Angry Planet - Your Handy-Dandy Guide to the Russian Mafia

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

From blue-tattooed psychopaths to “businessmen” with a twist, Russia’s vory developed a code all their own - if you can call it that. Mark Galeotti takes us through the history of Russia’s mafia and how that history helped to shape Vladimir Putin’s state. For a more detailed look, check out his book “The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia.”You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollege.co. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. In parts of Siberia where by summer the huge clouds of mosquitoes would arise, I mean, one of the things they could do, the guards could do, is literally just stake you out, and in the course of a day, you would be killed by mosquito bite. You're listening to War College.

a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Who runs Russia? Is it Vladimir Putin's government? Is it the oligarchs? Is it the FSB? Is it the criminal gangs? Well, what if the answer is yes? Friend of the show, Mark Galiati, is a senior researcher at the Institute of International

relations in Prague. He's a Russia expert, and he's here to talk with us today about his new book. The Vori, Russia's supermafia, explores Russia's rich criminal traditions, and they are rich. Mark, thanks so much for joining us. Always a pleasure. So let's just start off with what is the Vori? The short answer is the Vori, it simply means the thieves in Russian, is the name, the overall Portmanteau for the kind of professional criminal subculture that emerged, particularly in the 20th century. And still survives today, but in rather different form.

But essentially, I mean, in a way, these are the tattooed hard men we know and love from film and TV. People who had actually sort of moved into a kind of professional existence as criminals, but who also had made a cultural choice. choice. These were, shall you say, were also the maidsmen of the Russian underworld, the people who really had submerged themselves in the realms of organised crime. So how systematized is it? Are there rules, a code of ethics, that kind of thing? Yeah, I mean, what it was, and again, this has changed. In the heyday, the Vorey were very much marked by a kind of code of ethics, I mean, a singularly unpleasant one, in fact that you absolutely always had to follow through on promises made to other

vorei. You always had to make good on debts to other vorei. But basically everyone outside that realm was considered to be nothing. They will just pray. And it's interesting actually that in the language there's a jargon of the vorei, the Russian word Yudi people. is only used for other vore. So in other words, if you're not a criminal, you're not even a person. And then also this is, again, I mentioned the tattoos, this is a subculture that was very much also determined by this visual language of tattoos. The phenomenally sort of intricate often encoding on the body of their preferences,

where they've been to prison, what crimes they committed, what their attitudes were. And this is something that actually came out to really the late 19th century, the so-called Vorovsky Mir, the thieves world, which is this criminal culture that had emerged really in the slums of rapidly emerging and industrializing urban czarist Russia. And they actively sought to turn their back on mainstream society. I mean, one of the reasons why, if you compare it to say the Japanese yakuza

that have their own tattoo language. But they're always on the body and on the upper arms so that basically you can wear a shirt or even a tennis shirt and conceal the fact that you're a yakuza. The VOR tattoos were very, very clearly meant to be visible. You know, you've had sometimes extraordinary things like sort of tattooing barbed wire across the forehead or different tattoos on the hands and on the knuckles. And in part, that's because that's your kind of critical.

but also in part it's an indelible because this is the age before laser removal, an indelible mark that basically I turn my back on mainstream society, you know who I am, fear me. So this was this very distinct encapsulated society that became vastly more powerful and integrated during the era of Stalinism. So we had millions of Soviet citizens being thrown into the labor camps where they were dominant. And over time, and maybe this is something we can talk about later, they sort of had a split and what became a dominant faction decided that it could at least work with corrupt officials and so forth. But even so, there is still this sense that they were, and still are to a degree,

a caste, a subculture, a society apart from the mainstream. That is one of the fascinating things about in your book you talk about the gulags and how these people, the Vory, were brought together and from all over Russia into these camps where they were isolated and distilled. And can you sort of talk a little bit about the process when that was happening and what you ended up with? Surely. Well, I mean, what happened was the Vori had often been inside prisons and prison camps. And in fact, that was almost a mark of.

