accounts in Utah.
42. Jeffrey Robinson, The Merger: The Conglomeration of International Organized Crime (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000), pp. 21–3.
43. Carlos Resa Nestares, ‘Transnational organised crime in Spain: structural factors explaining its penetration’, in Emilio Viano (ed.), Global Organised Crime and International Security (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
44. This dates back to the mid-1990s; see Izvestiya, 17 September 1996.
45. Conversation, London, 2015.
46. United States Department of Justice, ‘More than 100 members and associates of trans-national organized crime groups charged with offenses including bank fraud, kidnapping, racketeering and health care fraud’, press release, 16 February 2011.
47. New York Times, 19 August 2002.
48. Congressional Record, 112th Congress (2011–2012), House of Representatives, 8 March 2011, p. H1583.
49. USA v. Kasarian et al., 2010.
50. US Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, ‘Manhattan US attorney announces charges against 36 individuals for participating in $279 million health care fraud scheme’, press release, 29 February 2012.
51. USA v. Kasarian et al., 2010. Kasarian pleaded guilty in 2011.
52. USA v. Tokhtakhounov et al., 2013.
53. Europol, Russian Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2008 (partially declassified version), p. 10.
54. Quoted in Friedman, Red Mafiya, p. 90.
55. Claire Sterling, Crime Without Frontiers: The Worldwide Expansion of Organised Crime and the Pax Mafiosa (London: Little, Brown, 1994).
56. John Kerry, The New War: The Web of Crime that Threatens America’s Security (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 21.
57. Phil Williams, ‘Transnational criminal organizations: strategic alliances’, Washington Quarterly 18, 1 (1995).
58. US Commercial Service, ‘US Commercial Service to support US pavilion at major Global Gaming Expo Asia 2013 (G2E Asia 2013)’, press release, 11 March 2013.
59. Bertil Lintner, ‘The Russian mafia in Asia’, Asia Pacific Media Services, 3 February 1996.
60. Far Eastern Economic Review, 30 May 2002.
61. Friedman, Red Mafiya, pp. 271, 284.
62. This is the estimate given by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in 2016.
63. Conversation, London, 2004.
13. New times, new vory
1. Gazeta.ru, 6 September 2011.
2. Kommersant, 24 February 1995.
3. Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 9 September 2011.
4. TASS, 6 September 2011.
5. US Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, ‘Manhattan U.S. Attorney Charges 34 Members and Associates of Two Russian-American Organized Crime Enterprises with Operating International Sportsbooks That Laundered More Than $100 Million’, 16 April 2013.
6. Life News, 10 September 2016.
7. This cable, ‘Subject: Spain details its strategy to combat the Russian mafia’, 8 February 2010, was subsequently released by WikiLeaks.
8. Guardian, 7 February 2012.
9. Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 119.
10. This cable, ‘Subject: the Luzhkov dilemma’, 12 February 2010, was subsequently released by WikiLeaks.
11. This is best and forensically outlined in Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, pp. 104–62, especially 126–32, 142–5.
12. Der Spiegel, 3 September 2007.
13. Gazeta.ru, 18 August 2016; Vedomosti, 25 December 2009; RIA Novosti, 16 January 2009.
14. This section draws on my analysis of the case in the Moscow Times, 15 July 2014.
15. The idea that Russia has a ‘deep state’ has been particularly developed by Brian Whitmore of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
16. Michael Rochlitz, ‘Corporate raiding and the role of the state in Russia’, Post-Soviet Affairs 30, 2–3 (2014).
17. Moskovskii komsomolets, 10 November 1996.
18. See for example Stephen Handelman, ‘The Russian “Mafiya” ’, Foreign Affairs, March–April 1994; Michael Waller and Victor Yasmann, ‘Russia’s great criminal revolution: the role of the security services’, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 11, 4 (1995).
19. Stanislav Lunev, ‘Russian organized crime spreads beyond Russia’s borders, squeezing out the local competition’, Jamestown Foundation Prism 3, 8 (1997).
20. The best summary is Thomas Firestone, ‘Criminal corporate raiding in Russia’, International Law 42 (2008).
21. This has been especially well demonstrated by Jordan Gans-Morse: see for example ‘Threats to property rights in Russia: from private coercion to state aggression’, Post-Soviet Affairs 28, 3 (2012).
22. PricewaterhouseCoopers, Economic Crime: People, Culture and Controls – the 4th Biennial Global Economic Crime Survey: Russia (2007), p. 3.
