Mark Galeotti - Gangster’s paradise: how organised crime took over Russia
NB: This report has much to tell us about our own country. It deserves to be read carefully. When the police and criminal justice system begin to be used by the political elite a mechanisms for revenge, for settling scores - all with the semblance of legitimate procedure - then we are on the brink of criminalising the entire state apparatus. After that it does not matter whether the facade of formal processes are upheld. They are upheld to facilitate crime on a continental scale. Watch your step, officials, judges, police officers. You know where the gang appropriately named the 'parivar' is leading us. DS
I was in Moscow in 1988, during the final years of the Soviet Union. The system was sliding towards shabby oblivion, even if no one knew at the time how soon the end would come. While carrying out research for my doctorate on the impact of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, I was interviewing Russian veterans of that brutal conflict. When I could, I would meet these afgantsy shortly after they got home, and then again a year into civilian life, to see how they were adjusting. Most came back raw, shocked and angry, either bursting with tales of horror and blunder, or spikily or numbly withdrawn.
I was in Moscow in 1988, during the final years of the Soviet Union. The system was sliding towards shabby oblivion, even if no one knew at the time how soon the end would come. While carrying out research for my doctorate on the impact of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, I was interviewing Russian veterans of that brutal conflict. When I could, I would meet these afgantsy shortly after they got home, and then again a year into civilian life, to see how they were adjusting. Most came back raw, shocked and angry, either bursting with tales of horror and blunder, or spikily or numbly withdrawn.
A year later, though, most had done what people
usually do in such circumstances: they had adapted, they had coped. The
nightmares were less frequent, the memories less vivid. But then there were
those who could not or would not move on. Some of these young men collaterally
damaged by the war had become adrenaline junkies, or just intolerant of the
conventions of everyday life.
One of the men I got
to know during this time was named Volodya. Wiry, intense and morose, he had a
brittle and dangerous quality that, on the whole, I would have crossed the road
to avoid. He had been a marksman in the war. The other afgantsy I knew
tolerated Volodya, but never seemed comfortable with him, nor with talking
about him. He always had money to burn, at a time when most were eking out the
most marginal of lives, often living with their parents and juggling multiple
jobs. It all made sense, though, when I later learned that he had become what
was known in Russian crime circles as a “torpedo” – a hitman.
As the values and
structures of Soviet life crumbled and fell, organised crime was emerging from
the ruins, no longer subservient to the corrupt Communist party bosses and the
black-market millionaires. As it rose, it was gathering a new generation of
recruits, including damaged and disillusioned veterans of the USSR’s last war.
Some were bodyguards, some were runners, some were leg-breakers and some – such
as Volodya – were killers.
I never found out what
happened to Volodya. He probably ended up as a casualty of the gang wars of the
1990s, fought out with car bombs, drive-by shootings and knives in the night.
That decade saw the emergence of a tradition of monumental memorialisation, as
fallen gangsters were buried with full Godfather-style pomp, with black
limousines threading through paths lined with white carnations and tombs marked
with huge headstones. Vastly expensive (the largest cost upwards of $250,000,
at a time when the average wage was close to a dollar a day) and stupendously
tacky, these monuments showed the dead with the spoils of their criminal
lives: the Mercedes, the designer suit, the heavy gold chain. I still wonder if
some day I’ll be walking through one of the cemeteries favoured by Moscow’s
gangsters and will come across Volodya’s grave… read more: