Mark Galeotti. Global Crime. Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2008.
The bandits of other lands observe their oaths and maintain the good faith and comradeship in crime. The dissolute and abandoned in Russia know nothing that is sacred… — Astolphe, Marquis de Custine (1839)
Some criminals revel in their history, even if it is typically mythologised, romanticised or simply invented. Thus, the Chinese triads represent themselves as the descendants of a centuries-long tradition of secret societies struggling against unjust tyrants, and the yakuza claim that their roots are not in the bandit kabuki mono (‘crazy ones’) who terrorised seventeenth-century Japan or the hired thugs of gambling and peddler bosses but the chivalrous samurai warrior caste and the public-spirited machi yakko (‘servants of the town’), militias formed to resist the kabuki mono. By contrast, modern Russian organised crime seems to revel in its very ahistoricity, placing itself firmly in the present and turning its back on its past. Even the traditional criminal culture of the vorovskoi mir (‘thieves’ world’), rich in gory and brutal folklore and customs generated and transmitted within the Gulag prison camps, is being put aside, as a new generation of criminal leaders, the so-called avtoritety (‘authorities’), eschew the tattoos and routines which marked out the old generation.
For all this, Russia’s modern underworld of sharp-suited criminal-entrepreneurs and their heavily armed bodyguards and leg-breakers did not emerge full-grown from their country’s tumultuous transition to the market after 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet system. Instead, they are heirs to a history which in its twists and turns reflects the wider processes shaping Russia, from centuries of rural insularity to the crash and crass, state-led industrialisation of the late nineteenth century and the Gulag-driven modernisation of Stalin’s reign.
Can Russia be policed?
Never tell a cop the truth. — Russian saying
Perhaps it is worth starting discussion of crime in Russia with an appreciation of the difficulties in policing this country. This was and is a phenomenally difficult task for three main reasons, of which the first and most basic is its sheer size. By the end of the nineteenth century, tsarist Russia covered almost one-sixth of the world’s landmass. The population of 171 million (1913) was overwhelmingly peasant and was scattered across this huge country, often in small, isolated villages and communities. Simply for orders or warrants from the capital, St Petersburg, to reach Vladivostok on the Pacific coast could take weeks, even by horse relay. The railway, telegraph and telephone were to help, but the size of this country has in so many ways been an obstacle to effective governance.
Furthermore, the empire was a patchwork of different climates and cultures incorporated largely by conquest. Revolutionary leader Lenin dubbed it the ‘prison of nations’ but the Soviet state willingly accepted this imperial inheritance and even today’s smaller Russian Federation is a multi-ethnic conglomeration of more than a hundred national minorities. To the south were the unruly and mountainous Caucasian regions, conquered in the nineteenth century but never subjugated. To the east were the Islamic provinces of Central Asia. Westwards were the more advanced cultures of the occupied Congress Kingdom of Catholic Poland and the Baltic states. Even the Slavic heartlands included the rich farm lands of the Ukrainian black earth regions, the sprawling and overcrowded metropola of Moscow and St Petersburg and the icy Siberian taiga. In all, the empire embraced some 200 different nationalities, with Slavs accounting for two-thirds of the whole.
This inevitably impacted law enforcement that often had to deal with a wide range of local legal cultures, often held by peoples to whom the tsarist order was an alien and brutal occupier, as well as the practical challenges apprehending criminals who could travel across jurisdictions. This might have been mitigated were adequate resources deployed to this purpose, but even these were generally lacking, either not available to the state or simply redirected to other purposes. After all, Russia’s state has also historically been relatively poor, inefficient in its revenue collection and perched upon an often marginal economy. Even so, spending on the police and the courts tended to take a distant second place to the military. By 1900, the proportion of the state budget spent on the police was around 6%—well below European standards and possibly the half of per capita expenditure in Austria or France and a quarter of Prussia’s.
The forerunners of what could be considered proper police forces and officials in Russia could be seen in the Razboinaya izba or ‘Banditry Office’ established by Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) to combat banditry or perhaps the nedel’shchiki of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bailiffs who enforced the will of the central court. These were, however, essentially only extensions of the tsar’s personal court and system of vassalage. Peter the Great is often credited with the introduction of a police force as understood in Europe when, in 1718, he established a special department to provide public security in the new capital he was building, St Petersburg (although even before then the tsar’s personal corps of musketeers, the streltsy, had largely taken over the role of fighting bandits). Catherine the Great sought to extend their role beyond St Petersburg, characteristically motivated by a blend of westwards-looking liberalism and hard-headed pragmatism.
The real father of the Russian police, though, was the much-maligned and misunderstood Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855). Contemporaries and later historians alike have characterised Nicholas as a cold-blooded conservative, a man devoted to maintaining a moribund status quo through the use of secret police tactics and repression. It is true that he sent his troops to crush liberal rebellions in Poland and Hungary and established the political police force of the Third Section in 1826. He was, however, very much a product of his times and his upbringing. The third son of Paul I had not been expected to rise to the throne and had thus been trained for a military life. His eldest brother, Alexander I, died unexpectedly of typhus, though, and his elder brother renounced his claim to the throne to marry a Catholic Polish countess. Nicholas’s military mindset left him saddened and impatient with the corruption, inefficiency and sheer lawlessness of Russia. Legend has it that he told his son ‘I believe you and I are the only people in Russia who don’t steal’. He sought to bring some order and fairness to Russia—a herculean task!—and the police were simply a part of it, alongside the codification of the country’s laws and efforts to reduce the scope for corruption within the elite.
In 1837, Nicholas turned to policing the countryside. Whereas before ‘policing’ had largely meant relying on the local gentry, with a blind eye turned to village lynch law (discussed below), the office of stanovoi pristav (‘district constable’) was established to bring the police closer to the village. The stanovoi pristav was appointed by the provincial governor from a list submitted by the local gentry. In 1879, these officers were granted a force of uriadniki (‘deputies’) to assist them. The management of the rural police was reformed in 1862, when the district chief (zemskii ispravniki), who had hitherto been elected by the local nobility, was made into a government official, responsible to the provincial governor. The final substantive reform of the rural police was to create a force of peasant guards (strazhniki) in 1903. A similar process took place in the towns. Until 1853, urban policing had been the responsibility of a motley collection of municipal guards, local forces and night watches. In 1853, these were dissolved in favour of new, centrally controlled units made up of ex-soldiers.
These reforms should not be overstated, though. The state’s grip on the countryside was always minimal, still largely confined to suppressing uprisings and dependant on the support (and hired guards) of the local gentry. The police—both urban and rural—tended to be an entirely reactive force, suffering from a lack of people and resources, poor training and morale, high turnover, endemic corruption (all in part symptoms of salaries worse than an unskilled labourer’s) and minimal popular support. Furthermore, they were burdened with a whole range of additional duties which distracted them from policing, ranging from the supervision of church worship to organising military recruitment. The standard ‘summaries’ of police duties published in the 1850s ran to some 400 pages apiece! While this sort of multi-functionality had been the fate of most other European forces in the past, they had (largely through the course of the nineteenth century) managed to pass off many of these extraneous roles, but the Russian police had only gained more.
