![]() The reason: his body was liberally adorned with tattoos. Nonetheless, he was identified within two days. There had been no missing-persons notification filed for him. And yet, with no fingerprints and no clothing, and with his face bloated, battered and partly eaten away, there were none of the conventional clues for identifying him. A series of deep knife wounds in the man’s abdomen gave a fairly good indication of the cause of death. It had been floating in the Gulf of Finland for a couple of weeks, and was not a pretty sight. I n 1974, a naked body washed up on the coast at Strelna, to the south-west of Leningrad (as St Petersburg was then known). All the same, I am still left with the image of that particular war-scarred gunman, at once victim and perpetrator of the new wave of Russian gangsterism, a metaphor for a society that would be plunged into a maelstrom of almost unrestrained corruption, violence and criminality. I have watched it rise and, if not fall, then certainly change I have seen it become increasingly tamed by a political elite that is far more ruthless, in its own way, than the old criminal bosses. In the years since meeting Volodya, I have studied the Russian underworld as a scholar, a government adviser (including a stint with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office), a business consultant and sometimes as a police resource. The mob wars ended, the economy settled, and despite the current sanctions regime in the post-Crimea cool war, Moscow is now as festooned as any European capital with Starbucks and other such icons of globalisation. The 1990s were the glory days of the Russian gangsters, though, and since then, under Putin, gangsterism on the streets has given way to kleptocracy in the state. Nonetheless, it was thanks to Volodya and those like him that I became one of the first western scholars to raise the alarm about the rise and consequences of Russian organised crime, the presence of which had, with a few honourable exceptions, been previously ignored. I still wonder if some day I’ll be walking through one of the cemeteries favoured by Moscow’s gangsters and will come across Volodya’s grave. Vastly expensive (the largest cost upwards of $250,000, at a time when the average wage was close to a dollar a day) and stupendously tacky, these monuments showed the dead with the spoils of their criminal lives: the Mercedes, the designer suit, the heavy gold chain. That decade saw the emergence of a tradition of monumental memorialisation, as fallen gangsters were buried with full Godfather-style pomp, with black limousines threading through paths lined with white carnations and tombs marked with huge headstones. He probably ended up as a casualty of the gang wars of the 1990s, fought out with car bombs, drive-by shootings and knives in the night. I never found out what happened to Volodya. Some were bodyguards, some were runners, some were leg-breakers and some – such as Volodya – were killers. As it rose, it was gathering a new generation of recruits, including damaged and disillusioned veterans of the USSR’s last war. It all made sense, though, when I later learned that he had become what was known in Russian crime circles as a “torpedo” – a hitman.Īs the values and structures of Soviet life crumbled and fell, organised crime was emerging from the ruins, no longer subservient to the corrupt Communist party bosses and the black-market millionaires. He always had money to burn, at a time when most were eking out the most marginal of lives, often living with their parents and juggling multiple jobs. The other afgantsy I knew tolerated Volodya, but never seemed comfortable with him, nor with talking about him. Wiry, intense and morose, he had a brittle and dangerous quality that, on the whole, I would have crossed the road to avoid. One of the men I got to know during this time was named Volodya. ![]() Some of these young men collaterally damaged by the war had become adrenaline junkies, or just intolerant of the conventions of everyday life. ![]() But then there were those who could not or would not move on. The nightmares were less frequent, the memories less vivid. A year later, though, most had done what people usually do in such circumstances: they had adapted, they had coped. ![]() Most came back raw, shocked and angry, either bursting with tales of horror and blunder, or spikily or numbly withdrawn. When I could, I would meet these afgantsy shortly after they got home, and then again a year into civilian life, to see how they were adjusting. While carrying out research for my doctorate on the impact of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, I was interviewing Russian veterans of that brutal conflict. The system was sliding towards shabby oblivion, even if no one knew at the time how soon the end would come. I was in Moscow in 1988, during the final years of the Soviet Union.
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