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lilreaderbug's review
4.0
Examination of the Russian mafia's role in society. An overview of their culture, including fenya and shansons. The book was well-researched. Galeotti is cautiously optimistic about Russia moving away from organized crime. If this does happen, it will definitely happen slowly as organized crime is endemic in Russian society. I do wonder if part of the historic defiance of law stems from ethnic Russian imperialism being imposed on the 100+ ethnic groups throughout the country.
mocaxe's review
4.0
very informative yet easy to digest. takes you on a journey so that it almost reads more like a story than a work of non fiction, but everything about it is real.
lgorzen04's review against another edition
4.0
Really well researched timeline of how crime changed throughout russias history
bob_muller's review
5.0
Anyone interested in understanding Russian organized crime should read this book. It is by far one of the best books on criminal organizations I have ever read. Although Galeotti eschews sociological analysis of his information in favor of a more simple historical analysis approach, you can easily read between the lines to get a clear picture of how the culture and social systems of Russia contribute to the structure of criminal organizations and black/grey markets. I would have liked more information about the latter, particularly the French cheese market and its relationship to elites, sanctions, national and local politics, Putinism, and gangster opportunism, but I'm sure that would be an entire book by itself :). And I remain uncertain about the possibilities of gang warfare (indeed of state warfare, say in East Ukraine/Donbas) over French cheese (and other, more prosaic goods such as heroin, of course) and its implications for world peace.
zachkuhn's review against another edition
5.0
Vibrant and relatable. Doesn't read like a historical look at centuries of Russian Mafia activity. That's the highest compliment.
darwin8u's review against another edition
4.0
"If Lenin had shot more criminals and hired fewer, we might have seen a very different Soviet Union."
- Soviet police officer, 1991, quoted in The Vory by Mark Galeotti
"Not everyone who carries a knife is a cook."
- Russian proverb
A nice survey and history of the Vory V Zakone "thief within the code". The best part of this Yale published and well researched book is the history of how the Russian mafia developed in parallel with the Soviet Union and Russia and changed and adapted to fit the new realities. I also enjoyed the sections that dealt with the language, rituals, and tattoos of the Vory. The book loses a bit of velocity as it tries to describe the different facets of the Russian organized crime's ecosystem (Georgian, Chechen, street vor to vor-broker). But still, these sections were necessary to understand that the Russian organized crime has multiple models of control, multiple levels of partnership, etc. It is difficult to even (from both epistemological and ontological perspective) understand exactly what controlled by organized crime means in Russia. The corruption and the cooperation of the state and businesses is so extensive that getting a firm idea of how much Russia is a mafia state seems hard to bite into.
Anyway, this is a fascinating read and helpful in understanding Modern Russia and how figures like Stalin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin contributed to the current corruption in Russia. It is also useful to understanding how Putin uses organized crime to support the Russian state (and his personal power) and the current conflict with Ukraine and Russia's desire to "Make Russia Great Again." It is also, in a minor way, also helpful to a degree in understanding the relationship Trump has with Ukraine and Russia (both officially and unofficially), although not much is directly said about Trump's ties with Russian money in this book.
- Soviet police officer, 1991, quoted in The Vory by Mark Galeotti
"Not everyone who carries a knife is a cook."
- Russian proverb
A nice survey and history of the Vory V Zakone "thief within the code". The best part of this Yale published and well researched book is the history of how the Russian mafia developed in parallel with the Soviet Union and Russia and changed and adapted to fit the new realities. I also enjoyed the sections that dealt with the language, rituals, and tattoos of the Vory. The book loses a bit of velocity as it tries to describe the different facets of the Russian organized crime's ecosystem (Georgian, Chechen, street vor to vor-broker). But still, these sections were necessary to understand that the Russian organized crime has multiple models of control, multiple levels of partnership, etc. It is difficult to even (from both epistemological and ontological perspective) understand exactly what controlled by organized crime means in Russia. The corruption and the cooperation of the state and businesses is so extensive that getting a firm idea of how much Russia is a mafia state seems hard to bite into.
Anyway, this is a fascinating read and helpful in understanding Modern Russia and how figures like Stalin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin contributed to the current corruption in Russia. It is also useful to understanding how Putin uses organized crime to support the Russian state (and his personal power) and the current conflict with Ukraine and Russia's desire to "Make Russia Great Again." It is also, in a minor way, also helpful to a degree in understanding the relationship Trump has with Ukraine and Russia (both officially and unofficially), although not much is directly said about Trump's ties with Russian money in this book.
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