THE RUSSIAN MAFIA
22 July 2005
By:Ali Ismail
aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk
Telephone: 0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)
Desperate people from the poor countries fly away on the basis of promises and many end up as exploited labourers, domestic servants and prostitutes (pictured brothel women above and prostitutes in a Tel Aviv sex establishment)
THE RUSSIAN ‘MAFIA’ AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Post-Soviet Russian gangsters work with criminals and slave traders
From Himalayan and Bangladeshi villages to the cities of Eastern Europe, people are attracted by the prospect of relatively well-paid jobs as domestic servants, waitresses and factory workers. Human traffickers recruit victims through misleading advertisements, mail-order bride catalogues and through casual conversations. Upon arrival at their destinations, the victims are taken to locations which are controlled by the traffickers while they are exploited to earn illegal incomes. Many are imprisoned, their passports are taken away and they and their families are threatened if they do not cooperate.Women and girls forced to work as prostitutes are blackmailed by threats that the traffickers will tell their families. Trafficked children are dependent on the traffickers for food, shelter and other basic necessities. Traffickers play on their victims' fears that the authorities in the new country will prosecute or deport them if they ask for help. A major buyer of these de facto slaves is the Russian organized crime syndicate – the ‘Organisatsya’.
Since the mid-nineties, trafficking in human beings has reached unprecedented levels. No country in the world is immune from this. The search for work abroad has been motivated by economic disparities, high unemployment and the cessation of traditional ways of earning livelihoods. Traffickers at present face few risks and can garner great profits by taking advantage of large numbers of potential immigrants. Trafficking in human beings is an activity in which persons are moved from relatively poor environments to relatively affluent environments, with the money flowing in the opposite direction. This happens at domestic, regional and international levels. It is believed to be growing fastest in Central and Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union.In Asia, girls from villages in Nepal and Bangladesh, the majority of whom are under 18, are sold to brothels in India for US$1000 (£564.28). Trafficked women from Thailand and the Philippines are increasingly being joined by women from other countries in Southeast Asia. The European Interpol estimates that the industry is now worth several billion US dollars a year. Trafficking in human beings is not confined to the sex industry. Children are trafficked to work in sweatshops as bonded labour and men work illegally in dirty, difficult and dangerous (‘The 3D’) jobs. A recent CIA report estimated that between 45,000 to 50,000 women and children are brought to the USA every year under pretences and are forced to work as prostitutes, labourers and domestic servants. UNICEF estimates that cross-border smuggling in West Africa and Central Africa enslaves more than 200,000 children. The children are sometimes ‘sold’ by their own parents who believe they are going to be cared for, educated and trained for respectable trades and professions. In the decade and a half since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international community has become vulnerable to a new form of criminal threat from organizations and their members who have emerged from Russia and other former Soviet republics such as the Ukraine. The variety of the crimes seems to be unlimited: trafficking in women and children, drug dealing, arms trafficking, stolen motor vehicles and money laundering are the most prevalent. The effects are particularly troubling to Europe because of geographical proximity to Russia and to Israel because of its large numbers of Russian immigrants. But nowhere in the world seems to be immune to this problem.