23. CNBC, 26 May 2011.
24. For an excellent study, see ‘Following the Magnitsky money’, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, 12 August 2012. Browder’s own take is in his book Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).
25. Valerii Karyshev, Russkaya Mafiya, 1991–2017: novaya khronika banditskoi Rossii (Moscow, EKSMO-Press, 2017), p. 374.
26. V. A. Nomokonov and V. I. Shulga, ‘Murder for hire as a manifestation of organized crime’, Demokratizatsiya 6, 4 (1998) p. 677.
27. Nicely summarised in Richard Behar, ‘Capitalism in a cold climate’, Fortune 141, 12 (2000).
28. Moscow Times, 4 August 2004.
29. In light of the constitutional bar on three consecutive presidential terms, Putin opted to swap jobs with his former prime minister Medvedev, even while making it clear who was in charge. In the process this reset the clock, allowing him to stand again in 2012 and then, after constitutional changes extending a presidential term from four to six years, presumably again in 2018.
30. Conversation, Moscow, 2012.
31. Nikolai Modestov, Moskva banditskaya 2: dokumenty khronika kriminal’nogo bespredela 90-kh gg. (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 1997), pp. 7–38; Valerii Karyshev, Aleksandr Solonik: killer mafii (Moscow: EKSMO-Press, 1998); Moskovskii komsomolets, 15 February 2002; Kommersant, 25 January 2003.
32. Pravda.ru, 24 January 2003; Valerii Karyshev, Aleksandr Solonik: killer zhiv?! (Moscow: EKSMO-Press, 2003).
33. Kommersant-daily, 13 March 1997; Moskovskii komsomolets, 1 June 2003.
34. Interfax news agency, 22 April 2002.
35. The Register, 20 April 2010.
36. Jonathan Lusthaus, ‘How organised is organised cybercrime?’, Global Crime 14, 1 (2013).
37. Guardian, 25 January 2008; CNN, 24 October 2009; Time, 20 January 2011; Vedomosti, 19 April 2011; RFE/RL, 11 November 2014; Reuters, 27 November 2014; Varese, The Russian Mafia, pp. 170, 172; Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, pp. 284–5.
38. Robert Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob has Invaded America (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), p. 113.
39. United States v. Peter Berlin, Lucy Edwards et al., 1999; see also Thomas Ott, ‘US law enforcement strategies to combat organized crime threats to financial institutions’, Journal of Financial Crime 17, 4 (2010).
40. Conversations, Moscow, 2014 and 2015.
14. Mafiya evolutions
1. Militsiya, August 1992, pp. 11–14.
2. Georgian Journal, 25 September 2014.
3. For the best study of this, see James Jacobs, Gotham Unbound: How New York City was Liberated from the Grip of Organized Crime (New York: New York University Press, 2001), chapter 3.
4. Rosbalt, 4 February 2013.
5. Georgian Journal, 25 September 2014.
6. Secret message circulated in prison, signed by thirty-four senior vory. Reproduced on the PrimeCrime website: see http://www.primecrime.ru/photo/3643 (accessed 25 October 2017). (The translation is my own, and has to take some liberties to convey the sense; instead of ‘seducing’, for example, the text literally says ‘leading people into fornication’.)
7. Rosbalt, 4 February 2013.
8. Vesti, 21 January 2013.
9. Vesti, 5 February 2013.
10. Vesti, 6 February 2013; Komsomolskaya Pravda, 7 February 2013.
11. Gazeta.ru, 18 August 2016.
12. Prestupnaya Rossiya, 2 June 2014; Rosbalt, 3 June 2014.
13. Conversation, Moscow, 2014.
14. Conversation, Moscow, 2014.
15. This section draws on my ‘Khoroshie vremena dlya plokhikh parnei’, Radio Svoboda, 13 June 2015, used with permission. This article was subsequently published in English by the Henry Jackson Society as ‘Tough times for tough people: crime and Russia’s economic crisis’, 18 June 2015.
16. Email conversation, 2015.
17. The following examples are drawn from conversations with Russian police and investigators, and sight of operational material in Moscow, 2014–16.
18. Conversation, Moscow, 2015.
19. CNN, 20 August 2015.
20. Vadzim Smok, ‘The art of smuggling in Belarus’, openDemocracy: Russia, 2 February 2015.
21. Daily Telegraph, 18 August 2015.
22. Email conversation, 2015.
23. Martin Müller, ‘After Sochi 2014: costs and impacts of Russia’s Olympic Games’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 55, 6 (2014).
