The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia

Organised crime groups have operated throughout vast territories of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and in the contemporary Russian Federation. Mark Galeotti’s recent book, The Vory, begins in the era of Tsarism, shifts through to Soviet gulags and the subsequent rise of black markets, the callous 90s, then ends in the post-Crimean sanctioned Putin regime. Galeotti puts forward an engaging account of criminal activity across a Russian underworld that has undergone metamorphoses through three different political periods and ideological configurations. This is a well-researched book that thrives due to its impressive cross-historical depth and insights from the author’s own decades of investigative experiences in the region. While Galeotti’s overarching claim is plausible – that organised crime in post-communist Russia has become entangled into the state’s economic and political structures, there are several generalisations made in reference to specific periods of Russian history that are lacking in evidence and leave the reader with conceptually unsubstantiated claims.

The vory (thieves) are representative of a set of criminals with larger ties to a hierarchical underworld of organised crime. In pivotal portions of the twentieth century, vory facilitated a range of activities from drug dealing, prostitution, to being participants in piracy on the Black Sea and in ambushing state mint-carrying trains during the civil war. Organised crime was ongoing at the side of Bolshevik activities. Bolsheviks, argues Gaelloti, were very willing to draw on criminal elements for political purposes (p. 36). By the ending years of the civil war, Article 49 of the Criminal Code was introduced which sent tens of thousands of socially ‘unfit’ figures to prison. In the 1930s, this Article was being increasingly utilised for political purposes – resulting in millions being placed into the Gulag system. Stalin’s policies argues Gaelloti, fostered the vorovskoi mir (thief’s world or world of thievery). This contributed to the formation of a dog-eats-dog context in the gulags that was marked by a struggle for daily survival. Combined with Article 49, Article 58 (prosecution of counter-revolutionary acts), resulted in a substantial segment of the male population getting sent to the system of gulags. From these harsh conditions emerged informal institutions in the vory v zakone (thief in law) who were mediators and moral authorities (p. 47). There also existed blatnye – a criminal minority that preyed upon petty and political prisoners. Next emerged the suki (bitches) who assisted the state in running the gulags and were informants (p. 51). As such, Gaelloti argues the communist state co-opted the worst of the underworld, transforming them into agents and trustees that kept the 58ers and 49ers at bay.

Eventually, the suki won over the vory through an overly violent inner-gulag struggle. When Stalin died and Kruschev became leader, a process of de-stalinisation was launched – leading to the closure of the gulag system and the release of five million criminals back into society. ‘Lawlessness’ rose exponentially in society (p. 85), which brings us to the first real problematic area in the book. Gaelloti puts forward a number of claims about general patterns of crime, some of which are accompanied by diminishing punditry of the Soviet social system, but does not substantiate these patterns with sufficient evidence. It is difficult to ascertain how much crime first arose after the gulag system was dismantled, then subsequently arose again around a decade later without estimates on different crime rates. For example, Gaelloti notes that ‘Organised crime was atomised back to relatively small-scale ventures and, despite continued sporadic cases of armed robbery and the like, often defaulted to activities such as fraud and illegal gambling’ (p. 86). What do small-scale ventures constitute in the context of ever-changing socio-economic milieu? What was the homicide rate or rate of varying types of violent crime before and after the gulag system was disbanded? No information is provided by the author that would enable the reader to connect the dots on such questions. This makes it difficult to weigh the potential impact that organised crime had on criminal behaviour indicators across a Soviet system that contained over a hundred ethnicities and hundreds of millions of inhabitants. In fact, formal statistics of different types of crime rates are entirely absent from the book.

After the gulags, the vory began to collaborate with communist party members when convenient for the latter. This involved black-market connections, yet their extent is again not substantiated in any meaningful way by the author. In the 1960s the authority of vory declined in the criminal world, then resurged in the 1970s due to economic stagnation. An underground economy gained prominence and resulted in state assets being stolen (p. 89). By the time Gaelloti arrives at his description of the 1980s and Gorbachev’s reforms, it leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness about the preceding two and a half decades, especially if we consider part of the title of the book, a Russian ‘Super-Mafia’. Further, from bootleg liquor, fake tobacco, to the black-market Afghan heroin trade, the 1980s were a turbulent time in the Soviet Union and things only got worse for the newly established Russian Federation in the 1990s. The 90s were a decade that has been perceived as being one of the most unstable, crime-ridden, and economically depressing of modern Russian history. Here, the vory were overrun by a heterogeneous collection of violent actors – many of which were gangster-businessmen (avtoritety – authority) who relied on labour of former athletes, military-servicemen from the Soviet-Afghan conflict as well as common criminals (bandity). Gaelloti paints a credible picture of the wide array of different criminal organisations that were active from the 1990s and into the 2000s. He does a splendid job in differentiating the ethnic dynamics between different gangs including Slavic, Chechen, Georgian, Armenian, among other peoples who all appear to have distinct modes of operation in relation to one another. Nevertheless, the reader is once again left with a gap in understanding how organised crime actually impacted different crime indicators. For instance, Gaelloti notes, ‘This was a decade of drive-by shootings, car bombs and the virtual theft of whole industries, in which the forces of order seemed powerless’ (p. 110). Were the 90s the pinnacle or exemplar of Gaelloti’s ‘Super-Mafia’? – one could make a strong case for this claim, as it would be difficult to find another decade of Russian history where organised crime had taken such a prominent role domestically while at the same time expanding outwards to places such as Spain or the US. In the absence of an evidentiary-based approach, however, Gaelloti does not (and cannot) make such an assertion.

