Thieves World Reorganized

...Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other Russian cities overwhelmed by organized crime...

...No Western institution seems to have tried to track this money to its ultimate users...

...Special treatment was reserved for the "dissidents" challenging the closed system...

...Handelman s study includes reports of his own interviews with gangsters and police, and these add appreciably to what officials or Russian analysts have revealed about the mafiya...

...So they are easily bought off or intimidated if their investigations stumble upon a messy situation...

...A second important reason is contained in Handelman's final chapter, "Who Lost Russia...

...The blatant corruption—extending to the sale of cheap domestically produced oil at high Western prices—has driven the Russians to both despair and rage...

...Reviewed by Mark Hopkins Former Moscow news bureau chief, Voice of America WE ALL KNOW about the Russian mafiya now...

...Yet since he made that statement to law enforcement officials in February 1993, all evidence suggests that the mafiya has dug itself more deeply into the Russian system...

...Armed mafiosi strutted through the center of town...

...For the successful the rewards—none of which could be bought with rubles—were plentiful: luxurious apartments, access to restricted food and clothing stores, chauffeur-driven cars, trips to the West...

...No need for the Soviet maf iya to learn from the Italian...

...They found thousands of Party, government and security officials ready to conspire with them...

...The title designates godfathers chosen by their peers in prison camps...

...They were accustomed to a predictable and orderly, if dreary, life...

...The fall of the Soviet regime," Handelman notes, "left senior members of the former Party apparatus?the so-called nomenklatura—in administrative control of most of the assets of Soviet power...

...Now they find themselves unprotected by the state, losing control of their own destinies, and with scant hope that their future or their children's will be better...

...The main theme of his book—partly a scholarly work, partly the diary of a Moscow foreign correspondent—is that the Soviet system with its rampantly corrupt apparatchiks and post-Communist Russia with its vast swindling of state resources by the mafiya, form a seamless whole...

...Still...

...The spoils amounted to tens of billions of dollars as greedy government and Party officials teamed up with organized crime to profit from domestic and international illegal trading and financial dealings...

...Subtle the Russian mafiya is not...

...Neither the Russian government nor Parliament has launched—or encouraged—probing investigations...

...Although the police pride themselves on the thousands of low-level government bureaucrats who have been brought to trial on charges of taking bribes or embezzling business funds, everyone knows none of the big-time mafiosi or their allies in the state apparatus have even been detained for questioning...

...In one he declared that "Crime is destroying the economy, interfering with politics and under-miningpublic morale...

...Everyone has read about the machine-gun slayings in broad daylight on the streets of Moscow, St...

...Just recently there was the titillating story of the Russian mobster who, with his girlfriend, consumed seven bottles of Dom Perignon one afternoon at a southern French resort and then—right out of a bad gangster film?peeled off 13 $100 bills from a wad to pay the check...

...And they openly ate lunch with government officials...

...According to Handelman, mafiya activity in Russia and other former Soviet states was accelerated by a December '91 meeting of 30 men near Moscow...

...Nevertheless, Western governments tend to go on dealing with Russia as if it were a fairly normal nation, instead of a state run to a great degree by criminal syndicates in cooperation with a richly corrupt government...

...The Georgians, Armenians, Chechens, Ukrainians, and Russians in attendance were the old mafiya leaders...

...President Boris N. Yeltsin has pledged in no less than three major addresses to root out organized crime...

...Indeed, during Leonid I. Brezhnev's reign in the 1970s and '80s, criminal groups operated with increasing daring...

...That point is underscored by Stephen Handelman, the Toronto Star's Moscow bureau chief for nearly six years, in Comrade Criminal: Russia's New Mafiya...

...After World War II, when organized crime started to emerge from the margins of Soviet society where it had been largely held in check by the Communists, it simply mimicked the Party structure...

...The Russians, Ukrainians, Chechens and others had their own homegrown managerial models to imitate...

...Assassinations of scores of bankers, several members of Parliament, and journalists have made clear that the mafiya will stop at nothing when it comes to protecting, or expanding, its operations...

...Even the security authorities have admitted that the mafiya controls at least one-third of Russian banking and commerce, and as much as 90 per cent of privatized businesses...

...For the failures the punishment initially was execution, but later, under more benign Soviet rulers, this was reduced to public disgrace, internal exile and ostracism...

...The new mafiya, writes Handelman, "reflected the political and economic power of a criminal class more sophisticated than anything Russia had ever experienced before...

...Hand in hand with the mafiya, they proceeded to get rich as millions of Russians sank into poverty because of ill-conceived economic reforms begun in early 1992...

...After August 1991 police found evidence that organized crime had expanded into nearly all areas of the new Russian economy...

...In public statements at least, the West appears oblivious to the striking inroads organized crime has made in post-Soviet Russia—to everyone's detriment...

...Comrade Criminal inevitably falls short of being a thorough account of crime and corruption in Russia (let alone other former Soviet republics...

...Like government officials they live on the equivalent of less than $100 a month at best—what the mafiosi spend for lunch at expensive Moscow clubs...

...As Party power and central control crumbled," Handelman observes, "a new class of warlord rose to claim the spoils of the old system...

...And many Russians will tell you that is because the crime lords and the political apparatus are colluding to enrich themselves...

...The word "new" is meant to tell us that gangs were well-entrenched in the old Soviet Union...

...The West's biggest mistake was to have expected more than Russia was able to become" after the Soviet Union vanished, he writes, and many observers now would agree with him...

...If Handelman is at all accurate in his description of the Russian mafiya and its allies, some or perhaps most of this Western "aid" simply ends up in the coffers of criminals and government officials...

...No attempt has been made, either, to give muscle to the badly paid, equipped and staffed internal security police...

...The main reason for this, I think, is that it remains impossible to get all the necessary information...

...The highly disciplined Soviet Party and security services operated in a tight network that had its own standards of success and failure...

...Similarly, the International Monetary Fund continues to pour billions of dollars into Russia, the World Bank gives it cheap credits, and the international bankers meet in Paris to put off interest payments on billions more in loans...

...Shadowy syndicates were said to be in control of banks, stock exchanges, hotels, and commercial enterprises in most Russian cities...

...Handelman maintains that Mikhail S. Gorbachev's perestroika, in loosing market forces, contributed to even more robust lawlessness...

...Soviet Communist Party and government functionaries, including KGB officials, merged easily with criminal elements following the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991...

...They drove their flashy cars to the new hotels, discos and casinos...

...Nor is it a surprising phenomenon...

...Moscow gangsterism appeared to have lost all fear of the authorities...

...They were sent to labor camps, tantamount to a death sentence in the case of those whose health was not good...

...Each, in the Russian underworld vernacular, was a vor vzakony, clumsily translated as "Thief-in-Law...

...Or has heard about Russian gangsters jetting to London to buy million-dollar-plus apartments and townhouses for cash, and setting up offshore accounts on Cyprus to hide millions more...

...They enriched themselves through illegal exports of raw materials, through drug dealing, money laundering, prostitution, protection rackets, and influence peddling...