24. Christian Science Monitor, 5 February 2013.
25. Guardian, 4 February 2013.
26. RBK, 16 January 2013.
27. Lenta, 26 October 2010.
28. Reuters, 1 July 2009.
29. Financial Times, 13 September 2015.
30. ZDNet, 6 April 2005.
31. Moscow News, 21 November 2011.
32. CNN, 16 March 2017.
33. Krebs on Security, 10 April 2017; Reuters, 9 April 2017.
34. Quoted in The Economist, 30 August 2007.
35. Guardian, 15 November 2007.
36. Joseph Menn, Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords who are Bringing Down the Internet (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010), p. 266.
37. Newsweek, 29 December 2009; Guardian, 15 November 2007.
38. The Economist, 26 August 1999.
39. Stephen McCombie et al., ‘Cybercrime attribution: an eastern European case study’, Proceedings of the 7th Australian Digital Forensics Conference, 2009.
40. ‘Palermo: hacker russi clonavano carte di credito statunitensi’, Polizia di Stato, 29 September 2015.
41. Nezavisimaya gazeta, 10 February 2009.
42. Conversation, Moscow, 2015.
43. Kommersant, 7 November 2014.
44. Interfax, 26 January 2013.
45. This section draws on my ‘Return of mob rule: the resurgence of gangsterism in Russia’, Jane’s Intelligence Review 25, 4 (2013), used with permission.
46. Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 2 November 2009.
47. Vremya novostei, 18 June 2009.
48. Life News, 7 March 2017. Kalashov denies his guilt and as of writing the case is still in the courts.
15. The criminal wars
1. The informant whom Kohver was meant to be meeting, Maxim Gruzdev, turned out to have been suborned by the FSB, and is currently in prison in Estonia for his role. Re:baltica, 13 September 2017; Postimees, 14 September 2017.
2. Postimees, 10 September 2014.
3. Hearing on Russian money laundering, 21 September 1999, quoted in Edward Lucas, Deception: spies, lies and how Russia dupes the West (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 316.
4. ‘Statement for the record: worldwide threat assessment of the US intelligence community’, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 12 March 2013.
5. Compare Edward Lucas, The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) with Mark Galeotti, ‘Not a New Cold War: Great Game II’, ETH Zürich, 14 April 2014.
6. Ezio Costanzo, The Mafia and the Allies: Sicily 1943 and the Return of the Mafia (New York: Enigma, 2007); Salvatore Lupo, ‘The Allies and the mafia’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 2, 1 (1997).
7. US diplomatic cable, ‘Subject: Spain details its strategy to combat the Russian mafia’, 8 February 2010.
8. Guardian, 23 January 2013.
9. Bout’s career is best described in Matt Potter, Outlaws Inc.: Under the Radar and on the Black Market with the World’s Most Dangerous Smugglers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).
10. Europol, Russian Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2008 (partially declassified version), p. 13.
11. ‘Address by President of the Russian Federation’, 18 March 2014.
12. This section draws on my ‘Crime and Crimea: criminals as allies and agents’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 3 November 2014, used with permission.
13. Ukrainskaya Pravda, 15 March 2014; Delovoi Peterburg, 10 July 2015.
14. KIAnews, 10 June 2010; Fakty, 3 March 2014; Ukrainskaya pravda, 15 March 2014; Der Spiegel, 25 March 2014; NPR, 5 June 2014; New York Times, 25 March 2015; Novaya gazeta, 8 February 2016.
15. Novaya gazeta, 8 February 2016; Andrei Konstantinov and Mal’kol’m Dikselius, Banditskaya Rossiya (St Petersburg: Bibliopolis, 1997), pp. 465–70.
16. Conversation, Moscow, 2014.
17. Conversation, Kazan, 2016.
18. Ibid.
19. US diplomatic cable, ‘Subject: Ukraine: land, power, and criminality in Crimea’, 14 December 2006.
20. ‘Prosecutor talks about control by crime’, Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, 18 December 2014.
21. ‘Ukrainian Football’s Dark Side’, BBC, 1 April 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7976826.stm (accessed 5 January 2018).
22. Ibid.
23. The Economist, 22 March 2014.
24. Forbes, 30 March 2015; Lenta, 1 June 2015; Lenta, 7 June 2015; Kryminform, 25 June 2015; Eurasianet, 16 July 2015; Al-Jazeera, 2 September 2015; New York Times, 30 September 2017.