pride. I mean, again, as I mentioned, some of the tattoos would actually say which labour camp or similar you had been to, particularly if it was one of the northern ones, which are much more sort of dangerous and therefore it was a mark of your hardness to show that you've been through one. But they sound almost like their real life was when they were behind bars. But then with Stalin, and you have literally millions of Soviet citizens being sort of swept up in this sort of whirlwind of terror and brutality. The overwhelming majority of whom were not criminal in any meaningful sense of the word. They laughed at the wrong joke. They didn't laugh at the right joke. Someone happened to denounce them just because they had a grudge,

or just simply there was a need for more slave labourers and secret policemen with quotas just went out and just swept people up. Now, what this meant was the VORI were a minority within the labour camp system. And that very much contributed to this sense of a sort of a common identity. And particularly we also, we think of the Gulag system as somewhere where you're condemned, you go there, you work, cutting down trees, digging coal, whatever, until either you're freed or you'll die. Well, that's actually not the way it works. This was a much more dynamic system. Prisoners were constantly being moved around because there was overcrowding at this camp. because that camp had just had a cholera epidemic and needed more workers.

Because the coal seam there had been tapped out, but there was now the need to mine radium over there. For whatever reason, people are constantly being moved around within the camp system. And what this means is actually you get this genuinely global, within Russian context or Soviet context, global criminal identity. It's not just, I'm a thug, a gangster from the Moscow region, or from Yakaterinburg or whatever, because these people are constantly being moved around

and therefore you get this homogenization. And then the second key factor is Stalin has millions of people behind Barbire. He wants to use them as in effect slave laborers the most efficiently possible. Now, the best way of doing that is not to hire lots and lots of camp guards who are going to need to be paid and everything else,

but to co-opt people within the prison system. And so what in effect happens is you have a tacit alliance between the Stalinist state and a fraction of the Vori who are willing to collaborate. And these become the foreman, even the guards and in due course and sometimes even people running camps for the state in order to keep the political prisoners in line. Because if you're going to hire people, do you hire the bespectical 50-year-old academic who's in there because he taught the wrong thing at university to be your enforcer? Or do you hire the hard 30-year-old career murderer? You know, probably the latter. So anyway, they became the shock troops of Stalinism within the Goulag system. And in the process, they broke part of the code of the Vori,

which had always said that you could never, ever collaborate with the authorities in any way, and this is a new course going to lead to violence within the criminal world. But these collaborators, which again in the charming parlance of the Vori themselves, what were called Suki Biches, would actually become crucial to the whole Gulaq system. And then when after Stalin's death, the gulags are opened up, they essentially reshape the entire Soviet underworld in their image. So you have, on the one hand, a really coherent criminal culture,

but on the other hand, one that was already learned that, in fact, there's real advantages in working with the state and already have their first networks of connections in order to be able to do that on the outside. All right, I have a few questions based on that. First, what exactly were those advantages? When they were in the Gulag system, what were they getting in return? And what did the, I guess, the gang conflict look like?

Did the bitches go to war with anybody? Well, I mean, on the first point, what did they get? Well, a better chance to get out of the Gulag system alive is the first and simplest answer. I mean, this is a time in which actually the state was not totally uncaring about the Gulag system. prisoners, just simply because they were after all raw material in some ways. But nonetheless, I mean, this is a time in which malnutrition, all kinds of other diseases and so forth were rife. And therefore, even just simply getting the fact that, you know, you will be worked less hard or not at all and you will have a better chance of getting

food, could well be the difference between life and death. But more broadly, you got to have power. I mean, unfortunately, that's one of the, you know, the drive. for so many human beings. Even if you're in a small social world constrained by Barb wire and the Siberian wilderness beyond it, nonetheless, the chance to be a big man in your small camp should not be underestimated. So they got power, they got minor perks, and they got survival.

Now, the conflict between them and the traditionalist criminals, generally known as the Bluffmier, but I'll try not to. throw too many Russian terms in. Didn't really happen much before the end of the Second World War. There were more traditionalists than they were collaborators. And so basically the collaborators prayed on and pushed the ordinary criminals, the political prisoners to work. And they, as far as possible, ignored the traditionalists.

The traditionalists despised the collaborators, but they knew that if they went after them, the state would back them and the state had all kinds of nasty ways of killing you if need be. I was reading actually one in which in parts of Siberia where by summer the huge clouds of mosquitoes would arise. I mean, one of the things they could do, the guards could do, is literally just stake you out, and in the course of a day you would be killed by mosquito bite.

