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A review by darwin8u
The Vory: Russia's Super Mafia by Mark Galeotti
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.