Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more than timely. In these days of ever more bizarre Russian attacks, it reads like the essential companion to a bewildering and aggressive new world, a world that is no longer confined behind Russian borders but seeks actively to penetrate and disrupt our own society. Essentially a history of the development of Russia’s unique form of organised crime, it constantly illuminates and clarifies the familiar, legal narrative of Russian history and the attitudes of Putin’s clique.
The Russian mafia’s distinctive culture originally emerged during the years of revolution and civil war. The collapse of the state created a vacuum for brutal criminal gangs that operated according to their own rules of honour, with their own hierarchy, language and agreements. Thieves (vory) were tattooed with symbols denoting their rank and their experiences and ‘lying tattoos’ could be forcibly removed. Betrayal of the code was answerable by death and in those early years the greatest betrayal was to collaborate with the state in any way at all. Leaders were given the title vory v zakone, thieves-in-law, for their faithful adherence to the criminal life.
Of all Stalin’s toxic inheritance, perhaps his most lethal, in retrospect, was his policy of co-opting the vory as servants of the state. With millions of helpless non-criminals flooding into the camps, the Party needed assistance, and the professional criminals provided it, terrorising the ‘politicals’ in return for a comfortable life in jail. According to the old-style lore this was collaboration, but it was too profitable for many to turn down. Varlam Shalamov, in his Kolyma Tales, wrote that the culture of the professional criminals defined life in the Gulag.
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