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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Just Mercy

I don’t remember when I first heard about modern executions, but at some point as a kid, probably around ten years old, I remember a prisoner on death row in Utah being executed.  It was all over the news because, as I recall, there were protests against the death penalty.  I remember seeing crowds lined up around the fence of the prison with signs and everything.  The death penalty has been around since the beginning of time, so I have always been interested in the arguments some people make against it.  Easily the most compelling is that of wrongful conviction.  Widely accepted studies claim that between 1 and 5% of all trials result in wrongful conviction, which seems unfair, especially if one of those wrongful convictions leads to the death penalty.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson (ISBN: 978-0-8129-8496-5) tells the story of the author’s lifelong crusade to provide justice for people whom he believes were treated unfairly by the courts in America.  The reader gets a brief history of Stevenson’s life before founding his non-profit law project, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and then a detailed look at the case of Walter McMillian, a man who was wrongfully accused (let along wrongfully convicted).  Along the way, Stevenson provides a few details of other cases he and his project was working on.  Like the McMillian case, most of the cases involve people who were possibly wrongfully accused or convicted, those who were mentally disabled, and those whose defense had been ineffective (for various reasons, but usually, per Stevenson, because the defendant did not have enough money to pay for effective counsel).  He also spends a solid chapter discussing his efforts to prevent juveniles from being sentenced to life in prison (“death in prison” as he calls it) and from being dealt with by the adult criminal justice system.  The McMillian case also had a racial element to it, which is likely unsurprising since it happened in Alabama in the early 1980s.  After a girl was murdered and the local police couldn’t identify a culprit, they found a convenient suspect in McMillian, a black man who was known in some circles to have had an affair with a white woman.  For most whites in the South in the early 1980s, that was still culturally unacceptable.  Eventually, McMillian was convicted on very shaky testimony and put on death row.  When Stevenson got around to working his case (“got around” since Stevenson took it upon himself to look into just about every death row case), he found many legal holes and worked tirelessly to overturn the conviction.  It took years, but he eventually succeeded, overcoming general police incompetence, racist feelings, and legal precedent, something that is always hard to deal with in the American justice system.  Stevenson notes, in his conclusion to the book, that as he’s worked these cases, he’s learned about justice and mercy.  It’s not just the people in prisons (there rightfully or wrongfully) that are, in some way, “broken,” but that we all are, and that when we recognize that, we are more prepared to show mercy to the broken around us.