Furthermore, they were as deeply involved as any in the corruption and the illegality of both the state and its functionaries, an age-old Russian tradition. The apocryphal story is that when the moderniser and state builder Peter the Great proposed to hang every man who embezzled from the government, his Procurator General gave the blunt reply that this would leave him with no officials because ‘We all steal, the only difference is that some of us steal larger amounts and more openly than others’. This was scarcely an exaggeration, as even into the nineteenth century, although officially banned, Russian officials were often implicitly expected to practice what in medieval times had been called kormlenie, ‘feeding’ off their posts with deals and judicious levels of bribe-taking, to supplement their inadequate salaries. The first government enquiry into bribe-taking was not conducted until 1856 and its view was that anything less than 500 rubles—in comparison, a rural police commissioner was paid 422 a year—should not even be considered a bribe at all, merely a polite expression of thanks. This became a particular problem when people overstepped the boundaries of ‘acceptable corruption’. For example, Major General A.A. Reinbot, the gradonachal’nik (police chief) of Moscow 1905-1908, became notorious for using his position to extort exorbitant bribes, setting a dangerous example to his subordinates. Two merchants who testified before an investigation of Reinbot’s graft noted that
the police took bribes before, too, but this was done in a comparatively decent way… When the holidays came around, people used to bring them what they could afford, what they could spare—the police used to accept it and express their gratitude. But this extortion commenced since the [1905] revolution, At first, they grafted cautiously, but when they learned that the new General, that is, Reinbot, accepted bribes himself, they no longer took bribes but actually commenced to rob the people.
Reinbot himself was dismissed amidst a public investigation headed by Senator N P Garin, but most corrupt police officials kept a much lower profile. Besides, Reinbot’s fate was hardly a deterrent: when he finally came to special court in 1911, beyond the loss of his special rights and titles, he received a fine of 27,000 rubles and one-year prison sentence. The fine was little hardship—from one deal alone, Reinbot was alleged to have pocketed 200,000 rubles—and Tsar Nicholas II subsequently interceded to ensure that he never had to go to prison.
Petty corruption was endemic within the police as a whole, from closing a blind eye in return for a consideration to more active and predatory corruption, such as extortion. Even essentially honest officers saw no real problem in breaking the law in pursuit of their duties, manufacturing confessions or applying the ‘law of the fist’ (kulachnoe pravo) to teach miscreants a quick lesson with a beating. This is not necessarily a problem in terms of public legitimacy, so long as this is generally understood and the police officers’ values are those of the people. However, given the wide divide between official and public values, as well as between official and effective state policy, this only served to delegitimise the police further. Their watchword might in effect have been ‘the more severity, the greater the authority of the police’, but authority did not mean respect or support. Alienated from the masses, feeling largely unsupported by a state which paid them little and expected much, it is perhaps unsurprising (if indefensible) that the police cut corners and lined their own pockets.
From bunt to bone-headedness: varieties of peasant resistance
He’s our criminal, and it’s up to us to punish him. — a peasant saying
It does not require a Marx to recognise that there will always be conflict between socio-economic orders, across and up and down the hierarchies of power. Who, after all, enjoys paying their taxes or tugging their forelock? There will, however, be radically different levels and forms of such conflict, and its comparative study can tell a great deal about a society, especially its degree of legitimacy and control. Legitimacy, after all, is central to the extent to which people willingly submit to higher authority. In a modern democratic state, for example, while many may try to shave off a little from their tax bill here or there, citizens generally do not question the state’s right to levy taxes, only perhaps their level or the use to which they are put. Even states with poor legitimacy, though, may be obeyed if they can exert a high enough degree of control—to put it bluntly, if they are feared. This could be the ‘Big Brother’ future of informants and 24-hour video monitoring, or it could be the classic model of a conquering nation, which threatens massive and bloody reprisal if its dictates are not observed. Russia is no stranger to this pattern, one applied by foreigners ranging from the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the Nazis in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, it has also been applied by its own rulers, whether Ivan the Terrible unleashing his private army of oprichniki on his political enemies or Stalin’s great engine of state repression. Such states may still face resistance from their subjects, but it will largely take passive and covert form. A state with low legitimacy and control, though, is probably on the verge of being relegated to the history books—as Tsar Nicholas II discovered in 1917.
Russian culture is characteristically rich in its forms of peasant resistance to their masters, both the state and the local landlords, grandees and officials who afflicted them. To a large extent this is a product of erratic and exploitative rule, but it also reflects a strong underground tradition of democracy. The most vivid example of this was the importance of the veche, or assembly, in medieval Russian cities—especially the northern trading city of Novgorod, where the veche evolved to the point, where it could make or break princes until crushed by Muscovy in the fifteenth century. The tradition that the community can counter autocracy was and remains a strong one.
At one end of the spectrum of peasant resistance came the sporadic explosions of rural violence known as bunt, which Pushkin characterised as ‘a Russian rebellion, senseless and merciless’. Russia has faced widespread rebellions at various times, such as the Pugachev Rising of 1773-1774 or the 1905 Revolution, but more common were localised cases of violence, such as the visitations of the ‘Red Rooster’ (the slang for arson, used by peasants as ‘an effective weapon of social control and a language of protest within their communities, as well as against those they deemed outsiders’) or the depredations of outlaws. The turn of the twentieth century also saw a dramatic growth in rural ‘hooliganism’. For all the Anglo-Irish roots of the word, hooliganism (khuliganstvo) is a very Russian crime—not least in its very amorphousness. It became used for a bewildering array of offences, from public nuisance and obscenity to arson, assault and even murder. The common denominators were that they were crimes against public order, usually committed without premeditation and often with no clear motive but defined usually by a distinct antiauthoritarianism. Hooliganism was by no means an entirely rural phenomenon, but it became seen as proof of the decay of the traditional means of social control over the countryside.
This division between the social norms of rulers and ruled is, to a greater or lesser extent, visible in all cultures. One of the distinctive features of Russian society, though—and, for that matter, Soviet society—was the size of this gulf between the state’s perceptions of crime (and thus the legal definitions) and society’s beliefs about what was right and what was wrong. Perhaps, nowhere is this gulf more visible on a practical level than in the workings of samosud, literally ‘self-judging’. Most of Russia was in practice policed by the community and by the knout, notwithstanding Nicholas I’s reforms. Even the chief of the paramilitary Gendarmes was of the view in 1874 that local police lacked ‘even the possibility to organise any police surveillance at all of localities with heavily populated manufacturing centres’ such that they were but ‘passive spectators of the criminal acts that are committed there’. To a large extent, a community was left (or even required) to police itself, with the tsarist state only intervening in the most serious cases, and then using extreme violence in a bid to deter future criminals. There is, after all, generally an inverse proportion between detection and deterrence: if a police force can rely on detecting and solving a high proportion of crimes, then penalties can be relatively moderate. However, if a force is only able to punish a small proportion of criminals, then the penalties will usually be far more severe, simply to increase its deterrent effect.