25. Conversation, Kazan, 2016.
26. Novaya gazeta, 23 October 2016.
27. This standard scam was explained to me both by security sources in Moscow in 2016 and a Western source in 2017.
28. Donday, 14 December 2016; Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 1 February 2017.
29. Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index placed Russia 136th in the world out of 175, and Ukraine 142nd.
30. New Republic, 5 June 2014. See also Taras Kuzio, ‘Crime, politics and business in 1990s Ukraine’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 47, 2 (2014), and Sergei Kuzin, Donetskaya Mafiya (Kiev: Poligrafkniga, 2006).
31. New Republic, 5 June 2014.
32. Novaya gazeta, 23 October 2016.
33. Gustav Gressel et al., ‘Donbas: an imported war’, New Eastern Europe, 3 November 2016.
34. Novaya gazeta, 23 October 2016.
35. Radio Svoboda, 17 April 2015.
36. Argumenty i fakty, 18 November 2016.
37. NEWSru.com, 3 July 2016.
38. This section draws on my longer report ‘Crimintern: how the Kremlin uses Russia’s criminal networks in Europe’, European Council on Foreign Relations, 18 April 2017.
39. Washington Post, 23 December 2010; Snob, 23 June 2011; Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, pp. 88–90, 303–4.
40. Conversation, London, 2015.
41. L’Express, 14 January 2016; SudOuest, 7 December 2017.
42. ‘Hard blow against Russian-speaking mafia’, press release, Europol, 19 June 2013.
43. For more on this ‘political war’, see Mark Galeotti, Hybrid War or Gibridnaya Voina? Getting Russia’s non-linear military challenge right (Prague: Mayak, 2016).
44. ‘Operation Ghost Stories’, FBI, 31 October 2011.
45. Hürriyet, 19 February 2014; ‘Have Russian hitmen been killing with impunity in Turkey?’, BBC News Magazine, 13 December 2016.
46. Mateusz Seroka, ‘Montenegro: Russia accused of attempting to organise a coup d’état’, OSW, 6 March 2017.
47. Conversation, Berlin, 2016.
48. Mark Perry, ‘Putting America’s ridiculously large $18T economy into perspective by comparing US state GDPs to entire countries’, AEIdeas, 6 June 2016.
49. Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 20 December 2000.
50. Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010), p. 27.
51. Globe and Mail, 22 October 2012.
1. Conversation, Moscow, 2010.
2. Rémi Camus, ‘“We’ll whack them, even in the outhouse”: on a phrase by V. V. Putin’, Kultura 10/2006.
3. Viktor Suvorov, Spetsnaz: The Story behind the Soviet SAS (London: Grafton, 1989), pp. 52–3.
4. Yuri Glazov, ‘“Thieves” in the USSR as a social phenomenon’, in The Russian Mind since Stalin’s Death (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1985), pp. 39–40.
5. Alix Lambert, Russian Prison Tattoos: Codes of Authority, Domination, and Struggle (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2003), p. 123.
6. See Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, ‘Criminal rhetoric in Russian political discourse’, Language Design 6 (2004); Michael Gorham, After Newspeak: Language Culture and Politics in Russia from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).
7. Novie izvestiya, 8 April 2004.
8. Viktor Erofeyev, ‘Dirty words: the unique power of Russia’s underground language’, New Yorker, 15 September 2003.
9. Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York: Harvest, 2000), p. 36.
10. Five Chechens were convicted of the murder in 2017. Although the official line is that they worked alone, it is widely believed that Kadyrov directly or indirectly ordered them to carry out the killing and Nemtsov’s family have petitioned investigators to look into his alleged involvement.
11. Although Navalny was part blinded in one attack, for example, it took several days and pressure from domestic and foreign sources before the police would even open an investigation.
12. Kathryn Hendley et al., ‘Law, relationships and private enforcement: transactional strategies of Russian enterprises’, Europe-Asia Studies 52, 4 (2000).
13. Michael Rochlitz, ‘Corporate raiding and the role of the state in Russia’, Post-Soviet Affairs 30, 2–3 (2014); Philip Hanson, ‘Reiderstvo: asset-grabbing in Russia’, Chatham House, March 2014; Jordan Gans-Morse, ‘Threats to property rights in Russia: from private coercion to state aggression’, Post-Soviet Affairs 28, 3 (2012).
