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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300243208 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/28/2019 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Sales rank: | 179,507 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.10(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
KAIN'S LAND
Even a bishop will steal if he's hungry.
Russian proverb
Vanka Kain, gangster, kidnapper, burglar and sometime informant, was the scourge of Moscow in the 1730s and 1740s. When Princess Elizabeth seized power in a coup in 1741, she offered amnesties to outlaws willing to turn on their colleagues. Kain eagerly seized the opportunity to wash away the taint of almost a decade's crimes. While officially becoming a government informant and thief taker, Kain actually continued his crimes, corrupting his handlers at the Sysknoi prikaz, the Investigators' Bureau. But such relationships acquire their own consuming dynamic. He began by simply gifting them a share of his loot, usually imported luxuries such as Italian scarves and Rhenish wine. Over time, his handlers grew greedier and more demanding, and Kain was forced into increasingly daring and dangerous crimes to satisfy them. Eventually this came to light and Kain was tried and sentenced to a lifetime's hard labour.
Kain became a romantic hero in Russian folklore. Of course, the criminal as hero appears in popular culture throughout the world, from Robin Hood to Ned Kelly. But unlike Robin Hood, the Russian thief is not fighting against an exploitative usurper. He is not misunderstood, not a victim of a deprived childhood, not a good man in a bad spot. He is just an 'honest thief ' in a world where the only distinction is between those thieves who are honest about what they are and those who hide their self-interested criminality beneath boyars' capes, bureaucrats' uniforms, judges' robes and businessmen's suits, whichever best fits the times.
Kain's story could be that of a twentieth-century vor, or even today's: the gangster whom the authorities think they can control, yet who ends up corrupting them. Swap horses for BMWs, and fur capes for tracksuits, and Kain's story could be played out in post-Soviet Russia without a hint of anachronism.
Criminal histories
I am not a scholar, but I can tell you this: Russians have always been the best, the bravest criminals around.
'Graf ' ('Count'), middle-ranking criminal, 19931
Ironically enough, while there is a strong historical pedigree for the vory, it is one in which they have never shown much interest. Some criminals revel in their history, even if it is typically mythologised, romanticised or simply invented. Thus, the Chinese triads represent themselves as the descendants of a centuries-long tradition of secret societies struggling against unjust tyrants. The yakuza claim their roots are not in the bandit kabuki mono ('crazy ones') who terrorised seventeenth-century Japan or the hired thugs of gambling and pedlar bosses, but the chivalrous samurai warrior caste and the public-spirited machi yakko ('servants of the town') militias formed to resist the kabuki mono. By contrast, modern Russian organised crime seems to revel in its very ahistoricity, lacking even a folklorish interest in its past. Eschewing memorialisation of its culture (as opposed to its current members4), it places itself firmly in the today and turns its back on its history. Even the traditional criminal culture of the vorovskoi mir, rich in gory and brutal folklore and customs generated and transmitted within the Gulag prison camps, is being put aside, as a new generation of criminal leaders, the so-called avtoritety ('authorities'), disdain the tattoos and routines which marked out the old generation.
For all this, though, Russia's modern underworld of sharp-suited criminal-entrepreneurs and their heavily armed bodyguards and leg breakers did not emerge full-grown from their country's tumultuous transition to the market after 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet system. Instead, they are heirs to a history which in its twists and turns reflects the wider processes shaping Russia, from centuries of rural insularity to the crass, state-led, crash industrialisation of the late nineteenth century and the Gulag-driven modernisation of Stalin's reign. Perhaps most striking, though, is the extent to which Russia's history, while full of vicious bandits and blood-stained murderers, is unusually heavily dominated by fraud- sters, embezzlers and gangsters who understood how to use the system to their advantage, when to challenge it, and when to keep a low profile.
One of the lessons of the historical evolution of Russian organised crime is that it emerged from a society in which the state has often been clumsy, threadbare, deeply corrupt – but also fundamentally ruthless, unconstrained by the niceties of legality and process, and willing to use often extravagant amounts of violence to protect its interests when it felt challenged. In the 1990s, it may have seemed for a while that the criminals were in charge. However, under Vladimir Putin, the state has re-emerged with a vengeance, and this has affected both crime and perceptions of crime. Even before the anarchy of the post-Soviet transition, though, a blend of coercion, corruption and compliance was central to the Russian way of crime.
Can Russia be policed?
Never tell a cop the truth.