In this context, samosud emerged as a surprisingly nuanced form of village lynch law, whereby the members of the commune applied their own moral code to offenders, regardless or even in defiance of the ‘official’ laws of the state. This has been best studied by Cathy Frierson, who concluded that—contrary to the opinions of many police and state officials of the time—this was a process with its own logic and its own principles. Above all, this sometimes brutal form of social control was essentially geared towards protecting the interests of the community, and crimes which threatened the survival or social order of the village were dealt with harshly. This sense of joint grievance and vulnerability was evident in such proverbs as ‘a thief steals, but the community suffers’. Yet, there was also a sense of natural justice which emphasised human frailty and restitution. Commune elders would often seek to mediate between injured parties, even settle disputes by drawing lots or organising contests. Lesser offences would typically require restitution and perhaps being made an example, such as by public humiliation and the payment of fines. In another characteristic Russian twist, these often took the form of vodka for the village elders, generally then used for a round or ten of conciliatory toasts which, in effect, returned the offender to good standing within the community. After all, no commune could afford to lose or alienate a potentially productive member. Offences which threatened the very future of the village, like horse stealing (which deprived the commune of a source of foals, horse power, transport and, in due course, meat) were dealt with in brutal and summary fashion, though. Death was the usual penalty, and often in some notably painful and inventive way, such as the thief whose arms and legs were skinned before his head split by an axe, or another beaten to within an inch of his life and then thrown to the ground before a charging horse for a poetic coup de grace.
Was this a crime, or was it the commune policing itself? Needless to say, the state resented and feared the notion of peasants taking the law into their own hands, especially given that the peasants’ ‘law’ was rather different from their own. Attempts were made to combat samosud, whether by education or policing. A killing through samosud, while regarded by the peasants as a regrettable necessity, a judicial execution, was treated by the authorities as murder. That said, there was very little the authorities could do, given the strength of the peasants’ own moral code and the practical difficulties of mounting day-to-day policing of such a huge country. The police were thinly stretched across the countryside, did not seem able to promise real justice or restitution (tellingly, only around 10% of stolen horses were recovered) and rarely made great efforts to win themselves friends in the village. The rural guards known as uriadniki, for example, while drawn of peasant stock had, by taking on the tsar’s uniform, aligned themselves instead with the state. The peasants typically called them ‘dogs’, while a contemporary observer complained that the uriadniki ‘boast of their commanding superiority and almost always treat the peasants with disdain’. It is thus hardly surprising that one contemporary source suggested that no more than one in ten of all rural crimes were ever reported. Nonetheless, the internal control mechanisms of the village—tradition, family, respect for the elders and ultimately samosud—ensured that the absence of effective state policing did not mean outright lawlessness.
This is especially because the most common rural crimes beyond petty interpersonal squabbles of the kind usually resolved by the commune itself were those such as poaching or theft of wood from the landlords’ or tsar’s forests which were not considered wrong according to the peasants’ own moral code. (The extent to which this was a widespread practice is evident from the way this offence accounted for 70% of male property convictions in late tsarist Russia.) The Russian language contains two very distinct words for crime: prestupnost’, which is defined as breaking the law, and zlodeyanie, which is instead based upon a moral judgement of immorality, such that, as the peasant proverb had it, ‘God punishes sins, and the state punishes guilt’. Such poaching may have been prestupnost’, but the peasants certainly did not see it as zlodeyanie because the landlord had more than enough wood for his personal needs, and ‘God grew the forest for everyone’. It could even be interpreted as an act of social banditry, a petty redistribution of wealth from the exploiter to the exploited. In the eyes of the eighteenth-century traveller, the Marquis de Custine, the serfs had to be ‘on the guard against their masters, who [were] constantly acting towards them with open and shameless bad faith’, and so they in turn would ‘compensate themselves by artifice what they suffer through injustice’. Finally, Russian peasants also played the same games of ‘masking’ or covert insolence and resistance as so many other exploited underclasses, from recalcitrant conscripts to African slaves, pretending to a dull and lumpen stupidity when it suited them and irked their masters.
Horse thieves and the bandit tradition
How was I to enforce the law over a population of 60,000 scattered in 48 settlements with but four sergeants and eight guardsmen? — Rural constable, (1908)
Of course, none of this could be considered ‘organised crime’ in any meaningful sense—even when such acts as serial samosud murders were undoubtedly crimes committed in an organised manner, they were not for private gain, and even long-term and organised poaching only marginally approaches the criteria, especially as it was generally managed within the context of traditional village authority structures. Ironically, though, samosud did help create one distinctive form of early rural organised crime in Russia, the gangs of horse thieves who exploited the near-absence of any credible police force in the countryside. After all, while Nicholas’s reforms had been a significant start, that is all they were and they certainly did not bring law and order to the deep woods, dark fields and unmarked frontiers of Russia. A force which by the turn of the century had grown to 47,866 officers of different rank and variety was expected to police a country of 127,000,000 souls. The cities may have been moderately heavily policed (although even this is open to debate, as will be discussed later), but the real problem was in the countryside. There, 1582 stanovye pristavy and 6874 uriadniki were expected to patrol Russia’s immense rural hinterland and keep almost 90 million people in line. On average, each stanovoi pristav was thus responsible for some 55,000 peasants! They were, in theory, assisted by peasant representatives. Each district was divided into ‘hundreds’ (actually of anything between 100 and 200 households), within which a locally-elected peasant official known as the sotskii (‘hundred-man’) was meant to be the constable’s local representative, backed by desyatskie (‘ten-men’) levies. Together, they were charged with a variety of duties, from fire prevention to informing the stanovoi pristav of any crimes and then assisting him in the course of any subsequent investigation or arrest. In practice, they were members of the rural community and were unlikely to take its side against the distant and exploitative state. Furthermore, service was a burden rather than a privilege, carrying with it a little danger but no pay, so that the village would typically lumber its least popular and productive members with it. Stanovye pristavi rarely trusted them with anything more important than message running or guard duty. The 1903 reforms did away with the 67,000 desyatskie, and replaced them with a force of 40,000 appointed and salaried strazhniki (‘Guardsmen’), lowering the official ratio of state officers to rural inhabitants to around 1:2600. However, efforts to bring the rural police closer to the peasantry proved stillborn. The suppression of the explosion of rural unrest in 1905-1906 opened an even greater division between peasant and state. The conversion of most of the strazhniki to squadrons of mounted police whose main role was to break up peasant protest did nothing to heal the rift.
As a result, the countryside was open to settled or wandering bandit gangs, sometimes rooted in a community and preying on outsiders, at others happy to rob from anyone and everyone. This was hardly new: banditry has long been a feature of Russian life, not least reflecting the weakness of law enforcement institutions and the remoteness of many villages. In the sixteenth century, Ivan the Terrible had to take special measures against it because local institutions proved unable or unwilling to deal with the problem. During his minority, charters were issued to regions instructing them to select elders responsible for assembling posses and hanging bandits. They reported not to local governors (namestniki) but Moscow, a centralisation institutionalised when Ivan, by then tsar in his own right, established his Banditry Office. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Time of Troubles, banditry emerged as the Muscovite state tore itself apart, with marauding gangs of Cossacks, Tatars and Russians alike operating freely and creating a culture of rural lawlessness that continued well into the subsequent Romanov dynasty’s era. The eighteenth-century bandit Vanka Kain even became the inspiration for a whole series of tales originally told in the tavern or around the stove, in due course immortalised and further mythologised in Matvei Komarov’s The Tale of Vanka Kain (1779), arguably ‘Russia’s first consciously popular piece of literature’.
The importance of banditry is twofold. It is a challenge and threat to the authority of the state, and a failure to control it can reflect a regime’s weakness or (like the early twentieth-century urban ‘hooliganism’ crisis, discussed below) generate hysteria about crime. Even in the twentieth century it has re-emerged in times of crisis. However, earlier Russian banditry can rarely be considered organised crime. Although relatively little hard data is available, there is no sense of the kind of sizeable, autonomous criminal groupings operating for an appreciable period that Anton Blok identified in the eighteenth-century Netherlands, for example, or as represented by the sixteenth-century Italian bandit-chieftain Francesco Bertazuolo, who commanded several hundred men divided into separate ‘companies’, as well as a network of spies. Even the infamous Vasili Churkin, a highwayman who terrorised the Moscow region in the 1870s, was much less than popular folklore made him. Rather than being the daring master of a sizeable bandit gang, he was actually a murderous thug who rarely had more than a handful of followers. This was the norm, and most gangs were smaller and often ephemeral, collections of outlaws and misfits which individually posed only a minor threat to the rural order. The challenge was, rather, the very number of such small groups.
Larger and more organised bandit groupings were typically rooted in specific communities and should really be considered manifestations of warlordism rather than crime. For example, as described by Kelly Hignett elsewhere in this volume, before their subordination to the Russian state, the Cossacks were raiding people. Further, south in the Caucasus mountains, the traditions of mountain peoples such as the Chechens included the cult of the abreg or abrek, a lone mountain outlaw, who could be a vicious desperado but might just as well be a daring rebel or the victim of a vendetta. The myth makes these individuals figures of power and daring, characteristically emerging sometimes as defenders of traditional values (avenging crimes by vendetta, for example), sometimes as defenders of that tradition itself against an intrusive state or alien invaders. Not surprisingly, this myth was to assume a powerful role during Chechnya’s wars for independence in the 1990s, when guerrilla leaders would all but compete to assume the persona, but in any case these cannot properly be considered organised crime because again their raids were legitimate within the local moral economy and carried out within existing authority structures, whether the established Cossack ataman (commander) or the abrek who gathers companions to him by successfully embodying community values and embarking on a cause likewise regarded as morally justified.
A particular exception to this were the gangs of horse thieves which represented such a concern to Russian peasants that they reserved for their captured members the most savage samosud murders. The lifeless bodies of these victims of lynch law would typically be left at the nearest crossroads (sometimes symbolically festooned with bridles or horsehair nooses) as warning to other prospective horse thieves to continue on their way. The horse was an invaluable asset to the family and the village. To lose it to thieves might doom a family to servitude and indebtedness at best, starvation at worst. No wonder a contemporary observer wrote that ‘periodic epidemics, crop failure and other disaster cannot compare with the harm that horse thieves bring to the countryside. The horse thief holds peasants in perpetual, uninterrupted fear…’
These gangs had to have the numbers, strength and cunning to evade not just the authorities but, far more dangerous, the peasants themselves. In some cases, the gangs even numbered several hundred members. One investigator, for example, wrote of the gang led by a certain Kubikovsky which numbered almost 60 criminals and had its headquarters in Zbelyutka village, site of an underground cavern in which they could hide as many as 50 horses at a time. If this was full or unusable, then each local village had an agent, known as a shevronista, who could be called on to hide horses or provide information. Not that they usually had to conceal them for long. Given that horses, while greatly in demand, were also relatively identifiable, the gangs—much like modern car thieves—needed to be able to conceal their original ownership (typically by selling them to a horse trader who could rebrand them and hide them amongst his regular stock) or else resell them far enough from their original owner that it would be impossible for them to be traced. Thus, a study of criminal networks in Saratov province found that
Stolen horses are taken on a certain road to the Volga or the Sura rivers; in almost every settlement along that road there is a den of thieves who immediately transfer the horses to the next village… All stolen horses end up… beyond the province’s borders, transferred either across the Sura into Penza and Simbirsk provinces, or across the Volga into Samara, while Saratov itself receives horses from these three provinces.
For a village to harbour horse thieves might bring them greater prosperity (not least as they squandered their gains on local alcohol and women) and perhaps even security. In some cases, the horse thieves operated as primitive protection racketeers, demanding tribute in return for leaving communities’ horses alone. Faced with the very real threat of such attacks and the economic costs to the community of having to mount constant guard on their precious horses, as well as the absence of effective state police, many regarded paying such ‘tax’—or hiring a horse thief as a herder, which also gave him the opportunity to hide stolen horses amongst the village’s—as the lesser evil.
Horse thieves were sometimes caught, whether by the peasants or the police, but overall they prospered, growing in numbers in the years leading up to the Great War and subsequent Bolshevik Revolution as part of a wider tide of rural crime and banditry. While clearly a specialised form of rural banditry, in their rough-and-ready way they did represent a kind of organised crime. They operated with a clear sense of hierarchy and specialisation, possessed distinct ‘turfs’ of their own, maintained networks of informants, corrupted police officers, visited retribution on those who resisted or informed on them and traded stolen horses with other gangs and corrupt ‘legitimate’ dealers. The more successful ones operated for years, and while they may have developed links with local communities, whether through extortion or as neighbours and protectors, they undoubtedly were not of the community, and in many cases recruited broadly, drawing on runaways, ex-convicts, deserters and petty outlaws.
This particular organised crime phenomenon would prove an evolutionary dead end, though, and not survive long into the twentieth century. The First World War made dealing in horses difficult and dangerous, given the extent to which they were being bought and requisitioned for the army, and the chaos of revolution (1917) and consequent Civil War (1918-1922) and famine (1920-1922) further disrupted their commercial networks. Bandit gangs were able to thrive for a while in this period of relative anarchy. In his study of the Volga region, Orlando Figes identified four main types: the small and transient ‘robber gangs’, larger ‘raiding bands’ associated with marginalised communities such as Cossacks displaced by famine and operating often under community leaders, intermediate-sized gangs which essentially practised warlordism by seizing and living off a specific area and large ‘bandit armies’ that were really rebel forces opposed to the Bolsheviks. In some cases, individual bandits or even gangs ended up being co-opted into the military or administrative structures of one side or another. However, as the Soviet regime began to assert its authority over the countryside, they faced unprecedented pressure from the state. While rural policing as a whole remained a low priority, when more serious challenges emerged, the response of the revolutionary state was much more urgent and exigent. To suppress the larger bandit armies of the Volga, for example, the Bolsheviks deployed more than four Red Army divisions, along with aircraft. The primal energies of bunt and banditry still remained, ready to break forth when the state seemed weak or when it put unbearable pressures on the countryside. In the whirlwind of Stalinist terror and collectivisation, for example, banditry once again became a serious challenge: in 1929, Siberia was declared ‘unsafe due to banditry’ and gangs roamed across much of the rest of Russia. In Sheila Fitzpatrick’s words, ‘their was a harsh frontier world, where bandits—often dekulakized peasants [repressed “rich peasants”] hiding in the forest—were likely to take potshots at officials while sullen peasants looked the other way’. However, while bandits did often seek to steal horses, the specific phenomenon of the horse thief gang was not to survive long into the Soviet era, and for the real roots of modern Russian organised crime one needs instead to look to the cities.
