One problem with talking about the Mafia in Russia is that probably almost half, maybe more, of businesses in Russia operate at least partly illegally. As I've mentioned before, official poverty and income statistics are worthless in Russia, because companies usually report their employees as earning several times less than they really pay them, so as to avoid paying taxes and benefits and to get out of having to follow labor laws. You can rest assured that, despite what the UN says, Russians are not getting by on a dollar a day (except for some pensioners). Moreover, Russia doesn't really have laws. There are things that are legal and things you have to pay the cops to let you do. The streetwalkers in my neighborhood give money to the cops rather frequently.
If by "Mafia" we mean gun-totin', drug-smugglin',hit-contracting operations, they are quite pervasive but have become very quiet; at least in Moscow, you no longer have legions of bullet-proof cars filled with Kalashnikov-wielding thugs hurtling around all over the place. Contract killings, at least murders officially designated as such, are far less frequent that they were in the mid-90s.
These groups grew out of the various local black-market and prostituion rings that operated in the Soviet Union (always with state connections). After the USSR fell, there was a period when these groups expanded rapidly and came into often-violent confrontation with each other. Now, however, you have Big Mafia, which is more interested in keeping things quiet. This is part of a general stabilization of Russian society.
It's interwined with everything. Every Russian business down to a cigarette kiosk has to pay an illegal krysha ("roof") either to some criminal syndicate or the government (which are virtually the same thing). There are known Mafia members in the Duma, like Iosif Kobzon, the Mafia crooner who always struck me as the Frank Sinatra of Russia. People aren't happy about it, but they don't have any choice.
My opinion of Putin is probably considerably higher than anybody else on this list, but when he was assistant to the mayor of St. Petersburg, he served as a liason between the city government and various criminal groups, including the notorious pipeline-building operation, when they used the pipe to shovel tons of stuff from the Hermitage into Finland.
Any other comments I can add off the cuff? The Mob is a big contributor to the Orthodox Church, I think because a lot of them are worried about what's going to happen to them when they die. There's a rather well-known priest who used to be in the Mafia -- nobody talks about what he did, but he seems to have been a hit man.
For some reason, the Mafia is dominated by ethnic Jews, a lot of whom have Israeli passports. The Russian and Israeli mafias are so closely linked they're virtually branches of the same organization. There's also a large presence of Caucasians.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------
Ian wrote:
Speaking of Russia.....Comments Chris?
< http://www.eurasianet.org > RUSSIA'S ORGANIZED CRIME: A TYPOLOGY Part I: How the Mafias Were Formed A EurasiaNet Commentary by Roustam Kaliyev: 1/31/02
Part I of a two-part series. Read Part II.
The Russian Mafia poses serious obstacles for Russia's development and has been perceived as a threat to its neighbors and even the West. Yet few seem to have a clear understanding of how Russian criminal syndicates are organized. The structure of criminal syndicates has evolved considerably due to the changing political circumstances of the late Soviet period and the subsequent upheavals in the Russian Federation. Criminal networks have grown to represent an attribute of the country's national character. Many in the West expected President Vladimir Putin, who had made his career in the Security Services, to herald a new approach to law enforcement. However, the problem of criminalization of the state at all levels remains.
The problem is not simply corruption, such as bribe taking, that infects the public sphere, but actual criminal activity by governmental and law-enforcement agencies. The organized crime groups in Russia can be divided into 3 major categories: "classic," "governmental," and "national." The classic Mafias are the familiar structures known throughout the world. The governmental structures are the security services and private security agencies that run substantial criminal enterprises. The national Mafias sprang from ethnically Chechen groups, which were initially set up explicitly to protect Chechen business interests but then diversified their activities and membership.
Among the "classic" groupings we find many ethnic, territorial and other criminal groups that formed and functioned along established systems, and were familiar to the law enforcement community. Famous groups include the Tambovskaya, Solnetzevskaya, Tul'skaya and Armenian Mafias. Their activities include: the drug trade, arms trade, smuggling, robbery, contract murder and more recently kidnapping and trade in people. [snip]