Russian saying
There were, arguably, two ways Russian organised crime could have evolved, two potential precursors, one rural and one urban. In the nineteenth century, rural banditry looked as if it might have the greater potential. After all, this was a country almost impossible to police. By the end of the nineteenth century, tsarist Russia covered almost one-sixth of the world's landmass. The population of 171 million (1913)6 overwhelmingly comprised peasants and was scattered across this huge country, often in small, isolated villages and communities. Simply for orders or warrants from the capital, St Petersburg, to reach Vladivostok on the Pacific coast could take weeks, even by horse relay. The railway, telegraph and telephone were to help, but the size of this country has been an obstacle to effective governance in many ways.
Furthermore, the empire was a patchwork of different climates and cultures incorporated largely by conquest. Lenin dubbed it the 'prison of nations', but the Soviet state willingly accepted this imperial inheritance and even today's smaller Russian Federation is a multi-ethnic conglomeration of more than a hundred national minorities. To the south were the unruly and mountainous Caucasian regions, conquered in the nineteenth century but never truly subjugated. To the east were the Islamic provinces of central Asia. Westwards were the more advanced cultures of the occupied Congress Kingdom of Catholic Poland and the Baltic states. Even the Slavic heartlands included the rich farmlands of the Ukrainian black-earth regions, the sprawling and overcrowded metropolises of Moscow and St Petersburg, and the icy Siberian taiga. In all, the empire embraced some 200 nationalities, with Slavs accounting for two-thirds of the whole.
Law enforcement had to deal with a wide range of local legal cultures, often espoused by peoples to whom the tsarist order was an alien and brutal occupier, as well as the practical challenges of apprehending criminals who could travel across jurisdictions. This might have been mitigated if adequate resources had been deployed to this purpose, but this was a state that policed on the cheap. After all, Russia's state has historically been relatively poor, inefficient in its revenue collection and perched upon an often marginal economy. Spending on the police and the courts tended to take a distant second place to the military. By 1900, the proportion of the state budget spent on the police was around 6 per cent – well below European standards and possibly half the per capita expenditure in Austria or France and a quarter of Prussia's. Russia's police had to do rather more, with proportionately rather less.
Successive tsars tried and failed to police their country. From the Razboinaya izba or Banditry Office established by Ivan the Terrible (reigned 1533–84)10 to the rural and urban forces established by Nicholas I (reigned 1825–55), all proved unequal to the task and the state's grip on the country-side was always minimal, largely confined to suppressing uprisings, and dependent on the support (and hired guards) of the local gentry. The police – both urban and rural – tended to be an entirely reactive force, suffering from a lack of people and resources, poor training and morale, high turnover, endemic corruption (all in part symptoms of salaries worse than an unskilled labourer's) and minimal popular support. Furthermore, they were burdened with a whole range of additional duties which distracted them from policing, from the supervision of church worship to organising military recruitment. The standard 'summaries' of police duties published in the 1850s ran to some 400 pages apiece!
Furthermore, the police were as corrupt as any of the institutions of the state, something of a Russian tradition. The apocryphal story is that when the moderniser and state builder Peter the Great proposed to hang every man who embezzled from the government, his procurator general gave the blunt reply that this would leave him with no officials because 'we all steal, the only difference is that some of us steal larger amounts and more openly than others'. This was scarcely an exaggeration as even into the nineteenth century, although officially banned from doing so, Russian officials were often implicitly expected to practise what in medieval times had been called kormleniye ('feeding'). In other words, they were not expected to live off their inadequate salaries, but to supplement them with side deals and judicious bribe taking. Legend has it that Tsar Nicholas I told his son, 'I believe you and I are the only people in Russia who don't steal.' The first government inquiry into corruption was not conducted until 1856 and its view was that anything less than 500 rubles should not even be considered a bribe at all, merely a polite expression of thanks. For the sake of comparison, at this time, a rural police commissioner was paid 422 rubles a year. This became a particular problem when people overstepped the boundaries of 'acceptable corruption'. For example, Major General Reinbot, the gradonachalnik (police chief) of Moscow 1905–8, became notorious for using his position to extort exorbitant payments, setting a dangerous example to his subordinates. Two merchants who testified before an investigation of Reinbot's graft noted that:
the police took bribes before, too, but this was done in a comparatively decent way ... When the holidays came around, people used to bring them what they could afford, what they could spare – the police used to accept it and express their gratitude. But this extortion commenced since the [1905] revolution, At first, they grafted cautiously, but when they learned that the new General, that is, Reinbot, accepted bribes himself, they no longer took bribes but actually commenced to rob the people.
Reinbot himself was dismissed amidst a public investigation, but most corrupt police officials kept a much lower profile. Besides, Reinbot's fate was hardly a deterrent: when he finally came to special court in 1911, beyond the loss of his special rights and titles, he received a fine of 27,000 rubles and a one-year prison sentence. The fine was little hardship – from one deal alone, Reinbot was alleged to have pocketed 200,000 rubles – and Tsar Nicholas II subsequently interceded to ensure he never had to go to prison.