Sins of the city: crime and urbanisation
A husky, unskilled village boy comes to the city seeking a job or training—and the city gives him only street fumes, the glitter of shop windows, homebrew, cocaine and the cinema. — L.M. Vasilevskii
There can be little doubt that the countryside can seethe with the same violence, sins and greed as the cities. However, urbanisation and its bedfellow industrialisation have a very different culture. Rural life is driven by the daylight hours, by the seasons and by a small and usually relatively stable community’s need to pull together to survive. By contrast, the Russian town was to be reshaped by rapid industrialisation and expansion as waves of migrant workers flocked in from the villages and it was characterised by massive turnover in populations, by anomie, a loss of old moral norms, and by the sense of invisibility amongst all these new faces. Industrial life is also one of organisations and breeds a new sense of structure and discipline, in which leadership goes not necessarily to the old but the able.
Russia went though a belated but brutal industrial revolution from the mid-nineteenth century, accelerated by the need to modernise the country’s defensive capabilities after the debacle of the Crimean War (1853-1856). Between 1867 and 1897, the urban population of European Russia doubled, doubling again by 1917. If some of these new workers were attracted to the cities by their opportunities for economic and social advancement, then many others were pushed there by a growing pressure on the land. Russia’s population almost doubled, growing by 1.6% annually between 1883 and 1913, a rate only surpassed by Australia, Canada and the USA, and in those cases largely as a result of migration. As a result, the proportion of landless peasants rose from 7% in 1893-1896 to 19.4% in 1905. For many, moving to the city for a season or even to start a whole new life was simply an economic necessity. In 1902 Moscow, for instance, 73% of the population were migrants from elsewhere.
It is no coincidence that these new cities proved the cradle not only of new political forces—including what was to become the Communist Party—but also new types of crime and criminals. Between 1867 and 1897, both St Petersburg and Moscow more than doubled in size, from 500,000 to 1.26 million and 350,000 to 1.04 million, respectively, largely as a result of migration from the countryside. In the main, workers lived in crowded, poorly ventilated and unhygienic barracks blocks provided by their employers, perhaps even sharing a bunk bed by shift. Yet these were the lucky ones; in the 1840s, a commission investigating the conditions of the urban poor in St Petersburg painted a picture of overcrowding and squalor, with a single tenement often holding as many as 20 adults. In one case, fully 50 adults and children were squeezed into a six metres square room. By 1881, a quarter of the entire population of St Petersburg was reduced to living in cellars, with between two and three workers in the city for each available sleeping place. Conditions were terrible, with hours long (a 14-hour day was typical, longer ones common), pay minimal and safety provisions almost non-existent. Nor were many of the palliatives and remedies gradually and painfully developed during Europe’s Industrial Revolution applicable. There were no effective legal controls on employers and working conditions. Furthermore, as so many industries were directly or indirectly under state control, as a result of the government-led nature of this industrialisation, purely industrial protests on issues of pay and conditions were too quickly regarded as political dissent and repressed accordingly.
The new workers lived lives full of exploitation and misery, yet empty of the village commune’s mechanisms of support and social control. In the village, after all, tradition and family provided a context for life, while the elders represented authority. In the cities, rural traditions seemed meaningless, most of the workers were young and single, and the alternative stabilising factors (such as a trained ‘worker aristocracy’ or the responsibilities generated by starting a family) had not yet had time to emerge. Many turned to the bottle for escape. Perhaps one in four of St Petersburg’s residents had been arrested at some point in the late 1860s, usually on a drink-related crime. There were other escapes, too, for the generally unmarried young male workers. Syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases spread wildly, and prostitution—both by ‘yellow card’ registered practitioners and ‘amateurs’—increased equally markedly. Street gangs also formed, although we know relatively little about them. The Roshcha and Gaida gangs, for example, became temporarily powerful in St Petersburg’s poor quarters, staging regular brawls, but having formed around 1900, by 1903 they had already fragmented, some members gravitating to more serious, mercenary crimes, others growing away from this life of male bonding through vodka and violence, yet new and even more violent gangs rose to take their place.
The worst of the worst were the slums known as yamy (‘pits’ or ‘depths’). These exercised a morbid fascination for Russia’s writers. In Fedor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), he wrote of St Petersburg’s Haymarket yama, ‘thick with whorehouses’ and full of ‘dirty, fetid yards’ and in his Slums of Petersburg (1864), Vsevolod Krestovsky characterised it as a place of vice and villainy. Alexander Kuprin’s novel Yama (1905) rather coyly describes Odessa’s yama as ‘a place exceedingly gay, tipsy, brawling, and in the night-time not without danger’, although Maxim Gorki—himself a man from the slums of Nizhny Novgorod—in his play The Lower Depths (1902), presents a rather more hopeless picture, in which a yama‘s ‘tipsiness’ is not so much ‘gay’ as out of a desperate and unredemptive search for oblivion. Likewise, Mikhail Zotov, a writer of the popular prints known as lubki, portrayed the ‘hopeless drunkards and vicious thieves’ of Moscow’s Khitrovka. These were indeed the lower depths, to which sank the lost and the destitute, the twenty-kopek whores, the raddled alcoholics and the drug addicts who would kill for their next fix. Near enough every major city had its yama, although arguably the Khitrovka, not even 20 minutes’ walk from the Kremlin, was the most notorious. Flophouses and cheap taverns lined a maze of small courtyards and alleyways, teeming with the unemployed, unwashed and usually drunk and cloaked in a heavy and evil-smelling fog from the stagnant River Yauza and the cheap tobacco and open cooking pots of its denizens. This was a living hell, a slum in which 10,000 were crammed into disease-ridden trushchoba flophouses on double- and triple-decked wooden sleeping platforms, and the home of the infamous drinking den known tellingly as Katorga, ‘Penal Servitude’.
In the poor neighbourhoods, the police chose largely to close a blind eye to many offences, unless the crimes were especially serious or impinged on the interests of the state or wealthier classes. Mass brawls between rival gangs or workers’ groups were quite a frequent and almost ritual occurrence, for example, and often allowed to play themselves out to their usual bruised and bloody conclusion: only when they were staged in the centre of town were they likely to be broken up by the police. At least they were present from time to time in the poor workers’ districts, but to a large extent, the police left the yamy and their denizens well alone. What after all, was a murder, beyond one less problem walking their streets? As it was, they often confined themselves to collecting the bodies of the dead every morning; when forced to go into the slums more decisively—usually only in response to some outbreak of serious violence which could be construed as having some potential political implication—they went as if troops invading hostile territory, in squads, with rifles at the ready. Otherwise, though, as one St Petersburg newspaper noted about the notorious Harbour Fields quarter on the city’s Vasil’evskii Island, ‘Police, or more often Cossack, patrols pass this place without stopping, since this “club” is outside the range of their operations: they pass by only in search of sedition’.
