The Vory: Russia’s Super-Mafia by Mark Galeotti, review: How the state absorbed the criminal underworld

Russia hasn’t loomed so potently in the national consciousness since the mid-1980s and the nightmares of Threads and When the Wind Blows. From the Skripal poisonings to the flows of illicit oligarch cash through our capital, to meddling in the Brexit vote and our agonised response to the gas attacks in Syria, understanding this threat is an urgent need, one met with authority in this fascinating book by Mark Galeotti, a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more exhaustive and compelling guide to the confluence of state and organised crime in Russia than this history of thievery that stretches back to the underworld’s pre-revolutionary roots. From the florid 18th century gangster Vanka Kain to the 21st century hacker for hire, Galeotti traces how intimately criminals have been absorbed by the state, which now harnesses their services in its “hybrid war” against the West.

Rather than a simple “mafia state”, the Russian government under Putin has shaped itself as the “biggest gang in town”, whose covert “spook-gangster nexus” is becoming ever more brazen in our towns and cities.

In stark contrast to acting as an arm of the state, the original vor-v-zakone, “thieves-in-law”, forged themselves in Stalin’s gulags in a shared hatred of the government and its suchya (bitches). Corruption and the rise of the black market under Brezhnev, then the liberation of market forces and the anarchic collapse of the Soviet state under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, provided the conditions for organised crime to consolidate itself in the modern era.

According to Galeotti, Russia’s “rich, intricate criminal ecosystem” has evolved in such a way that there is now no useful distinction between sleek-suited “gangster-entrepreneurs”, public officials and real businessmen, all three now operating as one in a “deep-crime/deep-state” pursuit of wealth and political power.

In return for authorities turning a blind eye, the regime “reserves the right to call on any individual or organisation… to advance the Kremlin’s agenda”. The blurring of the lines separating politics, business and crime is colourfully demonstrated by Putin’s references to mokroye deli (wet jobs) – killings of enemies of the state – a co-opting of gangster slang that reinforces his “bad-boy street hoodlum” image.

“Somewhere around the turn of the 21st century,” Galeotti writes, ”state-building thieves and criminalised statesmen met in the middle.” In a sense, he concludes, the state has absorbed the underworld, and can “mobilise” it at will.

Galeotti’s conclusion that Russia will reform itself from the inside, by the ordinary people who are “first and worst” victims of this culture, is open to question following Putin’s re-election. Will Western sanctions be sufficient? With Putin’s tentacles snaking into the Tories’ pockets, and the world’s most gifted cybercriminals at his disposal, it’s a disconcerting question.

‘The Vory: Russia’s Super-Mafia’ is published by Yale University Press, £20