There is no universally accepted definition of ‘organized crime’ in Russia, partly because Russian law provides no legal definition of ‘organized crime’. Analysis of criminological sources, however, enables one to identify some of its basic characteristics. There are features that make Russian ‘organized crime’ unique in the degree to which it is embedded in the post-Soviet political system. It also has certain features in common with such other well-known varieties of ‘organized crime’ as the Italian Mafia (the Cosa Nostra), which has a complicated history that includes both cooperation and conflict with the Italian state apparatus. Much more than is the case with the Cosa Nostra, however, Russian organized crime is uniquely a latter-day by-product of the former Soviet state.Russian ‘organized crime’ has come to trouble many regions of the world since the end of the Soviet Union in the early nineties. The trans-national character of Russian ‘organized crime’, when coupled with its high levels of technical efficiency and ruthlessness, has attracted attention and concern to what has become known as the Russian Mafia. Along with this concern, however, has come a fair amount of misunderstanding and stereotyping with respect to Russian ‘organized crime’.Trafficking is almost always a form of ‘organized crime’ and, I submit, should be dealt with by law enforcement powers to investigate and prosecute the persons concerned for the trafficking and any other criminal activities in which they engage. Trafficked persons should also be seen as victims of crime. Support and protection of these victims is a humanitarian objective and a means of ensuring that they are willing and able to assist in criminal court cases without realistic fears of witness punishment. As with other forms of ‘organized crime’, trafficking has internationalised. Groups formerly specialised in particular routes or in particular regions have expanded the geographical ranges of their activities to spill into new markets. Some have merged or formed cooperative relationships, expanding their geographical reach and the range of their criminal activities. Illegal migrants and trafficking victims have become just more commodities in a larger realm of criminal commerce involving narcotic drugs, firearms, other weapons and money laundering that generate illegal revenues or seek to reduce risks for traffickers by ‘cleaning’ their money.Certain geographical and infrastructure characteristics, such as the presence of seaports, international airports, strategic border locations, rich natural resources, and so on, provide especially favourable opportunities that can be exploited by criminals who are well organized. More so than with other forms of illegal activities and common crime, ‘organized crime’ is fed by the presence of ethnic minorities who furnish a readily available supply of victims and potential criminals to victimize them. ‘Organized crime’ also thrives in environments that are characterized by a relatively high tolerance of social deviance from the law and a romanticization of crime and criminals, especially in countries where the governments themselves and law enforcements are weak or corrupt (the history of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra illustrates this).Russia is one country that has the ideal environment in which ‘organized crime’ thrives. ‘Organized crime’ is deeply rooted in the 400-year history of Russia's unique administrative bureaucracy, but it was poured into its current form during the seven decades of Soviet power that ended in 1991. This developmental process helps to explain the pervasiveness of ‘organized crime’ in today's Russia and its close symbiosis with the post-Soviet political system. ‘Organized crime’ in Russia is an institutionalised part of the socio-political environment. It cannot, therefore, be fully understood without first understanding its place in the context of the Russian political and economic system.Unlike Colombian, Italian, Mexican, or other well-known forms of ‘organized crime’, Soviet ‘organized crime’ was not primarily based on ethnic and family bondings. As a number of criminologists have pointed out, ‘organized crime’ provided a crooked ladder of upward mobility for some people. They share common ethnicities, cultures, and languages and being on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder, either having no lawful opportunities for advancement or having rejected the opportunities that were available, have turned to crime, and specifically ‘organized crime’, to get ahead.Because ‘organized crime’ is peopled by criminals who conspire to carry out illegal acts, a degree of trust is necessary among them. Co-conspirators must be able to know or think they know that their collaborators will not talk to the police or to anyone who might talk to the police, and that they will not cheat them out of their money. A shared ethnicity, with its common language, background, and culture, has historically been a foundation for trust among ‘organized crime’ participants.By contrast, ethnicity did not play the significant role in Soviet ‘organized crime’ relative to elsewhere. Instead, the Soviet prison system, in many ways, fulfilled roles that were satisfied by shared ethnicity outside that country. In the Soviet Union, a professional criminal class developed in Soviet prisons during the Stalinist period that began in 1924 - the era of the ‘gulag’. These criminals adopted behaviours, rules, values, and sanctions that bound them together in what was called the ‘thieves' world’ which was led by elite criminals who lived according to the ‘thieves' law’. This ‘thieves' world’ created and maintained the bonds and climate of trust necessary for carrying out ‘organized crime’.’Organized crime’ in the Soviet era consisted of illegal enterprises with legal and black-market connections that were based on the misuse of state property and public money. It is most important to recognize that the blurring of the distinction between the legal and the illegal is also a trademark of post-Soviet organized crime that shows its ancestry with the old Soviet state and its command-economy system. This, in turn, has direct political implications. The historical symbiosis with the state makes Russian organized crime virtually an inseparable part of the state apparatus. As this has continued into the present, some experts would opine it has become an engine of state that works at all levels of the current Russian government.Contemporary Russian ‘organized crime’ grew out of the Soviet ‘nomenklatura’ system (the government's organizational structure and high-level officials) in which some individual ‘apparatchiks’ (government bureaucrats) developed mutually beneficial personal relationships with the ‘thieves' world’. The top of the pyramid of organized crime during the Soviet period was made up of the Communist Party and state officials who abused their positions of power and authority. Economic activities ranged across a spectrum of markets: white, grey, black, and criminal. These markets were roughly defined by whether the goods and services being provided were legal, legal but regulated, or illegal, and by whether the system for providing them was legal, legal but regulated, or illegal. The criminals operated on the ‘illegal’ end of this spectrum. Tribute gained from black markets and criminal activities was passed up a three-tiered pyramid to the ‘nomenklatura’, and the ‘nomenklatura’ itself (approximately 1,500,000 people) had an internal system of rewards and punishments. The giant state apparatus thus not only allowed criminal activity, but also encouraged, facilitated, and protected it, because the apparatus itself benefited from crime.These relationships provided the original nexus between organized crime and the government. From these beginnings, organized crime in Russia evolved to its present ambiguous position of being both in direct collaboration with the state and, at the same time, in conflict with it.
Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, desperate people are being herded over the border with India to be sent to the Middle East to work as camel jockeys, sex workers and domestic servants and in the other direction to Malaysia to work in restaurants and as factory assistants.
Since the mid-nineties, trafficking in human beings has reached unprecedented levels. No country in the world is immune from this. The search for work abroad has been motivated by economic disparities, high unemployment and the cessation of traditional ways of earning livelihoods. Traffickers at present face few risks and can garner great profits by taking advantage of large numbers of potential immigrants. Trafficking in human beings is an activity in which persons are moved from relatively poor environments to relatively affluent environments, with the money flowing in the opposite direction. This happens at domestic, regional and international levels. It is believed to be growing fastest in Central and Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union.In Asia, girls from villages in Nepal and Bangladesh, the majority of whom are under 18, are sold to brothels in India for US$1000 (£564.28). Trafficked women from Thailand and the Philippines are increasingly being joined by women from other countries in Southeast Asia. The European Interpol estimates that the industry is now worth several billion US dollars a year. Trafficking in human beings is not confined to the sex industry. Children are trafficked to work in sweatshops as bonded labour and men work illegally in dirty, difficult and dangerous (‘The 3D’) jobs. A recent CIA report estimated that between 45,000 to 50,000 women and children are brought to the USA every year under pretences and are forced to work as prostitutes, labourers and domestic servants. UNICEF estimates that cross-border smuggling in West Africa and Central Africa enslaves more than 200,000 children. The children are sometimes ‘sold’ by their own parents who believe they are going to be cared for, educated and trained for respectable trades and professions. In the decade and a half since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international community has become vulnerable to a new form of criminal threat from organizations and their members who have emerged from Russia and other former Soviet republics such as the Ukraine. The variety of the crimes seems to be unlimited: trafficking in women and children, drug dealing, arms trafficking, stolen motor vehicles and money laundering are the most prevalent. The effects are particularly troubling to Europe because of geographical proximity to Russia and to Israel because of its large numbers of Russian immigrants. But nowhere in the world seems to be immune to this problem.
There is no universally accepted definition of ‘organized crime’ in Russia, partly because Russian law provides no legal definition of ‘organized crime’. Analysis of criminological sources, however, enables one to identify some of its basic characteristics. There are features that make Russian ‘organized crime’ unique in the degree to which it is embedded in the post-Soviet political system. It also has certain features in common with such other well-known varieties of ‘organized crime’ as the Italian Mafia (the Cosa Nostra), which has a complicated history that includes both cooperation and conflict with the Italian state apparatus. Much more than is the case with the Cosa Nostra, however, Russian organized crime is uniquely a latter-day by-product of the former Soviet state.Russian ‘organized crime’ has come to trouble many regions of the world since the end of the Soviet Union in the early nineties. The trans-national character of Russian ‘organized crime’, when coupled with its high levels of technical efficiency and ruthlessness, has attracted attention and concern to what has become known as the Russian Mafia. Along with this concern, however, has come a fair amount of misunderstanding and stereotyping with respect to Russian ‘organized crime’.Trafficking is almost always a form of ‘organized crime’ and, I submit, should be dealt with by law enforcement powers to investigate and prosecute the persons concerned for the trafficking and any other criminal activities in which they engage. Trafficked persons should also be seen as victims of crime. Support and protection of these victims is a humanitarian objective and a means of ensuring that they are willing and able to assist in criminal court cases without realistic fears of witness punishment. As with other forms of ‘organized crime’, trafficking has internationalised. Groups formerly specialised in particular routes or in particular regions have expanded the geographical ranges of their activities to spill into new markets. Some have merged or formed cooperative relationships, expanding their geographical reach and the range of their criminal activities. Illegal migrants and trafficking victims have become just more commodities in a larger realm of criminal commerce involving narcotic drugs, firearms, other weapons and money laundering that generate illegal revenues or seek to reduce risks for traffickers by ‘cleaning’ their money.Certain geographical and infrastructure characteristics, such as the presence of seaports, international airports, strategic border locations, rich natural resources, and so on, provide especially favourable opportunities that can be exploited by criminals who are well organized. More so than with other forms of illegal activities and common crime, ‘organized crime’ is fed by the presence