Russian rookeries
In the gloomy half-light of the dirty dives, in crowded, bug-infested flophouses, in the tearooms and taverns and the dens of cheap debauchery—everywhere, where vodka, woman and children are sold—I encountered people who no longer resembled human beings. There, down below, people believe in nothing, love nothing and are not bothered by anything. — Aleksei Svirskii, Journalist (1914)
This was not simply because they did not care what happened in the yamy, more that they lacked either the resources or the political support to do anything about it. Contrary to popular belief, the tsarist state was by no means staffed entirely by backward-looking fools and greedy paper pushers. Quite the opposite: it is striking how many clear-thinking officials rose within the system and the Ministry of Internal Affairs itself was historically sympathetic to the Russian workers’ plight. Future Interior Minister Vyacheslav Plehve, while Director of the Department of Police, bemoaned that ‘before the rich capitalist, the individual factory worker is powerless’ and even the Okhrana political police force was ‘a long-time advocate of factory reform and improving workers’ conditions’. The real indictment is that their assessments and proposals were too often ignored. That the growth of the cities would pose a political, criminal and even sanitary threat was apparent from the first. Major General Adrianov, the gradonachal’nik of Moscow 1908-1915, not only made efforts to improve the honesty and efficiency of his force, but also appealed to the Duma (state parliament) to bring down high meat prices and later established anti-epidemic commissions. Most such measures were, however, limited or blocked and instead the police were forced to be reactive storm troopers of conservatism in a time of creeping martial law, as the tsarist state increasingly sought to side-step its own legal system by relying ever more heavily on emergency powers, through the declarations of ‘Extraordinary Guard’ and ‘Strengthened Guard’ provisions. By 1912, only five million Russians out of a total population of 130 million were not covered by such martial law provisions. These gave governors and gradonachal’niki sweeping powers but they were largely used in the execution of their orders, not to extend their role or redefine the very notion of the maintenance of public order.
The question of urban crime only became a truly important political issue at the turn of the century. Even then, this was stimulated first not by a sensitive assessment of the real pressures bubbling away but a moral panic about the threat ‘hooliganism’ posed above all to the genteel folk of St Petersburg, stoked by a rising tabloid ‘boulevard press’. Young workers, who once would confine themselves to ‘their’ part of the city began invading the well-to-do central neighbourhoods. Suddenly it seemed that everywhere rowdies in their trademark greasy jackets and flat caps were crowding the sidewalks, drinking, whistling at the passing girls, jostling and catcalling and in due course graduating to vandalism, random violence and demanding money with knives and menaces. Russian educated and elite regarded this hysterically as evidence of the imminent collapse of the social order and they demanded that ‘their’ police do something about it: keeping the uncontrolled workers out of ‘their’ city, not seeking to engage with these rowdies and squander their overstretched resources protecting the rights of the underclass.
The police were thus confined to deterring and dealing with crimes rather than preventing the development of conditions which generate it. At this they were, it must be said, not very effective. They were often overstretched, forced to rely on the hue and cry as well as on their unofficial deputies, the dvorniki. These were porters employed by pretty near every town apartment building; they were required to report crimes to the police and even the comings and goings to and from their buildings, and also provided occasional muscle for arrests. There were also privately hired night guards (nochnye storozha), who operated on similar terms. In Moscow, for example, it was estimated that there were some 2000 night guards—almost half the size of the entire city police force. These were very much a mixed blessing. While there were many incidents of dvorniki and guards raising the alarm and assisting the police, they were also often insalubrious characters themselves. In 1909, the head of Moscow’s detectives suggested that dvorniki themselves accounted for or assisted in 90% of thefts from locked premises.
The precise degree of overstretch is hard to ascertain. As the national capital, one might expect that policing St Petersburg would be the priority. Robert Thurston, though, has suggested that it was actually Moscow which had the heaviest level of police cover. By the end of 1905, an establishment strength of 4853, set against a population of around 1,340,000, yields a ratio of some 276 inhabitants per police officer. This is better than the ratios in Western European capitals, such as Berlin (1:325) and Paris (1:336). Even St Petersburg, though, seemed to maintain a respectable ratio of 1:343. However, Neil Weissman has made a convincing case that such figures should not be taken at face value. The Russians’ own ideal was to reach a ratio of 1:500 (and 1:400 after the uprisings of the so-called ‘1905 Revolution’), but admitted to problems in achieving such targets. First of all, official figures were often of establishment rather than actual strength: even in St Petersburg at the end of 1905, the Department of Police was short of 1200 officers, leaving five out of every nine police posts unmanned. The heightened tensions and attacks on the police during and after 1905 only served to increase the difficulty in making up the numbers, despite substantial pay increases in 1906. Second, the figures also included ‘dead souls’ introduced by fraudulent commanders (so that they could pocket these ringers’ pay) as well as policemen who never pounded the beat but were actually permanently appropriated by senior officers to act as their messengers, cooks and batmen. Weissman suggests that in the towns and cities beyond Moscow and St Petersburg, the ratio was often 1:700 or even worst, a situation exacerbated by rapid urbanisation.
Nor did the Russians make the best use of their police, who were also poorly trained and deployed. The gorodovye, the basic ‘street cops’, did not often patrol as their European or North American counterparts did. Instead, they usually simply manned posts, generally within earshot of the next, and waited for trouble to be reported to them or just come by. This essentially passive, static approach to policing meant that the police largely ‘slept like hibernating bears’, at best resembling security guards more than active public protectors. Instead, the police had to rely all the more on the dvorniki and the ordinary citizens as their eyes and ears.
In such conditions, it is hardly surprising that the yamy and other poor quarters, essentially abandoned by the state, became criminalised enclaves akin to the ‘rookeries’ and ‘stews’ of early modern London where burglars could plan their raids and fence their goods, muscle could be hired at any tavern and life and death were equally cheap. At the same time, these were districts with few amenities or opportunities for sober and legitimate entertainment which did not cost more than their denizens could afford. Despite a growing movement to establish workers’ clubs and reading societies for workers, by 1905 there were only 10 of the former in all St Petersburg, while the grim Nevskii Gates district, home to 60,000 workers, had just two dowdy theatres to compete with the taverns. Yamy such as the Khitrovka came to symbolise both the plight and the perils of the indigent urban poor—as Daniel Brower noted, ‘in popular literature Khitrovka acquired junglelike qualities and became a sort of “darkest Moscow”’. They also raised a growing concern that the criminalisation of these teeming and discontented masses could lead not only to revolutionary ferment but also the professionalisation of the underworld. Odessa’s predominantly Jewish Moldavanka district, while ‘unsavoury terrain, a quarter filled with dark alleys, filthy streets, crumbling buildings and violence’ was also one in which lawbreaking was increasingly characterised in the eyes of outsiders by ‘professional, businesslike criminality’.
