From The Times Literary Supplement
22 February 2002

Headlines on Russian organized crime appear regularly in the Western press and carry alarming messages: “Crime without punishment”, “Evolution of a mafia”, “The Russian mafia means business”, “Russian mafia cash washes into London”, “The cloning of Russian gangsters around the world”, etc. Now we finally have a sober, scholarly account: The Russian Mafia: Private protection in a new market economy by Federico Varese.

Unlike the headline writers, Varese is cautious about the use of the term “mafia”. For some, he notes, “mafia” is a phenomenon typical of Sicily, and the term is to be used only in reference to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. Varese argues that mafia is a “species of a broader genus, organised crime, and various criminal organizations – including the American Cosa Nostra, the Japanese Yakuza, and the Hong Kong Triads – belong to it”. But does anything of the like really exist in Russia? By tracing its roots back to the Soviet criminal underworld, and by comparing the Russian mafia to its Sicilian counterpart, Varese arrives at the conclusion that it does. The key notions for the specific nature of the Russian mafia, however, are those emphasized in the author’s subtitle: private protection and a new market economy – both indicating change rather than continuity.

It is at first somewhat surprising that the Russian Mafia came to be associated with providing private protection, as one would expect that it is from the mafia that such protection is needed. Indeed, Varese shows that, in the early and crude stages of racketeering in Russia, kiosk owners were forced to pay a so-called protection fee, so that their “protectors” would not burn down their kiosk. Such schemes, however, quickly developed into sophisticated forms of alternative law and contract enforcement – including debt recovery, the settlement of tax and payment arrears, and the resourceful negotiation of business issues with the local bureaucracies, customs, or arbitration court (arbitrazh) on behalf of the “protected”.

Protection has its demand and supply sides. The demand for protection is created by Russia’s transition to a market: the weakness of state protection, the imperfection of Russian legislation, and the inefficiency of law enforcement agencies. Importantly, Varese also indicates that corruption, being an illegal activity produces a demand for alternative protection because the actors in this exchange do not know for sure that the other party will deliver what was promised (the bribe money or a favourable official decision). In Varese’s own words, the contemporary mafia emerged as a consequence of the imperfect transition to the market.

The demand for protection, Varese argues, is only met when there is a supply of people trained in the use of violence and weapons. Some of these are “supplied” by the state apparatus (ex- and current employees of the KGB, MVD, and the military), by various private protection firms, sport

organizations and security departments created by the large firms. All of these are significant players on the protection market. Varese’s focus is on the “criminalized” sector of the protection business (although some would argue that in Russia all protectors have to resort to unlawful methods in one way or another). More precisely, Varese looks into the
origins of the Russian mafia by analyzing how the post-Soviet demand for protection has transformed the Soviet criminal underworld. He provides evidence of both the entrepreneurs in need of protection and the criminal underworld equipped to offer an effective “roof” (protection).

Perm, the focus of Varese’s fieldwork, is an industrial city, situated in what Solzhenitsyn called the Gulag Archipelago. Perm-36 for example, was an infamous camp where political dissidents, such as the literary critic and writer Andrey Sinyavsky and the human rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky, were confined. The legacy of the Gulag has created a criminal order, run by vory-v-zakone (literally “thieves-within-the-law”) – chief criminal “governors” in charge of the criminal order. The history of the vory-v-zakone is fascinating: they existed throughout the entire Soviet period. The number of vory went from fewer than a hundred in the
late 1980s to 740 in 1994, and then declined sharply to 387 in 1999. To illustrate this trend, Varese recounts the case of Yakutenok, a vory-v-zakone “crowned” in a camp in the Perm region at the end of the 1970s and killed in 1998 on the order of “new” criminal authorities in a “war” over the spheres of influence.

Apart from Perm-based ethnographic records, Varese explores general trends in the rise of strong criminal groups in the post-Soviet period. Their leaders
often get involved with legal business, becoming directors of commercial enterprises and banks. They also bribe politicians and law-enforcement agents. Both tendencies have serious implications for the State and society. In his final paragraph Varese concludes: “One need not ask whether the Russian Mafia is bad for society: that we know. One should ask rather whether the remaining institutions of authority, which are supposed to enforce universal rights and secure protection for the Russian people, behave according to a logic entirely different from those of the mafias. Doubts remain.”

It looks as though some positive change in law enforcement is under way. Addressing hearings in the Russian Parliament in November 2001, the Deputy Interior Minister, Yevgeny Soloviev, said that over 10,000 officers have been put on trial since the beginning of the year. Among these officers, 2700 have been sued for corruption. He also said that the MVD has asked its Internal Security Service to launch an investigation into the fact that organized crime groups made 820
attempts to infiltrate the MVD in the first nine months of 2001, and that the Federal Service of Security (FSB) now screens all applicants for positions within the MVD.