The Soviet Mafia
Vaksberg, Arkady
Last July, a month prior to the abortive hard-line coup that would prove Soviet Communism's undoing, I was in Moscow researching an article on crime. One of my first stops was the Ministry of...
...They had personal servants, hairdressers, masseurs, tailors—all Internal Ministry personnel...
...Vaksberg seems to think, however, that the mafia has been behind virtually everything that has happened in the USSR since Stalin...
...The exploits of the Soviet Union's new mafias had become a staple of new progressive publications like the business/political journal Kommersant...
...One could question his contention that the ethnic violence in places like Nagorno-Karabakh or Kazakhstan was the result of intra-mafia power struggles and manipulation...
...Indeed, in a relatively benign way, this woman was simply getting a piece of what, prior to perestroika, had been monopolized by the Communist nomenklatura: the good life...
...To a question about the Soviet mafia, she replied: "The Party—that's our mafia...
...their activities underscored the "cowboy capitalist" character of late perestroika—raids by armed Ingush on gold mines in the Soviet Far East, for instance...
...T he venality of it was breathtaking...
...Twenty thousand rubles were allocated for a gold gavel bedecked with jewels, which was apparently never presented to Burger...
...The reading public was clamoring for news about them...
...In the penultimate chapter, he speaks about the billions of dollars in foreign aid that were sent to the Soviet Union to bolster Gorbachev: "One can say without fear of contradiction that a large proportion of the goods and money sent by the West to help the impoverished Soviet people fell into mafia hands...
...In some of the ex-republics—in Azerbaijan, Central Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine—they retain much of their power...
...I was at first struck by the seemingly non-propagandistic presentation by Pugo's spokesmen: they bombarded me with statistics showing that every imaginable type of crime—murder, extortion, prostitution, banking and financial scams, arms and narcotics trafficking—was on the rise...
...he was sacrificed in the token housecleaning that followed...
...This is somewhat misleading...
...As that money begins to flow, one hopes that Nikolai Shcholokov, from the grave, doesn't get the last laugh...
...It disarmed any potential criticism of him...
...Still, by no means all of what the Ministry's apparatchiks told me was bogus...
...The USSR's top cop simply couldn't resist the impulse to loot...
...And," writes Vaksberg, "it was sent: a secret-service operative took this potty which played music when a child peed into it from Beirut to Moscow as a precious trophy...
...What The Soviet Mafia does, though, is provide a vivid sense of why the apparatchiks of the former Soviet Union, even after the formal dissolution of the CPSU, try to cling to power and thwart the reformers...
...Nine flats were requisitioned for his use...
...Brezhnev was also presented with a diamond-studded dagger and his bust in white gold...
...The end they serve is the guaranteeing of a life of ease and maximum self-gratification, a life with nothing denied and every whim satisfied...
...Yet in 1982, when Brezhnev came down to Baku to pay his respects, Aliev presented the Godfather with a ring...
...This aim dovetailed with the entrepreneurial impulses that had begun to resurface in the absence of Stalinist terror...
...Twenty-four billion more have been slated by the West for Russia, eventhough the legal basis for a market economy has yet to be established, privatization is only just beginning, and much of the bureaucracy is the same as it ever was...
...He cites the confessions of a KGB major, stationed in Beirut, who received a coded request from Moscow Center for ten tins of olive oil...
...Newer stars included exotic ethnic gangs, like the Ingush and the Moslem Chechens, both from southern Russia...
...In essence, I was being fed the rationale for the State of Emergency Committee's power grab...
...Indeed, Aliev made a name for himself as the "hammer of the mafia"—a fighter against corruption...
...in fact, something like "The Mafia State" would make a better title...
...Shcholokov and his family had a special private shop for their exclusive use...
...For Aliev, though, power itself was heaven...
...another asked for a "musical potty" for a grandchild...
...In Russia, the struggle continues, with Yeltsin and Co...
...And in this convergence of interests the Soviet mafia was born...
...Where the newly-emerging Soviet businessman found support from party and state functionaries, both sides flourished...
...Some of Jonas Bernstein covers post-Soviet affairs for Insight...
...And Vaksberg suggests something else...
...Martin's Press/285 pages/$24.95 reviewed by JONAS BERNSTEIN The American Spectator July 1992 61 THE SOVIET MAFIA (continued from page 61) memory" of his visit...
...All their dangerous and convoluted schemes to expand their power and increase their wealth are not the end but the means...
...But with the benefit of post-Communist hindsight, we can see that, even with the partocracy weakened, ethnic hatred is thriving...