Anyway, so there's all kinds of ways in which the state can make sure that you don't go after its collaborators. However, during World War II, a lot of criminals, either volunteered or were forced to go and fight. In the course of which, by basically taking up arms for the state, they were considered to be collaborators. And so when at the end of the war, they were thrown back into the gulags, they found themselves being forced into the ranks of the collaborators

by the traditionalists. You also have the awful spectacle of the fact that Stalin had thought that basically no Soviet soldiers should be willing to let themselves be taken prison. And so what that meant is you had the ridiculous and horrifying spectacle of many Soviet prisoners of war being freed from the Nazi concentration camps and essentially at gunpoint being loaded onto trains and being driven to Stalinist concentration camps. But again, these soldiers, because they had fought for the state, because they'd worn uniforms, were considered by the traditionalists of the outsiders. So you actually had this strange alliance of collaborators and ex-soldiers. And suddenly there were just too many of these collaborators to be ignored. The long, vicious Cold War broke.

And so at the end of World War II, you had the start of this rolling wars within the camps. And often that was fought in ones and twos. An individual collaborator has his head beaten in by a shovel. An individual traditionalist has three collaborators burst into his cell and holding down and strangle him. But increasingly it becomes something that is larger scale and erupts into essential riots and pogroms within the gulags. And look, the state didn't want this. The state was worried that it was losing control over the camps. But on the other hand, if there is going to be a war, it wants the collaborators to win.

So it basically put its thumb on the scale. It did what it could to support them. So for example, you have a lot of collaborators suddenly being given jobs as cooks and barbers inside the gulablers. the Gulaq. You might think, well, what about that? Well, what that means is they have access to sharp metal things. So all of a sudden, they are armed. Or you have the authorities deliberately sort of basically forming contingents of collaborators, sending them all to one particular camp where they basically beat, humiliate, or kill the traditionalists, and then moving them on to the next as sort of shock forces. So one way or the other, you have to, you have to be, you have to, you, you have,

have this, this extraordinarily vicious individual and collective war being fought within the Gulag system that frankly makes it almost ungovernable when productivity declines dramatically. All right, before we move out of the Gulag system, and I've got a question about a specific Russian term that comes from it, that is a little bit to do with the Vori. It's one of these things that I've always heard and always assumed was not true. But since we're here and we're talking about it, I'm going to ask you. Are you familiar with the Russian term Korova or like Mancow? Is this a real thing?

And can you tell the audience what it means? I suppose the key thing is, look, we need to make absolutely sure that we realize that the Vori were strong and they made great characters for film and TV. but their culture was absolutely horrendous. You know, it's hard to think of a group that was more vicious, often towards themselves, but certainly towards everyone else. And therefore, you have a whole series of particular sort of uses of outsiders. I mean, sometimes we're talking about basically, you know, rape being a way of both demonstrating your power over someone else. and just sort of, you know, basically formally breaking people.

The most, I think, horrendous one is the notion that, and this is clearly sort of something that did happen, however much it got sort of embroidered, sometimes when gulag, when prisoners wanted to escape from the gulags, particularly the ones that were way up in the far north or in the deeps of Siberia, where in many ways the security was not just the barbed wire around the camp, The real security was the fact that there was nowhere to go,

and that soon enough you'd have guards with dogs on your track, and no food, nowhere to find shelter or whatever. So one of the things that was sometimes done is that some vori would befriend a non-vore. And remember, in vorey culture, a non-vore is not even a person. And say, oh, we're going to escape, we can go over the wire, why don't you come with us and whatever, not realizing that his role was essentially to be walking provisions. I mean, another word for these people is miasa, which literally means meat.

So the point is that when the food that they can find, steal and scavenge runs out, they will just turn, kill this person and eat him. As I said, I mean, it seems hard to credit. But nonetheless, it clearly did happen. And it happened often enough that there was actually a specific, term or terms within the Gulag vocabulary for these people, which again, I mean, I think illustrates the extent to which this is not only a kind of a horrifically violent and vicious subculture, but it's one that really clearly considered outsiders to be of having no rights,

no value, or anything else. So let's take it out of the Gulag and as... As... what happened once people were being sent home once after Stalin was dead the gulag started to shrink and how did it how did the voree continue to evolve well yes you you had I mean let's be honest the gulag shrank not because specifically because Stalin died nor out of any kind of humanitarian impulse

but just simply because it was no longer cost effective and it's striking that the first person who actually advocated running down the Goulag system was Lavin de Beria, who was Stalin's last and most unpleasant, and that's quite a high bar to vault, most unpleasant secret police chief. And again, it says something about the Soviet state, but in fact they let the professional criminals, the murderers, the thugs, the burglars, out first on the whole before they sent out the political prisoners. But anyway, so what you had is, well, first, First of all, I mean, terrifying experiences for the towns and cities closest to the Gulags

that were suddenly being overrun by what they call these blue gangs, blue because they were covered in, these guys were covered in tattoos. And for a while, you know, actually, in Siberia, you almost had this kind of almost wild west environment prevailing. But that was a sort of, largely a temporary sort of, the initial flood. What happened was, you know, the gangsters went out. They went back into the underworld. There they encountered often a lot of traditionalists who hadn't actually experienced the war that had taken place in the Gulax.