of ethnic minorities who furnish a readily available supply of victims and potential criminals to victimize them. ‘Organized crime’ also thrives in environments that are characterized by a relatively high tolerance of social deviance from the law and a romanticization of crime and criminals, especially in countries where the governments themselves and law enforcements are weak or corrupt (the history of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra illustrates this).Russia is one country that has the ideal environment in which ‘organized crime’ thrives. ‘Organized crime’ is deeply rooted in the 400-year history of Russia's unique administrative bureaucracy, but it was poured into its current form during the seven decades of Soviet power that ended in 1991. This developmental process helps to explain the pervasiveness of ‘organized crime’ in today's Russia and its close symbiosis with the post-Soviet political system. ‘Organized crime’ in Russia is an institutionalised part of the socio-political environment. It cannot, therefore, be fully understood without first understanding its place in the context of the Russian political and economic system.Unlike Colombian, Italian, Mexican, or other well-known forms of ‘organized crime’, Soviet ‘organized crime’ was not primarily based on ethnic and family bondings. As a number of criminologists have pointed out, ‘organized crime’ provided a crooked ladder of upward mobility for some people. They share common ethnicities, cultures, and languages and being on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder, either having no lawful opportunities for advancement or having rejected the opportunities that were available, have turned to crime, and specifically ‘organized crime’, to get ahead.Because ‘organized crime’ is peopled by criminals who conspire to carry out illegal acts, a degree of trust is necessary among them. Co-conspirators must be able to know or think they know that their collaborators will not talk to the police or to anyone who might talk to the police, and that they will not cheat them out of their money. A shared ethnicity, with its common language, background, and culture, has historically been a foundation for trust among ‘organized crime’ participants.By contrast, ethnicity did not play the significant role in Soviet ‘organized crime’ relative to elsewhere. Instead, the Soviet prison system, in many ways, fulfilled roles that were satisfied by shared ethnicity outside that country. In the Soviet Union, a professional criminal class developed in Soviet prisons during the Stalinist period that began in 1924 - the era of the ‘gulag’. These criminals adopted behaviours, rules, values, and sanctions that bound them together in what was called the ‘thieves' world’ which was led by elite criminals who lived according to the ‘thieves' law’. This ‘thieves' world’ created and maintained the bonds and climate of trust necessary for carrying out ‘organized crime’.’Organized crime’ in the Soviet era consisted of illegal enterprises with legal and black-market connections that were based on the misuse of state property and public money. It is most important to recognize that the blurring of the distinction between the legal and the illegal is also a trademark of post-Soviet organized crime that shows its ancestry with the old Soviet state and its command-economy system. This, in turn, has direct political implications. The historical symbiosis with the state makes Russian organized crime virtually an inseparable part of the state apparatus. As this has continued into the present, some experts would opine it has become an engine of state that works at all levels of the current Russian government.Contemporary Russian ‘organized crime’ grew out of the Soviet ‘nomenklatura’ system (the government's organizational structure and high-level officials) in which some individual ‘apparatchiks’ (government bureaucrats) developed mutually beneficial personal relationships with the ‘thieves' world’. The top of the pyramid of organized crime during the Soviet period was made up of the Communist Party and state officials who abused their positions of power and authority. Economic activities ranged across a spectrum of markets: white, grey, black, and criminal. These markets were roughly defined by whether the goods and services being provided were legal, legal but regulated, or illegal, and by whether the system for providing them was legal, legal but regulated, or illegal. The criminals operated on the ‘illegal’ end of this spectrum. Tribute gained from black markets and criminal activities was passed up a three-tiered pyramid to the ‘nomenklatura’, and the ‘nomenklatura’ itself (approximately 1,500,000 people) had an internal system of rewards and punishments. The giant state apparatus thus not only allowed criminal activity, but also encouraged, facilitated, and protected it, because the apparatus itself benefited from crime.These relationships provided the original nexus between organized crime and the government. From these beginnings, organized crime in Russia evolved to its present ambiguous position of being both in direct collaboration with the state and, at the same time, in conflict with it.
Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, desperate people are being herded over the border with India to be sent to the Middle East to work as camel jockeys, sex workers and domestic servants and in the other direction to Malaysia to work in restaurants and as factory assistants.
THE END
posted by Ali @ 1:04 PM
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