The underworld in Russia From the Czarists and the Communists, the new Russia inherits thugs
Fleet, Robert
Robert Fleet
THE UNDERWORLD IN RUSSIA
It's been there all along
American media were shocked by the assassination of Moscow journalist Vladislav Listyev last March. Listyev was a TV personality, and...
...Outside the city...
...Police and government officials became corrupted by the unfair way in which laws were administered-leading to grassroots tolerance of criminal activity...
...The worst legacy of the Soviet Union is that it warped the Russian's everyday concept of what is criminal and what is not...
...Sergei explained, "We were taught to despise 'speculators.' In the Communist system, everyone worked-speculators make money doing nothing...
...democracy" leaves these emigres stranded in an ethnically chauvinistic society that does not readily accept them...
...Speculators...
...Autocratic government was a structure Lenin adapted to his "revolutionary" purposes...
...Democracy is not just free elections, though Americans often believe that's all it takes...
...I know that...
...But long-time observers of Russian society do not offer such a hysterical analysis...
...Read Dostoevski, or Gorki's Lower Depths: like Dickens in Victorian England, these writers found violence, criminality, and corruption pandemic in feudalistic Russia...
...Sergei answered reluctantly...
...has fewer ties to Mexico than to his "hood," so too with young Georgians, and the like...
...Faced with choosing between Stalin's gulags and a bad conscience, few party officials suffered any ethical crises...
...Russians learned to avert their eyes...
...Let's buy from the old ladies outside," I suggested...
...Profit for nothing...
...Where do they buy it...
...We were taught all our lives that making profit is wrong, it's capitalist exploitation...
...Sergei was disdainful...
...Let me give you an example...
...With the new Russia comes opportunity...
...Both were legacies of Czarist Russia...
...The criminal underclass the Bolsheviks inherited had long experience in surviving in a police state...
...But only by exposing it, as journalists are doing, can the problem be addressed...
...Russia seemed less criminally violent until recently because it was officially violent...
...Guided through Moscow in late 1992 by Sergei Kostin, I participated in the following exchange while purchasing groceries at an expensive, Western currency store...
...In another sad similarity to an American social crisis, the criminal underclass in Russia is largely an urban group comprised of non-Russian minorities drawn from the former Soviet empire...
...Criminal anarchy does threaten the social fabric of Russian society...
...Under Communist rule, the intermingling of ethnic nationals was enforced by decree...
...What was true in party circles also held for the criminal milieu: undisciplined, "soft," or one-time criminals were quickly put away, leaving the strong and clever...
...The IMF and Congress have yet to take such thinking fully into account when they make economic demands on Russia...
...A strong, ruthless underworld stepped into that void...
...Russia always has been violent, experienced commentators say, and it is the nation's newly developing free press that is bringing the violence to light...
...Listyev was a TV personality, and his shooting was reported as akin to killing Geraldo Rivera...
...While Kostin and other East European observers make no claim that the Soviet police state resembled that of America circa 1932, he does note that in both instances a criminal "resistance" evolved as a result of arbitrary, selective persecution...
...On one night in 1938 virtually half the Politburo was removed from an apartment building, with their families, and never seen again...
...Yet just as a second generation Chicano in L.A...
...They seek legitimacy by mainstream-ing their offspring...
...Instead, the criminal underworld was strengthened by persecution...
...They understood the advantages of compromising apparatchiks with extralegal perks-as Kostin uncovered for a documentary titled Red Mafia (made during the waning Soviet years...
...They are 'speculators' because they buy meat cheaply, bringing it from far away, so you can pay 100 rubles more for it-without having to spend hours traveling...
...I could walk up to the Russian "White House" in November 1992 without being stopped at all by guards...
...Robert Fleet THE UNDERWORLD IN RUSSIA It's been there all along American media were shocked by the assassination of Moscow journalist Vladislav Listyev last March...
...In the old system, though, the "mainstream" was as corrupt and dangerous as the underworld...
...However, though American tradition embraces John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde as folk heroes, this is not a Russian sentiment...
...This does not absolve the Communist era from culpability...
...According to Kostin, Russian criminal activity was not snuffed out by decades of repressive and puritanical Soviet communism...
...Their price is half...
...Western critics of current Russian society should not be surprised by this ancient alliance...
...The Murder Inc.-style death of Vladislav Listyev and others has shaken up the squabbling politicians, giving them public support to fight back against lawlessness and anarchy...
...As the apparatchik-styled Communists die off, so will many of the old-line criminals...
...For these resented and isolated groups, crime is a form of survival and crude protest...
...Before reform can happen we have to learn a new way of thinking...
...That scenario was replayed on every level of the "classless" society...
...Negative selectivity" is how Kostin describes the process...
...But Kostin and other Russians hope that there is an opportunity to outgrow such myths and create real social order...
...We all like our Robin Hoods...
...Neither, however, do these observers offer much comfort...
...Corruption was rampant in the Soviet system...
...Until the Afghanistan war injected a wave of disillusioned Soviet Army veterans into the society, Russians "enjoyed" a much less visibly violent society than people in the capitalist West...
...High and low, powerful and insignificant, in the paranoid police state Stalin perfected, violent crime existed-they simply called it "enforcing order...
...Where do such cultural biases leave Russians now...
...To many living in Moscow today those days have taken on a mythic quality...
...Whether the Russians can stop short of authoritarianism is the question...
...Communists did not invent the criminal underworld, just as they did not invent the repressive institution of the secret police...
...There is nothing wrong with what they do...
...They sell salami for 400 rubles-I know they pay only 300...
...Still, the rush of violence now filling Russian newspapers is not new: discussing it out loud is...
...Journalist Sergei Kostin's Dangerous Epic: The History of Soviet Nuclear Submarines (Laffont, Paris, 1992) established his credentials as a critic, not an apologist, for his country...
...I'm uncomfortable with speculators...
...In the immediate wake of the Soviet Union's demise, the pendulum swung to total freedom in Russia...
...I am a journalist supporting economic reform...
...The concept meant nothing to me in that context...
...By the time reformers such as Khrushchev and Brezhnev came to power, the ties between criminals and the apparatchiks were thoroughly entrenched...
...There was less crime in 1937 than now, but the price for security was paid by thousands of "enemies of the state" summarily rounded up and shipped off to gulags or executed...
...How were these ladies "speculators...
...Buildings were constructed with false walls where the police spied upon occupants...
...They look down on the criminal with a disdain that would make J. Edgar Hoover proud...
...The murder also highlighted a new fear in relations between the former superpower opponents-that Russia, center of the deceased Soviet empire, is descending into criminal anarchy...
...In their wish to throw off the repressions of the Communist state, Russians left a void of authority...
...He raised his eyes, seeing the unstated assumptions behind his reactions...
...Like post-Prohibition America, successful Russian criminals generally do not encourage their children to enter the family "business...
...Under the Soviets, only the most ruthless and devious could survive in government-particularly during Stalin's rule...
...Democracy is also an attitude of openness that does not shrink from the responsibility of facing the unpleasant.ibility of facing the unpleasant...
...Russians are rule-followers, order-oriented...
...Finally, and most important in understanding the current rise of crime in Russia, is the violent legacy of Soviet communism itself...
...Khrushchev and Brezhnev did reform the worst aspects of this horror, but the memory kept the populace cowed...
...In some respects, in the same situation the United States was in at the close of Prohibition...
...It was encouraged by the criminal networks...
Vol. 122 • October 1995 • No. 18