And so you have another running little low level civil war taking place within the underworld all across the Soviet Union. But anyway, the collaborators win. They reshake the code in their interests. They still use the same words. They still call themselves Vori and such like. But they are in a very different world. they have to adapt to the fact that what you can get away with in the gulags, you cannot get away with an ordinary society. I mean, here the state is powerful, vigilant and jealous of its power.

The police and the KGB are not going to let you get away with being the kind of blatant gangster that you could before. And so what happens is that over time, and this is something that takes place really through the 60s and the 70s, is that they adapt to operating out of sight beneath the surface. In some ways at this point, you have three main sources of criminality, organized criminality within the Soviet Union. You've got the Vori, as it were, the proper traditional gangsters. You have the black marketers, the people who are actually responsible for, let's be honest,

an underground economy, a second economy, that really becomes increasingly essential to actually keeping the Soviet Union functioning. And then the most powerful of all are the corrupt party bosses. And this is a period in which actually the Soviet Communist Party becomes increasingly corrupt until more or less corruption becomes its closest thing to an ideology. Now, the black market entrepreneurs, they have money, but they don't know how to spend it. They have access to all kinds of goods. Some of it made domestically, some of it smuggled from the West,

so forth that everyone wants. But on the other hand they're also insecure because they're ultimately that they just gangster businessmen who have no real legal power. The officials, they want the money, they want the goodies, but they can't be seen to be getting in bed on the whole with the black marketeers. So what happens is organised crime emerges in some ways as the connected tissue. They've already become the connected tissue between these two realms. At first they basically bully and predate and extort from the black marketeers until they realise that actually it's better just to make a deal with them and be paid off to provide protection and so forth.

And they also can be the people who can actually mediate between the black marketers and the officials. And so this is one of the reasons why we didn't really think about there being organised crime in the Soviet Union. And I think this is one of the areas that the scholarship was lacking. There were some emigre writers, people like a chat called Charlie Zer, who wrote about it. And this was seen as an interesting little curio, but pat on the head and let's move on. We had basically assumed that there could not be organized crime within a police state.

And because it wasn't visible, we assumed it wasn't there, until the 1980s when the Soviet system began to collapse, and that's when they began to emerge from the rubble, and that's when I began to be interested in them. But in that period, particularly through the period of General Secretary Leonie Bresnev, when the emphasis was on just keeping everything quiet, letting the elite live a nice feather-bedded life, letting the black marketeers do their business, keep the population happy and keep the elite in the nice fancy imported goods. Organized crime was able to operate in that world, but very much as the weakest of the three. the other two, one had power, one had money, organized crime just simply fitted in between. How did organized crime fit in with the security state, as in KGB?

And I guess we'll talk in a little while about the successor. Well, look, the KGB, which was ironically, probably about the least corrupt institution within the Soviet Union. that is not to say uncorrupt, but just least corrupt. But also, I mean, it was exceedingly pragmatic. And therefore, you had a situation in which sometimes you had people within the KGB who were just simply in cahoots with the gangsters. But they usually did that in the context of kind of wider alliances. I mean, in places like Georgia and Uzbekistan, for example.

We saw these massive and extraordinary criminal ventures which stretch from out and out gangsters all the way to the Republican Party bosses. all busy sort of scamming literally millions upon millions of rubles and living very good lives. But also you often had cases in which actually the KGB would be willing to turn a blind eye to gangsters so long as they were useful. And we particularly saw this in Moscow and in what was then still Leningrad and Alson Petersburg, where you had a whole bunch of sort of both black marketeers and gangsters who are involved in things like changing money,

basically trying to buy hard currency from foreigners in return for way above the artificial sort of official rate. I mean, the official rate was always paid that one ruble equals one dollar. Now, in reality, rubles were worth vastly less than a dollar. So they would come along and they would say, we'll give you 10 rubles to the dollar or whatever. Or else they would come along and they would try and buy the jeans off you. I mean, one of the more surreal experiences I had, which also says something about the fact that the Russians are a nation of people.