Petty corruption was endemic within the police as a whole, from turning a blind eye in return for a consideration, to outright extortion. Even essentially honest officers saw no real problem in breaking the law in pursuit of their duties, manufacturing confessions or applying the 'law of the fist' (kulachnoye pravo) to teach miscreants a quick lesson with a beating. Their watchword was 'the more severity, the greater the authority of the police', but authority did not mean respect or support. Alienated from the masses, feeling largely unsupported by a state which paid them little and expected much, it is perhaps unsurprising (if indefensible) that the police cut corners and lined their own pockets.
Peasant justice
He's our criminal, and it's up to us to punish him.
Peasant saying
Russian culture is characteristically rich in its forms of peasant resistance to their masters, whether that be the state or the local landlords, grandees and officials who afflicted them. At one end of the spectrum came the sporadic explosions of rural violence known as bunt, which Pushkin characterised as 'Russian rebellion, senseless and merciless'. Russia has faced widespread rebellions at various times, such as the Pugachev Rising of 1773–4 or the 1905 Revolution, but more common were localised cases of violence, such as the depredations of outlaws or the visitations of the 'red rooster' (slang for arson, a crime used by peasants as 'an effective weapon of social control and a language of protest within their communities, as well as against those they deemed outsiders').
Most of Russia was in practice policed by the community's fists and by the landowner's whip. Even the chief of the paramilitary Gendarmes was of the view in 1874 that local police lacked 'even the possibility to organize any police surveillance at all of localities with heavily populated manufacturing centers', so that they were but 'passive spectators of the criminal acts that are committed there'. Instead, order in the village was largely the preserve of samosud ('self-judging'), a surprisingly nuanced form of lynch law, whereby the members of the commune applied their own moral code to offenders, regardless or even in defiance of the state's laws. This has been best studied by Cathy Frierson, who concluded that – contrary to the opinions of many police and state officials of the time – it was not mindless violence but a process with its own logic and its own principles. Above all, this sometimes brutal form of social control was essentially geared towards protecting the interests of the community: those crimes which threatened the survival or social order of the village were dealt with most harshly. In particular, that meant horse theft, which threatened the very future of the village, by depriving it of a source of foals, power, transport and, in due course, meat and leather. Death was the usual penalty, and often in some notably painful and inventive way. There was, for example, the thief whose arms and legs were skinned before his head was split by an axe, or another beaten to within an inch of his life and then thrown to the ground before a charging horse for a poetic coup de grâce.
Was this a crime, or was it the commune policing itself? Needless to say, the state resented and feared the notion of peasants taking the law into their own hands, but there was very little it could do, given the strength of the peasants' own moral code and the practical difficulties of mounting day-to-day policing of such a huge country. The police were thinly stretched across the countryside, did not seem able to promise real justice or restitution (tellingly, only around 10 per cent of stolen horses were recovered) and rarely made great efforts to win themselves friends in the village. The rural guards known as uryadniki, for example, while drawn from peasant stock, had, by taking on the tsar's uniform, aligned hemselves instead with the state. (It is worth noting at this stage that the injunction against taking arms for the state would also appear in vor culture.) The peasants typically called them 'dogs', and the uryadniki returned the favour: a contemporary observer complained that they 'boast of their commanding superiority and almost always treat the peasants with disdain'. It is thus hardly surprising that one contemporary source suggested that no more than one in ten of all rural crimes were ever reported. Nonetheless, the internal control mechanisms of the village – tradition, family, respect for the elders and ultimately samosud– ensured that the absence of effective state policing did not mean outright lawlessness.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Vory"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Mark Galeotti.
Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of illustrations vii
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xi
A Note on transliteration xiii
Introduction 1
Part 1 Foundations
1 Kain's land 9
2 Eating Khitrovka soup 21
3 The birth of the vory 35
4 Thieves and bitches 49
5 Thief life 61
Part 2 Emergence
6 The unholy trinities 81
7 Gorbachev's gangsters 97
8 The 'Wild Nineties' and the rise of the avtoritety 109
Part 3 Varieties
9 Gangs, networks and brotherhoods 125
10 The Chechen: The gangster's gangster 150
11 The Georgian: The expatriate vor 166
12 The gangster - internationalist 181
Part 4 Future
13 New times, new vory 207
14 Mafiya evolutions 223
15 The criminal wars 240
16 Bandit Russia: The theft of a nation? 255
Glossary of commonly used terms 273
Notes 276
Bibliography 302
Index 317
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