RUSSIA IN FOUR CRIMINALS

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.