* * *
�Organized
crime refers to a group generally operating under some form of concealment with
a structure reflective of the cultural and social stipulations of the societies
that generate it; and which has the primary objective to obtain access to
wealth and power, through the participation in economic activities prohibited
by the law as well as through the corruption of those engaged in enforcing it.
Organized crime is a form of crude accumulation because it is based on the use
of threat of physical violence which emerges�and has emerged�in different
socioeconomic formations across time and place, and is generated by the
specific conditions of that time and place.� (Alfredo Schulte-Bockhard, The
Politics of Organized Crime and the Organized Crime of Politics, 2006)
�Organized
crime is an ideological chameleon that changes its colors in accordance with
the environment.�
�There is no
Mafia in the Soviet Union.� (Literaturnaya Gazeta, 1980)
��� The
Russian Mafiya did not emerge as a result of the 1991 collapse of the
communist state. It was present, as were other Russian mobs. They existed
before and were a consequence of the unique characteristics of the Soviet
system.
��� The
existence of organized crime was not officially acknowledged. Even juvenile
delinquency was �nonexistent,� at least by an American sociologist, who in the
1960s with a USA government grant found no Soviet statistics on the subject. By
the 1980s, with the policy of Glasnost, or openness, such data emerged.
In 1994, Russian officials acknowledged some 5700 criminal gangs in the Russian
Federation and another thousand gangs in the other Soviet Republics. It was
claimed that these mafias had a tight grasp on large sections of the Russian
economy.
��� There
was an energetic trafficking in arms by members of the former Soviet army.
Also, the illegal sale of raw materials, art treasures and drug trafficking.
Military weapons, after 1991, flooded the international arms markets. Russian
military became involved in narcotic peddling. Military aircraft flew narcotics
to the former German Democratic Republic. In 1994, it was reported that the
military was taking advantage of the political vacuum and �descending into the
world of organized crime.� A �whole army of mafia� was abroad in the land.
��� A raw
materials black market flourished. Millions of tons of nonferrous metals were
shipped westward through the Baltic States. Small Estonia with no metal
deposits in its territory suddenly became a major exporter of copper. Russian
border police were kept busy intercepting vast loads of metals, timber and
industrial chemical products worth billions of rubles.
���
Recreational drugs mixed in with the spreading corruption. The number of
addicts would swell by 70 percent between 1985 and 1990. Self-abuse took hold
among the youth as they transitioned from the traditional high alcohol
consumption to opium and hashish. Drugs for the Central Asian republics
accounted for much of the narcotics consumed in Russia and other European
nations. Columbian traffickers used the former USSR as a transit route into
Western Europe. The local mafias formed cartels to ensure the smooth flow of
their product to eager customers.
���
Alliances between organized crime and the Establishment became forged
throughout post-Soviet Russia. A money laundering industry took advantage of
lax banking legislation to the extent of allowing mafias to establish their own
financial businesses. Studies documented that by 1997 five hundred banks were
controlled by crime bosses. Like all failed states, Russia became an extreme
and classic example of mobs seeing the opportunity to emerge from the
underworld to become �intimately linked to political structures and economic
infrastructures.� The lines between the elites and the racketeers became
blurred.
��� Every
nation has its organized crime and in each the phenomenon
evolves in accordance with the unique conditions of time and place. In the
Soviet Union, the traditional �thieves� world� was strongly anti-state, meaning
no collaboration of any kind with agents of the state. Deviance from the code of
silence meant certain expulsion or worse. With the advent of the Stalin era,
after the First World War, the thieves did an about face by entering into
mutually advantageous ventures with state officials. Despite instances of
severe repression of the thieves� world by the USSR, the mafia mentality was
not destroyed, but continued to exist within the prisons and work camps. The
thieves were assigned the task of oppressing and eliminating anti-Soviet
Russians.
��� The
Soviet example is a telling case study of the interplay between the underworld
and the overworld when certain environments exist. From an anti-state posture,
the former became an �informal instrument of the state that played a role in
the persecution of the regime�s political enemies and even fought on its
behalf.� With growing corruption the tables were turned. There emerged the
�thieves in authority,� a cozy arrangement where the thieves and the elite
prospered often to the disadvantage of the general population.