The thieves’ world
Once you’ve eaten Khitrovka soup, you’ll never leave. — Moscow saying
Within the slums, drinking dens and barracks housing of the urban slums emerged a new criminal culture which, unlike its rural counterpart of the horse thieves, adapted to thrive in the post-revolutionary era. This was the vorovskoi mir, the ‘thieves’ world’.
Writing about the fate of the rootless and dispossessed young man in the slums, contemporary Russian criminologist Dmitrii Dril lamented that ‘He encounters the company of veteran tramps, beggars, vagrants, prostitutes, thieves and horse thieves’. Or, as teacher and youth worker V.P. Semenov put it, he will pass ‘through the school of the flophouse, the tearoom and the police station’. Within the yamy, a new generation would be born into a life of crime. The children of the cohorts of prostitutes would, for example, often be rented out even as newborn babies as usefully heartstring-tugging accessories to the city’s beggars, before eventually graduating into begging themselves. At least they had a parent and perhaps even a home: many of the genuine bezprizorniki, the uncared for, lived truly on the streets, sleeping in rubbish bins or fighting over a barrel for shelter. Playing ‘thief’ was a common and popular game, before in due course they would move into more active participation in the underworld, from standing as a lookout to becoming a fortach, one of the wily and agile children used to wriggle through open windows to carry out burglaries. The presence of specialised varieties of lawbreakers, with their own distinctive modus operandi and title, is often a good index of the rise of an organised criminal subculture. The yamy certainly proved fecund breeding grounds for this culture, which proved sufficient to maintain an increasingly specialised and varied criminal ecosystem.
Although many crimes were carried out opportunistically, the thieves’ world embraced a wide range of criminal ‘trades’. Indeed, there was a bewildering array of such specialisms, from the shchipachy (pickpockets) to the common skokari (burglars). With specialisation also came hierarchy, as underworld professions became increasingly differentiated. Unlike the purist blatnye who came to dominate the world of the prison camps in the early twentieth century, and who deliberately turned their back on legitimate society, for most within the vorovskoi mir of the late nineteenth century, the dream was to be able to pass as a member of the polite society, all the while mocking its values and robbing it blind. Even Benya Krik, the criminal hero of Isaak Babel’s Odessa Tales, made sure that when his sister was married it was with a grandly traditional feast, ‘in accordance with the custom of olden times’. Perhaps, as a result, the aristocracy of the vorovskoi mir were its fraudsters and any who were able to masquerade as the well-to-do in order to carry out their crimes. In Odessa, for example, particular respect was owed to the maravikhery, elite pickpockets who were able to pass as gentlemen while they worked the circuit of elite society, from the theatre to the stock exchange. Of course, there was also a practical reason for the authority of the fraudsters, as those who were successful could also make a great deal of money, more than they could easily spend. As a result, some became virtual bankers of the vorovskoi mir, lending their dirty money and in the process gaining circles of clients and investing in further crimes.
Indeed, the criminals could more generally avail themselves of an increasingly sophisticated range of criminal services. For instance, raky, ‘crayfishes’, were tailors who could take a stolen item of clothing and over night turn it into something else, undetectable to the authorities and ready for sale. Bunin’s trushchoba in the Khitrovka was known for its raky, while St Petersburg’s Kholmushi tenement quarter was a favoured place to fence stolen goods through ramshackle local shops, along with the Tolkucha market. Likewise, just as, for example, the taverns of Odessa’s port district acted as virtual labour exchanges, at which contractors and artel bosses could recruit whomever they needed for that day or week, so too did the drinking dens of the yamy become places, where loot and information was exchanged, muscle hired and deals struck, while tavern keepers could cultivate profitable sidelines as fences and bankers to their shadowy clientele.
Striking evidence of the coherence and complexity of this underworld culture is to be found in its two languages. The first was a criminal cant known as fenya or ofenya, after an earlier beggars’ cant in which extra syllables, typically ‘fe’ and ‘nya’, were inserted between the syllables of regular words. Thus prison, tyur’ma, would become tyur’femanya. By the mid-nineteenth century this particular practice appears to have fallen into disuse, but the name remained. The other language is a visual one, encoded in the often-complex tattoos with which career criminals inscribed their bodies. While neither are unique to the Russian vorovskoi mir, with criminal cants identified as far back as the fourteenth century, they are distinctive in their spread and interaction. After all, in an age when the Russian language itself as spoken by commoners was still fragmented, branched into countless local dialects, both the spoken and visual languages of the vorovskoi mir were largely homogenous, promulgated not just in the yamy and the drinking dens but perhaps most importantly in the prison system. Tellingly, the slang term for a prison was to become akademiya, ‘academy’. Within the prisons and labour camps the cult of the urka (‘daring thief’) or blatnoi (career criminal) developed with its code of defiant machismo, preying on the weak and yet observing a degree of ‘honour among thieves’ by keeping one’s word on pain of collective and brutal punishment. (Indeed, the criminals’ use of collective beatings and murder to punish those who broke their code is in many ways a direct carry-over from samosud.) Like so many such cants, fenya was a hotchpotch of borrowings from foreign languages and Russian words given new meanings. Thus, the fenya ‘musor’ for the police came from the Yiddish for an informant, moser, and the Russian word for a lynx, rys’, acquired the meaning of an experienced criminal wise in the ways of prison. Fenya also included numerous terms for particular criminal trades and acts (the German ‘good morning’, Guten morgen, for example, became a guten-morgen, a burglary carried out in the morning) and descriptors of different levels of social status, from the lowly shestyorka (‘sixer’, from the lowest score in a card game) up to a patsan, a boss.
Likewise, the code of tattoos drew often upon traditional visual themes, not least religious iconography, but gave them a distinctive and often intentionally sacrilegious meaning, underlining the thieves’ lifetime commitment to their ‘world’ and, often and increasingly, a deliberate and defiant alienation from mainstream society. However, the tattoos also encoded a criminal’s career and rank, with designs denoting the kinds of crimes committed, where and how long he was imprisoned and his ascent within the underworld. As such, the tattoos appear to have been a language which came into its own closer to the end of the tsarist era. Earlier generations of criminals may well have sported their own tattoos, but they were less prone to regard them as part of a formal language, less eager to use them as a permanent and defiant demarcation between their world and that of the legitimate sector. It is hard to be at all confident about dating this change—not least because this conclusion rests largely on the negative data that while earlier police reports referred to criminal slang they are essentially silent about a specific tattoo code—but it seems to reflect a change taking place around the turn of the century. Whereas originally the vorovskoi mir was simply a culture which arose amongst outsiders excluded by poverty and ill fortune, there increasingly emerged a strand within it that did not just accept but embraced and exalted this exclusion, actively turning its back on the mainstream, starting a process which would lead to the rise of the blatnye criminals discussed below.