Once being in the lift, this is probably my, maybe even my very first time in Soviet Union when I was actually still at a school kit. In the lift and Russian approached me with a sort of twinkling design. You have Agatha Christie, because Agatha Christie books were apparently incredibly popular. So even Agatha Christie, who done it, there was a black market for. So what you had is a bunch of criminals who had routine regular contact with foreigners and who also, let's be honest, we're trying to encourage foreigners to do something that was against the law. So this is exactly the kind of person that the KGB turned to.

Basically said, well, you know, tell us what you can pick up. We will let you continue within your activities as long as you act as an asset for us. Tell us, you know, what's going on. Occasionally we might actually want you to go even further, you know, maybe sort of see if you can encourage certain sort of targeted foreigners, you know, you want women or whatever, that will actually put them into compromising positions that the KGB can then capitalize on. So even from that first point, you actually have the secret police that is meant to be there fighting crime, actually sitting there thinking, well, we'll fight crime sometimes, but at other times we're going to use it

if it's part of our wider political mission. How do you join? I mean, in some cases, it's through sort of family and so forth, but this is not basically an organised crime milieu, like, say, the Italians or whatever, which is clearly linked around family and kin and so forth. Essentially, you join by growing up with people who have joined. You join by showing that you're interested and almost kind of hunting out the gangsters and making your pitch.

There is this term a chastiorca. which basically it means a kind of a gopher and a wannabe. You know, you have to put in your time. You have to show that actually that you're trustworthy. You have to show that you're willing to kind of learn criminal slang. You have to show that if need be, you're tough. And then maybe if you impress the people enough, they will induct you and you will become a fully fledged member of the Vorovskrimier.

But this is it. You know, it is, theoretically, it's open to anyone. But the point is you clearly have to show that you're interested and that you're useful. And you have to kind of work your way through to it. You don't just simply turn up and say, hey, my uncle is one of you guys. Can I come in and join? No, no, no. You have to demonstrate your credentials.

So we now move on to probably, I mean, the contemporary relevance of this book and of the Vori is really, really striking. after the Soviet Union fell in 1991, things started to change. The role of the Vori started to change. Can you talk a little bit about that evolution and where we've ended up now? Sure. Well, this is interesting. I mean, in some ways, the evolution had started before the Soviet Union collapsed. I mean, during the sort of the Gorbachev reform era, I feel so, so sorry for Gorbachev on so many bases.

But one of them was actually all his essentially, well-meant reforms turned out to be perfect for organised crime, galvanised them, gave them economic muscle. So by the time the Soviet Union had collapsed, these gangsters were already coming out of the shadows. And instead of being the weakest element, for a brief period, they were the strongest. When the Soviet Union collapsed, suddenly corrupt officials

who had power because they were Communist Party officials, suddenly needed to scramble for position in a new world, whether it was setting up companies, whether it was winning elections or whatever. But the point is they didn't, they suddenly lacked the power that they had once had. And likewise, this is a period in which law enforcement was pretty much in collapse. So the underground entrepreneurs, the black marketeers, they likewise, they didn't have any protectors. So all of a sudden, organized crime comes along and basically it says, we have muscle. In the early 1990s, right after the Soviet Union collapsed, basically it was a period in which

there was no law, everyone needed protection, and organised crime could provide you with protection. So for a while they were dominant, and what we see at this point is the rise of a new kind of war. Not the tattooed thug from the camps, but a gangster businessman, so-called authoritarian, authority. Someone who basically is just looking for money and power and is happy to do crime if crime will get it safely, but is also perfectly happy to do legit. It operates right across that spectrum. And it's this new gangster businessman who becomes frankly dominant through the course of the 1990s. It doesn't happen overnight.

