A concise, scholarly look at the rise of crime in post-Soviet Russia.
An Oxford criminologist profiles a small group of perpetrators and their outsize role in modern Russia.
In this concise volume, Varese, who studies organized crime, examines the nature of unlawful activity in Russia from the 1980s to the present. First is Vyacheslav Ivan’kov, a mobster who became the “most feared” representative of the vory v zakone, or “thieves in law,” a sect of “professional criminals who follow a code of honour.” Next is Boris Berezovsky, a powerful businessman who was “instrumental in ensuring Putin’s election” in 2000, then made a white-collar fugitive when Putin turned against the oligarchs who aided his rise to power. Sergei Savely’ev, the subject of the book’s third section, is distinguished not by his crime (drug trafficking) but by his actions during his incarceration, when he leaked videos of prison torture and rape to a human rights group, proving that the state had “condoned and indeed encouraged the mass rape of convicts.” The final section of the book deals with Nikita Kuzmin, the young inventor of the “world’s most powerful computer virus, Gozi.” While Varese does provide the occasional colorful detail (noting, for example, that 26-year-old Kuzmin longed to purchase a Playboy Russiaphotoshoot for his then girlfriend), the book is less interested in its subjects as individuals than as emblems of larger issues in the “macro history of Russia.” Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the 1980s, Varese argues, failed to equip the new economy with protections for fair exchanges, thus informal enforcers like Ivan’kov emerged. In the case of cybercrime, the state is increasingly forced to turned to “freelance criminals” to carry out their operations. This is an intellectually rigorous book, compellingly argued and crisply written.
A concise, scholarly look at the rise of crime in post-Soviet Russia.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781509563609
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Polity
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.
The National Book Award winner delivers a handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed.
New Yorker contributor Gessen, an immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union, understands totalitarian systems, especially the ways in which, under totalitarian rule, language is degraded into meaninglessness. Today, writes the author, we are “using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.” Against that, Gessen suggests, we now have an administration for which words hold no reality, advancing the idea that “alternative facts” are fine but professing dismay when one calls them lies. The step-by-step degradation of democratic institutions that follows is a modern-day rejoinder to the fact that more than half a dozen years separated the Reichstag fire from World War II. That’s a big buffer of time in which to admit all manner of corruption, and all manner of corruption is what we’ve been seeing: Gessen reminds us about Mick Mulvaney’s accepting handsome gifts from the payday-loan industry he was supposed to regulate and Ben Carson’s attempt to stock his office with a $31,000 dining-room set. Yet corruption’s not the right word, writes the author, since Trump and company are quite open and even boastful about what used to be a matter of shame and duplicity. The real tragedy, it seems, is that they have been so successful in creating what the author calls a “new, smaller American society,” one that willfully excludes the Other. Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration’s missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind’s The List as a record of how far we have fallen.
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18893-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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