Gangs of Russia

The 1990s are known as wild times in post-Communist Russia.  I was lucky enough to be a missionary in Russia at the end of the 1990s (starting in 1999).  I missed some of the craziest times, including a financial crash in 1998 that decimated the meager finances of most every-day Russians, but still got to experience some of the hallmarks of the wild 1990s.  The preferred clothes of the Russian street gang member, track suit pants, a leather jacket, and a black knit hat, were still very ubiquitous, especially in the markets, where the low-level racketeering probably made many of the bootleg CD sales that young people enjoyed possible.  Missionaries sometimes had run-ins with street thugs, although it’s hard to say if they were part of organized groups or not.  Some missionaries who served in Pskov before I did told of having their apartment besieged by a group of young Russian thugs, and one of the missionaries hung a couple sheets tied into an impromptu rope ladder off the balcony and shimmied down in order to get down on the street and warn the sister missionaries from going to the apartment, where a missionary meeting was scheduled.  Later, in the same city, a missionary companion and I had a run-in with thugs who beat us up in our own apartment building’s elevator, taking the small bit of money we had on us as their prize.  Such stories were common in 1990s Russia.

Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power by Svetlana Stephenson (ISBN: 978-1-5017-0024-8) delves into street gangs in the post-Soviet Russia.  Published in 2015, it relies on data gathered mostly during the first decade of the 2000s, but also talks about the 1990s.  The books focuses on traditional Russian street gangs, and doesn’t worry much about independent criminals or the famed thieves in law (vory v zakone).  The street gangs, the author reports, are like the thieves in law in that their roots go back to pre-revolutionary Russia, where the social fabric of the village commoners was often knit in part by groups of young men who spent their free time roaming the village streets, often picking fights with neighboring villages.  Much like soccer hooligans, these fights weren’t always territorial in nature, but sometimes just as an outlet for steam and the kind of dangerous, on-the-edge entertainment that young men often look for.  Soviet urbanization quashed much of this behavior, but glorification of anti-Soviet criminals in the 1970s and 1980s led to a comeback.  Once the Soveit Union fell, there were plenty of opportunities for street gangs to make money, not just fight each other, and they rapidly moved into sectors where the state was often unable to provide security or other services that government is usually expected to provide.  Markets, kiosks, street parking, prostitution, and extortion were prime territory for street gangs.  As these opportunities proved lucrative, the fights returned, but now for territory and power.  A few of these new criminals moved up the chain and became career criminals, commanding the guys on the streets below them, which were the types we missionaries ran into.  As the 1990s have faded into the past, street gangs have had to adapt to the state becoming more powerful and things like private security firms (usually started by former gang leaders) edging into the gangs’ territories.  Traditions have also changed or are threatened by the ever-increasing drug trade.  Finally, a major thesis in the book is that Russian  street gang members, unlike those in some other places, are able to combine the street life with regular life, including college, careers, and families.  Russia has a unique culture that allows for one pursuing both angles in life as needed, which has, in a few ways, allowed for the preservation of the street gang.  There was a passing of an era described, though, since the gang wars of the 1990s are done and upward mobility in gangs largely a thing of the past, so the future of Russia street gangs is one of waning and increased reliance on the drug trade, something they have traditionally eschewed.

Given my personal experience with this, I found it interesting to read about.  If it wasn’t for my fascination with Russia, though, I think I would’ve found this a little too dry, even if the underworld and crime were a topic of one’s interest.  The book tried to draw on both statistics for Russia as a whole and some more concentrated studies in Kazan and Moscow (especially Kazan), and I thought that the Kazan focus was overwhelming.  I think it could’ve left out some aspects of the organized crime situation in Russia because of Kazan’s large non-ethnic Russian population and proximity to Daghestan, where the crime situation and corruption are an entire level up from a lot of the rest of Russia.  Some of the personal stories the author gathered in discussions with criminals were interesting, and I liked learning about the ability of many street gang members to live what most would call a double life, but that seemed entirely normal to them, involved in low-level crime with their friends from the street, but going to college, getting married, even holding down jobs at the same time.

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