There's going to be all kind of jostling between the old generation and the new. And as is always the case, the old generation just think, oh, well, the newcomers, they don't know what it was like, they're not as hard as we were and so forth. And the younger generation say, well, we don't care, we can hire hard men because we've got enough money and pay. power. But so through the 1990s, when Russia is going through this extraordinary elongated period of almost state collapse, in which actually the government can scarcely govern, in which local government is often penetrated by all kinds of different criminal interests, in which soldiers and policemen and even secret policemen are scarcely being paid their wages, and therefore everyone

is involved in all kinds of corrupt scams. This is a period in which organized crime, suddenly changes from being parochial, hidden, to being a truly dynamic global force. And I think the global thing is worth mentioning, because no one knew what was going to happen in Russia. No one knew if the thing was going to stabilize, if the country was going to break apart, or if communists or ultra-nationalists were going to come into power, which meant that basically everyone wanted to get a certain amount of their money, at least, out of the country. and so for the gangster's point of view, they very, very quickly also internationalized

so that if things went bad in Russia, they would have money and friends and a bolthole outside the country. So the 1990s absolutely crucial in essentially reshaping Russian organized crime. Were they still tattooed at that point? Or their entire look changed? Besides the suits, I mean, did they become like the Yakuza where the tattoos were hidden,

or did they just abandon that whole? whole part of the culture. I mean, bit by bit, it was a band. I mean, you still see people with tattoos, just as you still see people calling themselves Vori or the Vore Vosacogne, the thief within the code, which is the kind of the authority figure, the sort of combination of judge and high priest of the Vorovs coming here. You still see people using this, but very, very much it's declined.

You know, back in the day, you wanted to use your tattoos to make yourself look distinct, make yourself look separate from mainstream society. Now you don't want that. You want to be able to operate in every single world. You want to be able to operate in the crime world, but at the same time be invited to the ambassador's reception to be going there in your speedos at Saint-Ropé and not look like a freak.

So actually the tattoos are very much sort of disappearing, particularly as a code. Nowadays, you know, if you want a tattoo, you get yourself a tattoo. Back in the day, because you'd be a tattoo. because each tattoo had a very specific meaning, you had to show that you were entitled to it. You know, let's say a camp, you know, that you had a sort of, you know, this one was for example showing a sort of leaping stack, which showed you've been to a particularly hard labour northern camp, in other words, that you know, you survived that, that means you were tough. If it ever came out that in fact you hadn't deserved to have that tattoo, that you've not been to that, that can't.

If you were lucky, humiless men would be presenting you with a knife so that you could actually scrape that tattoo off your skin. That's if you were lucky. Those days where the tattoo language would really matter and was enforced, they'd gone. Now, I mean, it's funny, you go to the sort of the hipster bars of Moscow, which, let's be honest, has actually become an extraordinary hipster place. And you will see guys who are wearing, once upon a time, would have been considered VOR tattoo. and they clearly are not worried. They just thought they were cool tattoos. What's the role of them in popular culture?

You know, we've kind of teased this idea that they're tough guys and they're in movies and TV. And I'm kind of, like, especially in Russia, I'm curious, how does the culture talk about them? It's interesting. There's a massive true crime genre. You know, you go to bookshops and there's loads of sort of things about all the various sort of gangster activities. But I would say, I mean, there's two particular connected strands. One of them is that gangsters clearly are gangsters. They're not nice people.

But at least they are honest crooks. I've heard this term, honest criminals, so many times. What is an honest criminal? You know, it's a crook. Who knows he's a crook? Who doesn't pretend he's anything else? And that's contrasted with the dishonest crooks. Who are the guys in suits, in the mayor's office, and in Parliament?

or in uniforms at the police headquarters or the secret police or whatever, who claim to be working for the people while they're actually ripping the people off every day. So it's quite interesting that there's almost like at least there are at least the sort of the morally correct gangsters. And they're not Robin Hoods. I mean, this is interesting, you know, there isn't that same sense of gangsters being good people. But on the other hand, at least they're honest about who they are. compared with all the other gangsters around. It says something about a very, frankly, nihilistic and sort of downbeat perspective of modern

politics, which is probably not inaccurate. But the second point I make, what's really fascinating is really illustrated by, there were two blockbuster films, Brat and Brat Dabar, a brother and brother two. First one, the protagonist is basically a kind of vigilante who takes on gangsters from the North Caucasus. At the time we got to the second one, though, he's essentially an organised crime figure, a kind of hitman, and he goes to the United States, because I won't go into the plot. But one of the key themes is, yeah, okay, we're Russians, we have gangsters. But at least our gangsters are the toughest SOBs around. because when our Russians go to America, they basically show the American mafia what's for

and Ukrainians and others and so forth. So there is this kind of weird perverse pride or kind of inverse pride. If we're going to be a mafia state, if we're going to be a sort of state run by gangsters, at least let us be run by the smartest, nastiest, toughest gangsters around. In these places that I guess I would call the fringes of empire, if I can use that term, if that's not inaccurate. Kind of, what places like Georgia and Chechnya, what does this stuff look like? Does it change at all? Is it the same? Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting that, for example, nowadays, the majority of people in Russia