The meaning of the vory became largely symbolic by the 2000s – a new era that was marked by gangsters becoming semi-legitimate businessmen and eventually politicians. While a number of vory still existed, they were old timers and were largely utilised by crime groups for reputational purposes and money laundering. This is where the state appears to have struck a collection of deals with major organised crime groups to place a cap on violence so it could be aware of large-scale crime operations. Simultaneously, organised crime groups expanded their networks, capital, and practices into an increasingly globalised world. Domestic institutions such as court systems failed to prosecute major organised crime figures. This pertains to a grander claim made by Gaelloti – that crime infiltrated business and then politics in the year 2000 when Putin became president. Since, the Russian state has been embedded with organised crime to such a significant extent that Gaelloti asserts this relationship drove (or at the very least had a principal influence over) Russian foreign policy in major international events such as the ongoing Ukrainian conflict and 2014 territorial seizure of Crimea. For example, Gaelloti claims that areas of Russian separatism in the Ukrainian conflict contain significant criminal elements (p. 249–51). While criminal-political alliances in regions such as Donbas or Luhansk are indeed factual, equating the totality of this conflict with crime and the vorovsky mir’s entanglement with the Russian state is a strong assertion. Gaelloti does not take major regional de-industrialisation and lack of social welfare into account when explaining why over 13,000 battle deaths have occurred throughout the duration of this conflict. Gaelloti’s account also strips any agency away from non-crime-affiliated civilians in these regions – some of which did end up fighting for their own reasons, were not coerced by mobsters to participate in conflict, and did have legitimate claims to rebellion after having been stripped of their political sovereignty as a result of a regime transition that they did not participate in (2013–14 Euromaidan). This brings us to the final sections of the book which are disappointingly speculative. Gaelloti’s claim of a ‘Super-Mafia’ lacks evidentiary support. For instance,

‘According to a conversation with a Russian police officer, representatives from Solntsevo had visited Crimea for talks with local vory even before 4 February 2014, when Crimea’s presidium, or governing council, considered a referendum on its status. The Muscovites came not just to feel out the scope for further criminal business, but also to gauge the mood of the local underworld’ (p. 246).

It is unclear how one police officer can provide significant knowledge of covert clandestine political operations that are supposedly carried out via the upper echelons of governmental security sectors. How was this subject chosen for the interview process? Considering Gaelloti’s politicised descriptions of the Soviet period, one should be concerned about selection bias with regard to this interview. Similarly, the book’s linkage of Russian military decision-makers to organised crime groups is difficult to ponder over. For example, at the height of the Crimean crisis, high ranking Russian military officials such as Mikhail Ulyanov (Director of the Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms control at the Russian Foreign Ministry) boldly stated that Russia could deploy nuclear weapons to Crimea. The presence of anti-ship missiles such as the Utyos or the strategic stationing of Tu-22M3 bombers illustrates that the Russian state has significant foreign and national policy interests in Crimea. If we consider a counter-factual scenario in which Eastern Ukraine was absent of criminal networks, it is apparent that foreign policy interests would still be pursued by the Russian state, especially in view of the monumental strategic and historical importance that Crimea has for its foreign policy.

In summary, The Vory, when compared to Vareses’ The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Citation2001), Oleinik’s Organised Crime, Prison and Post-Soviet Society (Citation2003) or Stephenson’s Gangs of Russia (Citation2015), offers a broader cross-historical account of organised crime throughout Russian history. The Vory is a necessary read for regional specialists including criminologists and sociologists. It should also be of interest to non-regional scholars. The book is rich in detail and historically vast. Yet it is also theoretically shallow and fails to present the reader sufficient empirical evidence. The major claim of a ‘Super-Mafia’ is left unsubstantiated, and apart from the 1990s, it is hard to imagine such an entity existed.