The world of the lower depths: crime and punishment in Russian history

Organised crime in Russia draws upon a rich, anarchic and dangerous tradition rooted equally in the problems in policing this sprawling, impoverished and authoritarian empire and the folkways of the town and the village. Historically, two distinct criminal traditions emerged. In the countryside, the problems of overcoming peasant resistance (especially evident through their samosud lynch law) and trafficking in identifiable loot meant that gangs of horse thieves became increasingly organised in the nineteenth century. This proved an evolutionary dead end, though, and the real ancestors of the modern Russian ‘mafiya’ are to be found in the vorovskoi mir, the ‘thieves' world’, which formed in the slums of the cities as a result of the urbanisation and industrialisation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This became an increasingly homogeneous and organised underworld culture, with its own hierarchies, values and spoken and tattoo languages. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the hard core members of the vorovskoi mir were deliberately embracing their status as outsiders and beginning to assert their dominance of the prison system, something which would later bring them into contact with the Soviet state. This led to an internal revolution which left them willing and able to operate within the confines of an increasingly corrupt USSR, ready to capitalise on the collapse of the Soviet system.