who are classed as Vordi Vazakonje, these are in the code, these authority figures within the underworld, are actually ethnically Georgian. and in part that's because Georgia itself had a very efficient and effective campaign to drive criminals, organized crime figures out of their own country and a lot of them went to Russia. But it's also because actually the old traditions, the old language actually has lasted a lot longer on the southern fringes of Russia. Because there I think organized crime, firstly it fits in with a certain kind of clannish

macho culture. But secondly, it was also a way back in the day in which you could also kind of strike a blow against Moscow, strike a blow exactly against the Soviet Empire that controlled you by ripping it off. So, you know, corruption and gangsterism hand in hand had this kind of almost nationalist legitimation. That basically, you know, this is how we fight back against the Russians who controlled us. so it's still quite quite strong there still quite clannish and so forth the Georgians is one thing but the Chechens I think are really fascinating it's one of the reasons why there's just a chapter that I devote to them in my book

starting with this conversation I had with a Chechen hitman who is quite the loveliest Chechen hitman that you could ever choose to meet but nonetheless obviously an exceedingly scary figure at the same time And what's happened is that the Chechens have basically capitalised on what we could call their brand name. Everyone knows the Chechens are as hard as nails, not least because of the two Chechen wars that Russia had to fight to try and keep them in post-Soviet Russian Federation. And it's generally assumed the Chechens are crazy. That if you take the Chechens on, they will keep coming at you and they will summon their brothers and their cousins and keep on coming. and keep on coming until they've ripped you down, whatever the cost to them.

So for that reason, most people will not take the Chechens on. The kind of person, the kind of business, let's say, that comes up with, someone demands some money from them, you know, lovely shop you got here, shame for it burnt down, they might be sitting there thinking, well, okay, so here's a gangster, but on the other hand, my brother-in-law is the local chief of police, so I'll turn to him instead. Chechens come along, and you think, ah, game over. you're going to make a deal. So much so that they've even actually sort of basically sort of franchised out their brand name.

You actually have gangs that basically pay to be able to allow to use the term, we work with the Chechens. So in the case of the Chechens and the Georgians, you have different patterns. But in each case, what it is is because they're outsiders, because they're people who in a way for whom crime was also a way of fighting a covert rebellion against foreign occupation. It's still much more central

to their kind of cultural response to the Russians. I wanted to get to one more thing before we leave, and it's not necessarily a small thing, but how the Russian state works now along with criminals. This is something that I think you write about

very eloquently, but Vladimir Putin and his state, they're not really separate from the criminals who they use. What's your phrase for how they utilize criminals? I mean, yeah, I mean, I've made it because one of the terms we someone's hear about Russia is it's a mafia state. It's not a term I like because it implies either the state absolutely controls the underworld or the gangsters control the state. What I've suggested in some ways is instead under Putin we have a state that is trying to nationalise the underworld. Because it's really very striking how Putin in particular has totally refashioned the relationship of state to organise crime. I mean, in way, just as back in Soviet times there were kind of three sources of criminality.

There were the gangsters, there were the black marketeers and there was the corrupt party bosses. Well, anyway, now still we have the mainstream underworld, we have the embezzling kleptocrats and oligarchs in the business sector, and we have the also embezzling kleptocrats within officialdom. And there's a lot of overlap between these three worlds, but they are different. Now Putin, when he came to power, when he was first standing for election, 1999-2000, he spoke very tough about law and order. and a lot of people believed him, after all, ex-KGB and so forth. So I remember talking to one VOR who literally had a packed suitcase underneath his bed so that if one of his informants in the local police or procuracy

heard that he was going to be picked up, he could just grab that suitcase, zoom for the airport, and get the hell out. Well, he never had to use that suitcase. Because what happened was, in effect, Putin instead offered organized crime a social contract. And literally this was, you know, actually what happened? I remember talking to one cop who was working in Moore, which is the Moscow Criminal Intelligence Division. And he was meant to be one of the people trying to catch gangsters. And instead he was actually having to go down and have sit-downs, have meetings with various gangster bosses

and basically sketch out the new rules of the game. Which is basically this. Organized crime will continue to do crime and the cops will continue to try and catch them. That's fine. However, if the gangsters did anything, which looks like a... challenge to the state or which embarrasses the state, then they will be treated as enemies of the state, which is obviously a much, much more serious kind of response. And on the whole, you might say after 10 years through the 1990s of turf wars and absolute anarchy, you know, the new generation of gangster