...His ministry also launched a campaign against art collectors, accusing them of currency violations and other crimes...
...There were old favorites like the Lubertsy gang, or "Lubers," thuggish young sports enthusiasts from the Moscow suburbs who started in the early 1980s as petty racketeers and graduated to drugs and prostitution...
...And for that reason his external way of life—comparatively speaking, of course—appeared modest...
...On the ring was set one enormous stone symbolizing Brezhnev the Sun King, and around it glittered fifteen smaller stones symbolizing the fifteen union republics like planets orbiting their sun...
...I recall a conversation with a college professor who had her own shadowy business on the side, which involved going to Poland or India on Aeroflot, buying cheap clothes, bribing her way through customs and selling her wares at a huge profit...
...During a 1977 visit to the USSR by U.S...
...Drawing on scores of investigations that he undertook from the Brezhnev "era of stagnation" until the Gorbachev era, Vaksberg portrays the USSR as quite simply the mother of all kleptocracies...
...It was not the means but the end...
...This ring cost the Azerbaijanis 226,000 rubles...
...Likewise a set of silver wine goblets earmarked for the Angolan minister of internal affairs...
...Nikolai Shcholokov, minister of internal affairs under Brezhnev, is a conspicuous, but by no means isolated, case...
...When he received it, and heard the recitation of the symbolism embodied in it, Brezhnev burst into tears...
...Quite simply, they don't want to lose the easy life...
...That such factors were involved there can be little doubt...
...Chief Justice Warren Burger, Shcholokov got permission from his boss and pal Leonid to give the visiting dignitary a "happy (continued on page 66) THE SOVIET MAFIA: A SHOCKING EXPOSE OF ORGANIZED CRIME IN THE USSR Arkady Vaksberg St...
...there they could buy imported goods in bulk and resell them at a huge profit on the black market...
...T hese and countless other variations on the "power corrupts" theme enliven Vaksberg's book...
...To this end everything else is subordinated: operations, decisions, every move, no matter how these are "dressed up" ideologically as being for the common good...
...An interesting aspect of Vaksberg's portrait is that the post-Stalinist Soviet oligarchy comes off looking much like those of various non-ideological Third World kleptocracies—Noriega 's Panama, perhaps, or Mobutu's Zaire: In the final analysis all of them from top to bottom are human beings with the normal human qualities...
...The apparatus of repression was now used by the rulers to maintain their market share: "If separate groups of clever dealers were bold enough to try to operate independently, not sharing with or relying upon the ruling elite, they usually got it in the neck...
...Not all of the party mafia figures Vaksberg portrays are cut from the same cloth...
...Their collections were seized, with many of the works ending up adorning the Minister's dachas...
...One of my first stops was the Ministry of Internal Affairs, domain of the unlamented Boris Pugo, who would take his own life in the wake of the August 19 events...
...In Vaksberg's view, this acquisitiveness was the prime motivation of apparatchiks in all sectors...
...The motive for this candor, however, was soon apparent: the Ministry's explanation was that "so-called popular fronts"—i.e., nationalists in the republics—and unscrupulous new businessmen were taking advantage of glasnost and perestroika for their own nefarious ends...
...T he Soviet Mafia, by Arkady Vaksberg, veteran investigative reporter for the weekly newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta, bills itself as "a shocking exposé of organized crime in the USSR...
...pitted against the nomenldatura bloc that dominates the Russian legislature and bureaucracy...
...If Shcholokov was nakedly corrupt—a Soviet Mobutu—the former Azerbaijani Communist boss Geidar Aliev, with his machiavellian instincts, cult of personality and clan-based power structure, was more reminiscent of Sad-dam Hussein: Other bosses also aspired to power—as a means of ensuring heaven on earth for themselves...
...He starts from this basic premise: after the Stalin period, during which any remnants of ideological fervor or enthusiasm for "building socialism" had been drowned in seas of blood, the Communist ruling class—the nomenklatura or "partocracy"—devoted itself simply to acquiring la dolce vita...
...The natural processes going on inthe economic sphere began to converge with the interests of the new political class (to use Milovan Djilas's label...
...Something of an aesthete, Shcholokov cultivated figures in the Soviet art world, and managed to convince some of them to donate works of art "for the raising of the aesthetic level of militia generals...
...Every morning the minister's wife and daughters would be brought fresh flowers," writes Vaksberg, "paid for by the ministry and shown in the accounts under 'sundry official entertaining.— When Brezhnev died, the game was up for Shcholokov...
...Stripped of his goodies and perks and expelled from the party, Shcholokov committed suicide in 1984...
Vol. 25 • July 1992 • No. 7
