Sergei is seated at the desk, Josef is standing, Mattias is sitting in the chair. 1 Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. To order a copy for £17 go to or call 03. The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia by Mark Galeotti is published by Yale University Press (£20). There is no honour among Russia’s thieves and it is past time that we woke up to that fact. In his final chapter, Galeotti quotes a Russian friend as asking him: “Why do you in Britain hate our mafia in Russia but love them at home?” In a month when British ministers have been lining up to denounce the influence of oligarchs that their party has accepted hundreds of thousands of pounds from, it is an important question. The Vory is a timely, readable and important text for anyone thinking of ways to restrict Russian influence over the west and to punish Russia’s leadership for its crimes. All three are versions of each other, with individuals playing different roles depending on the requirements of the moment. He sees it as a country where there is no meaningful distinction between crime, politics and law enforcement. Galeotti’s book adds vital texture to the description of Russia as a kleptocracy. The men who undermined Ukrainian rule in Crimea quickly went back to the rackets that were their day job once Russia’s control was secured. The hackers who targeted the US election are thieves in a new guise: patriotically undermining foreign political systems one day, stealing credit card numbers the next. Now the Kremlin relies on thieves to fill more significant roles. In Soviet times, the authorities used thieves to move things around, to supply booze for parties and to find “deficit” goods for cities that the plan had neglected. “Under Putin, the real currency is not the rouble, but political power, and mere money and property are at best something held in trust.” “Sometime around the turn of the 21st century, state-building thieves and criminalised statesmen met in the middle,” Galeotti writes. After the collapse of 1991, only two groups had the confidence and contacts to seize the opportunity: the thieves and the chekists, and increasingly there was no distinction between them. The thieves’ smuggling made up for the failures of the Soviet economy and their networks allowed KGB men to make money.
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Once the thieves had discarded their code of honour, and the chekists had stopped pretending to be honest, this became a mutually profitable connection, with important consequences for what Russia would become. By the end of the Soviet Union, the criminal world and the security services – the chekists – were interpenetrated. Kirill’s friend must have been a rare outlier, because few thieves still lived by the code by the late 1970s. The collaborators – the “bitches” – were empowered to persecute them, which they did with extreme prejudice, until the code of non-cooperation was broken. Galeotti’s account of what happens next rather undermines Kirill’s idea of the thieves as proto-dissidents, however.Īfter Stalin’s death, most camp inmates were released, giving the authorities more time to focus on the gang leaders. During the Stalin-era heyday of the Gulag, they were untouchable, too powerful for the prison guards to deal with. The thieves emerged in tsarist times, but it was the Soviet camps that forged their subculture – Galeotti wittily refers to it as a “gangster archipelago” – as mafiosi from around the country got to know each other, exchanging methods and contacts. Galeotti cuts through the legends, to get to the real story. Thieves are mythologised in Russia, much in the way the mafia are in American cinema, and their music and slang are widespread. Kirill’s tale was my introduction to Russia’s underworld, which Mark Galeotti brilliantly describes in The Vory, his history of Russian criminals from the 18th century to the present day. In Soviet times thieves were used to move things around… Now the Kremlin relies on them to fill more significant roles They earned what they had with fists and cunning: they had no time for the crooks in uniforms who used laws to get their way. They considered themselves to be honest – it was the world that was bent. Dissidents boycotted the government out of liberal idealism, the thieves from ancient tradition. They could barely have been more different, but they did share a principle: they refused to cooperate with the Soviet government. It is no exaggeration to say that the thief’s protection saved Kirill’s life and that he was intrigued by his saviour’s motivation.
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