14. RBK, 17 April 2017.
15. Conversation, Moscow, 2016.
16. Olga Matich, ‘Mobster gravestones in 1990s Russia’, Global Crime 7, 1 (2006).
17. In Matvei Komarov’s The Tale of Vanka Kain (1779), also known by the less snappy but infinitely more delightful title Thorough and Reliable Descriptions of the Life of the Glorious Russian Conman Vanka Kain and the French Conman Cartouche. The latest and probably best version is Vie de Kain, bandit russe et mouchard de la tsarine (‘The Life of Kain, Russian Bandit and Informant of the Empress’), annotated by Ecatherina Rai-Gonneau (Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 2008).
18. Eliot Borenstein, ‘Band of Brothers: homoeroticism and the Russian action hero’, Kul’tura, February 2008, p. 18.
19. Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Memoirs by my typewriter’, in Lucy Dawidowicz (ed.), Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, quoted in Charles King, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), p. 139.
20. Certainly Odessa itself has taken him as its own, with an Ostap Bender Square featuring a sculpture of one of those twelve chairs.
21. Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).
22. This violent genre is best explored in Anthony Olcott, Russian Pulp: The Detektiv and the Russian Way of Crime (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) and Borenstein, Overkill.
23. Borenstein, Overkill, p. 23.
24. Vanessa Rampton, ‘ “Are you gangsters?” “No, we’re Russians’: the Brother films and the question of national identity in Russia’, eSharp special issue (2008), p. 65.
25. Serguei Oushakine, ‘Aesthetics without law: cinematic bandits in post-Soviet space’, Slavic and East European Journal 51, 2 (2007), p. 385.
26. Ibid., p. 377.
27. This unique resource is to be found at http://www.primecrime.ru/.
28. New York Times, 16 July 2006.
29. Frederick Patton, ‘Expressive means in Russian youth slang’, Slavic and East European Journal 24, 3 (1980), p. 274.
30. Izvestiya, 9 January 2013.
31. ‘Treasury designates associates of key brothers’ circle members’, press release, US Department of the Treasury, 30 October 2013.
32. Robert Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob has Invaded America (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), pp. 116–17.
33. See Lore Lippman, ‘The Queen of the South: how a Spanish bestseller was written about Mexican narcocorridos’, Crime, Media, Culture 1, 2 (2005); Martín Meráz García, ‘“Narcoballads”: the psychology and recruitment process of the “narco”’, Global Crime 7, 2 (2006); Howard Campbell, ‘Narco-propaganda in the Mexican “drug war”: an anthropological perspective’, Latin American Perspectives 41, 2 (2014).
34. Anton Oleynik, review of Valerii Anisimikov, Rossiya v zerkale ugolovnykh traditsii tyurmy (St Petersburg: Yuridicheskii tsentr Press, 2003), Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies 6/7 (2007).
35. V. G. Mozgot, ‘The musical taste of young people’, Russian Education and Society 56, 8 (2014).
36. Author’s translation.
37. Rossiiskaya gazeta, 20 December 2010.
38. Conversation with a graduate student at MGIMO, the Foreign Ministry’s elite university, Moscow, 2015.
39. Edward Luttwak, ‘Does the Russian mafia deserve the Nobel Prize for economics?’, London Review of Books, 3 August 1995.
40. For police reforms, see Brian Taylor, ‘Police reform in Russia: the policy process in a hybrid regime’, Post-Soviet Affairs 30, 2–3 (2014); Olga Semukhina, ‘From militia to police: the path of Russian law enforcement reforms’, Russian Analytical Digest 151 (2014); Mark Galeotti, ‘Purges, power and purpose: Medvedev’s 2011 police reforms’, Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies 13 (2012).
41. New Times, 27 December 2010.
42. Alexis Belianin and Leonid Kosals, ‘Collusion and corruption: an experimental study of Russian police’, National Research University Higher School of Economics, 2015.
43. Conversation, Moscow, 2016.
44. Comments made during a conference in Moscow, 1995, quoted in the Guardian, 31 July 1995.
45. This is, of course, a drastically simplified account of the process. For more on this, see John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2004), chapters 10 & 11; Jane Schneider, Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
46. Joseph Serio, Investigating the Russian Mafia (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2008), p. 97.
47. Guardian, 26 July 2007.
48. Conversation, New York, 2009.
49. George Dobson, Russia (London: A. & C. Black, 1913), pp. 240–1.
50. Conversation, Moscow, 1993.