bosses who had risen, who are now really wanting to kind of consolidate what they had, thought, yeah, okay, so the state is back. The state is the biggest gang in town. It's okay. We can work. with that and they all are therefore willing to accept that social contract. And in some ways, in hindsight, we shouldn't be surprised because this is exactly what Putin did when he was deputy mayor in St Petersburg in the 1990s. His job was to be liaison with whoever needed to be talked to, including the local organised crime grouping, Tambovska. And in order to keep the city running and also for him and others to benefit, you know, he made deals and he just simply took that onto the national stage. But what's happened over time is that you might say at first this was

a social contract that was defined by negatives. You don't do certain things. And every now and then, an organised crime figure who seemed to have gone too far, who's getting a bit too embarrassing, whatever, would be arrested in a large, showy display of state force, just as simply to remind people that that, the state is, as I said, the biggest gang in town. But what we've seen since 2014, as this whole geopolitical conflict called war, hot peace, call it what you will, really steps up. And it's in a way as Putin on the basis of relatively little resources

basically tries to take on the entire West, he clearly has adopted a strategy of creating a mobilization state where it doesn't matter who you are, the state can call on you to do something. And that includes organised crime. So whereas once upon a time the social contract was just don't do X, Y or Z. Now, increasingly, we're seeing a thing in which, well, if you want to continue, the state wants you to do A, B or C.

And particularly in Europe, we've begun to see organised crime being used as in a way an additional asset for intelligence and subversion operations, in a variety of different ways, but particularly in terms of raising so-called black cash, untraceable money that has no kind of crumbling fingerprints on it, that can then be used to support convenient political movements and so forth. So increasingly what we're seeing is Putin considering organized crime to be yet one more potential asset for his political war on the West. And it makes sense. You know, if it's a problem that's not going to go away or can't be solved, you may as well make the best of it.

I think actually from Putin's point of view, I mean, this is one of the many, many tragedies of contemporary Russia. And I say this is someone who likes Russia and likes Russians. And I think we should always remember that, you know, Russians have been Putin's first victims. Many other people have been added to the list. But I think from Putin's point of view, he doesn't really see this as a major problem. You know, I think organized crime, like corruption, he every now and then pays lip service to it as a problem.

But in practice, his track record is it's only a problem when it actually gets in the way of particular things that need to be done. putting almost seems to like a world in which everyone has a skeleton in their closet because he gets to decide whose closet to look in and say, I'm shocked, shocked to discover that you've been doing something wrong. This gives him leverage, this gives him power, and this gives him a way of, you might say, having also covert and deniable instruments, as well as his overt and obvious ones.

Right, if it's a criminal gang that just hacked your election, rather than an actual Kremlin-backed cybersecurity presence, then I guess you have all the deniability in the world. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a case, for example, of some pro-Czechin, well, some Chechen pro-Rebel fundraisers in Turkey who were assassinated. Now, earlier, there have been assassinations, which are likely to have been in the hands of,

shall I say, card-carrying Russian intelligence officers. Then there was a bunch which the Turkish police with what was actually some very good police work I don't manage to identify who the killers were. They'd already long since fled the country. But basically they were members of a neo-Nazi Moscow car crime gang. Now, it's hard to think why it's a bunch of gangsters in Moscow should suddenly think, I'll tell you what, let's go with Istanbul and whack some Chechens. You know, it's pretty clear that they were employed and given basic training by the security apparatus

to go and kill some inconvenient people. But again, in such a way that could be entirely deniable. We can say, look, it seems fairly clear that. But can this be proven in a court of law? Of course not. So in this respect, it's great from the Russians' point of view. Organised crime, terrible if you're a Russian businessman. It's not much fun if you're an ordinary Russian citizen, but from the state's point of view, it's great.

because it means you've got this great pool of everyone from killers and hackers through to smugglers and people traffickers whom from time to time you can use. Well, Mark, thanks so much for once again coming on and scaring the crap out of us. That's perfectly fine. It's what I do. And thanks for the chance to pimp my book after all. Yeah, I actually can't recommend the book highly enough. If you really want to understand what's going on in the world right now, I think you can't do better than look back to a group of people who started as horse thieves, if I remember. Thanks for listening to this week's show.

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