The hierarchies, internal organisation and evolution evident in these languages reflected the vorovskoi mir as a whole. This was in no way yet dominated by substantial and durable criminal organisations, but there were myriad small gangs and groups. Some were in effect underworld equivalents of the artel, a traditional Russian form of work association already appropriated by beggars’ communities. An artel was a voluntary group pooling their labour and resources to a common end. Sometimes they were labourers from the same village who migrated together to seek work in the cities, sometimes a work crew paid collectively for their overall production. In this way, the artel was a way of recreating the mutual support of the peasant commune, but in smaller and more mobile form. Typically, an artel would have an elected leader, a starosta (‘elder’—although this was an honorific rather than chronological term) who negotiated with employers, handled common arrangements (such as renting accommodation) and distributed any profits. Within the underworld, equivalents to the artel abounded, collections of thieves working together long term or else the apprentices and minions of a veteran teaching them their craft, like ‘Morozhenshchik’ (the ‘ice-cream seller’), an Odessan Fagin who taught a gang of nephews and other street children the arts of pickpocketing and burglary. They tended to work within a specific criminal profession or at least within connected ones (so that a single group might include both con men running shell games or similar street gambling scams and pickpockets who would prey on the crowds of onlookers), although the kind of group which later became known as a kodlo was often more heterogeneous, perhaps as many as 30 criminals united by mutual interest and experience rather than specialism.
This was a time of social ferment and one in which people could and did move from city to city as new economic opportunities arose or, in the case of criminals, as they made enemies or became too well known to the local authorities. Combine that with the way the penal system became a powerful engine for the transmission of the codes and folkways of the vorovskoi mir and it is perhaps no wonder that not only the core criminal culture but also the local crime phenomena proved infectious. The thriving and cosmopolitan port city of Odessa, for example, acquired a reputation for its flamboyant and entrepreneurial crooks: ‘the registers of investigative police agents from St Petersburg and Moscow to Warsaw, Kherson and Nikolaev were heavy with the names of Odessa thieves, “kings” and “queens” of crime whose mug shots graced “rogues’ gallery” albums circulated widely throughout the empire’. Especially, notorious criminals were not only wanted by the authorities across Russia, but also they even became ‘celebrities’ within the national underworld. Figures such as Faivel’ Rubin, the notorious pickpocket and the bandit Vasili Churkin were at once inspirations for the underworld and by turns the subject of exaggerated concern and prurient fascination within the legal world.
Conclusions: present at the birth of Stalin’s bastard children
A thief’s country is any place where he can steal. — Literaturnaya gazeta
The vorovskoi mir would go through its own revolutions after the chaos of the Great War, the 1917 revolutions and the Civil War, as would all Russia’s criminal traditions. Banditry would rise and fall, contingent on the levels of control and poverty imposed on the countryside, and bunt would explode at times of greatest pressure, although only to be repressed with a savagery and, worse yet, efficiency the tsars had never managed. Fraudsters remained the genteel aristocrats of crime, at least in the popular imagination, reinforced by the tales of the 1920s con man Ostap Bender, preying on greedy wheeler dealers and self-important bureaucrats alike, before the dead weight of Stalinist orthodoxy pushed most such tales off the written page and back into oral tradition. Samosud likewise re-emerged during the anarchy of revolution, not just in the countryside but also in Russia’s cities. With horror (if also perhaps hyperbole), the author Maxim Gorky claimed that at the end of 1917 there had been 10,000 cases of lynch law since the collapse of the tsarist order. This too would be suppressed by the Soviets, albeit still perhaps to survive hidden within other expressions of vigilantism.
However, the vorovskoi mir experienced a process of growth and consolidation. Massive levels of continued urbanisation meant that even if the state proved less willing to abandon the yamy to their own devices, slums and shadowy corners continued to offer them homes and havens. The expansion of the Gulag labour camp system further entrenched its role as the cradle of the thieves’ culture, and as they found themselves condemned to longer sentences and surrounded by growing numbers of political prisoners within the camps, the criminals became increasingly united. This was the time in which the social elite known as the vory v zakone (literally ‘thieves in the law’ but best translated as ‘thieves within the code’) emerged. These were not necessarily gang leaders, but figures whose spirit, reputation and experience were such that they were widely respected and became community leaders, arbitrators of disputes and repositories of the lore and tales of the vorovskoi mir.
The members of the vorovskoi mir, increasingly known as blatnye, gladly persecuted and abused the regular criminals and especially the political prisoners, known either as fraiery or ‘peasants’. In a striking symbol of the contempt they felt for outsiders, the blatnye referred to themselves as lyudi, ‘people’—by implication everyone else was something less than a person. However, stealing from the other prisoners, forcing them to work in the place of the blatnye and abusing them whenever the fancy struck them was something they did for their own pleasure. The real criminal revolution crept upon the vorovskoi mir slowly from the late 1920s as the authorities began co-opting blatnye, persuading them with better food and conditions and the temptations of wielding power over others to become trustees within the Gulag system. As such, these criminals became foremen and enforcers, keeping the convicts in line, making sure they carried out their labour assignments and generally ensuring that the system worked, allowing the state to minimise its expenditure on salaried prison staff. After all, the slave labour of the Gulags was seen as an economic resource to be put to use in Stalin’s industrialisation drive, and the less spent on warders the better. As a result, as far as possible it ‘subcontracted’ the management of the Gulags to these trustees.
In the process, though, these criminals broke one of the fundamental laws of the vorovskoi mir, which proscribed any cooperation with the authorities. True blatnye were expected to mutilate themselves or face severe punishment rather than work for the state, never mind act as its agents. The traditionalists labelled the collaborators suki, ‘bitches’, and a severe and often violent enmity ensued between these two wings of the professional underworld. To a large extent they ignored each other, beyond sporadic, individual, local and usually murderous clashes. After the Second World War, though, the numbers of the suki would be swollen by convicts who had fought in the defence of their motherland and former Soviet prisoners of war (who, on being liberated from the Germans, were promptly imprisoned by Stalin, who felt they ought to have fought to the death), both groups the traditionalist blatnye regarded likewise as lackies of the state. The cold war between the two broke down and the ensuing ‘bitches’ war’ (sometimes rendered as ‘scabs’ war’) rocked the Gulag system through the late 1940s and the early 1950s. Thanks to their numbers, their greater discipline and the implicit support of the authorities, the suki won, and when the Gulags began to be opened after Stalin’s death in 1953, they emerged to recolonise the Soviet underworld. They took over the code, slang and titles of the blatnye in every respect but one, striking out the prohibition on collaboration with the authorities—so long as it was ultimately in their interests.
This redefined vorovskoi mir prospered behind the scenes in the later Soviet Union, third and perhaps weakest in an unholy criminal trinity alongside corrupt Party officials and underground black market entrepreneurs. A tragic and unexpected by-product of Gorbachev’s reforms in the 1980s was to allow them to grow in power, ready to capitalise on the anarchy and marketisation of the 1990s and emerge as today’s ‘mafiya’. Today’s Russian organised crime is moving away from its traditions, the new avtoritety often dismissive of the vory v zakone, just as younger members of the Cosa Nostra in the USA part-respected, part-derided the Sicilian-born ‘Mustache Petes’ as representatives of a past era. Nonetheless, even today, Russia’s underworld is to a large extent shaped by its historical evolution and a tradition dating back to the slums of the nineteenth century.