The book is informative and really makes the reader think (two important qualities in books).  Crime and the criminal justice system are an interesting topic to learn about, even if one has never really been involved (the closest I’ve ever been is explaining to a judge that the 90 m.p.h. I was accused of driving was patently false, although I would freely admit to driving 75 m.p.h. in a 65-m.p.h. zone; he believed me, thankfully, and the fine I had to pay was quartered).  McMillian’s story is quite gripping, and the book is well worth a read.  Some of the other stories Stevenson brings up are also interesting, but given the lack of detail and attention paid to them, they waver between being a decent supporting cast and being a distraction.  The points made in the supporting stories about the struggles those with mental incapacities have in getting a fair trial are well worth exploring, but need a more extensive treatment.  Arguably the largest point made by the book is that poor people are often hung out to dry when it comes to adequate representation in court.  Stevenson’s book does not make public defenders look good at all.  They are repeatedly shown to be petty and lazy.  My guess is that is an unfair characterization of all of them, although there is no reason to doubt his description in the specific cases he mentions.  Another subject brought up is rehabilitation for those who get out of prison, which seems like a pretty universal thing people should be able to rally around.  In discussing legal questions, it’s always worth hearing the other side, and this book doesn’t do that.  There is no discussion of how, in cases with mentally competent adults, by simply not committing crimes (or, in cases where things aren’t legal crimes, but are against God’s commandments), the majority of these situations could be avoided.  I also found it somewhat disingenuous to have a lawyer talking about applying the law fairly since it is unscrupulous lawyers (Stevenson seems to be an honest one) who use legal tricks and loopholes to keep those who are actually guilty out of prison or free from other consequences.  The justice system, like anything done by the government, is a one-size-fits-all thing, so when too many people are seen getting off the hook, the pendulum swings the other way with minimal sentencing requirements and other harsh penalties.  Finally, racism is also brought up a couple times in the book, and in a few cases mentioned, it seems to have played a negative role, and there is no reason to not believe Stevenson’s account.  I am old enough to remember some people saying interracial relationships were to be avoided (by the time I was a teenager, this sentiment had either died out or was not something people chose to talk about, but in circles I ran in, I believe it to be the former and, certainly, those of my generation did not hold those views), so the McMillian story has a very real air about it.  At the very end of the book, Stevenson strayed into the world of social justice, but it seemed to be a small part of the message, and one I hope stays in the background because it pales in comparison to the message Stevenson, maybe unwittingly, presents, which is that individuals who are free to make their own decisions and who are willing to love their neighbor and sacrifice their time and efforts provide the greatest good.  There was a powerful story in the book where Stevenson helped a black guy who had a troubled childhood and then committed a violent crime.  During prison visits, Stevenson met a prison officer who was quite antagonistic toward Stevenson and, based on some of his tattoos and bumper stickers, harbored at least some racist beliefs.  Stevenson didn’t openly confront this man, and once the warden had to escort the prisoner to trial and heard about his troubled childhood in the foster care system, mellowed greatly, even getting the prisoner a favorite treat, likely against prison rules because the guard found something in common with the prisoner: a troubled childhood in dysfunctional foster homes (dysfunctional homes are a constant in the book, but not an issue that gets discussed).  I thought the story fit Stevenson’s message about all of us being broken in one way or another and our cognizance of that opening us to being more merciful toward others as powerful as anything in the book.  

   

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Savage Continent

My high school offered a number of Advanced Placement® classes.  I availed myself of the opportunity of taking some of them, but European History was not one of them.  It seemed too far removed from anything involving me, too obscure.  Since then, thanks to things like serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Russia and my wife being from Europe, as well as a greater appreciation for my family history, which has a lot of Europe in it, I’ve developed a greater interest in Europe and European history.  The AP class typically starts with events in the XIV century, and my interests don’t usually go back that far, as the XX century and today are usually what intrigue me, likely because I see the connection, just like I didn’t see the connection back in high school.

Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe (ISBN: 978-1-250-03356-7) takes a very raw look at the immediate post-World War II period in European history.  The author catalogues the side of post-war Europe that is not usually highlighted in articles and books: genocide, ethnic cleansing, corruption, and violence.  The wartime years are famous for those, but they continued, usually on a smaller scale and in a more isolated fashion, for years after the Allies defeated the Axis powers.  Lowe examines the post-war conditions and how they created the ideal setting for further violence.  While the Allied armies tried to gain control and figure out just what they had on their hands, displaced persons and refugees wandered Europe.  There were plenty of instances of vigilante justice and people looking for revenge against the Germans or other people that had truly or only purportedly wronged others.  In Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and a few other places, the German concentration camps were still being used, either has temporary housing or by the Soviets or others for their original purposes, just against a new type of inmate.  Ukrainian and Poles fought.  Greece went into a civil war.  Jews continued to find no quarter.  The Allies and international organizations worked hard to remedy the harsh conditions, but given the level of destruction the war had wrought, it was often slow going.  Finally, the emerging struggle of the Cold War meant that some of these problems were not given the focus that some would have liked them to have been under.

The book was a very interesting read, although it is easily one of those that is often described as “hard” because of the vivid descriptions of man’s cruelty to his fellowman.  The descriptions of the trials and judgements (or lack thereof) against Nazi sympathizers and collaborators in many European countries was interesting and presented interesting arguments on why they were conducted in the manner that they ultimately were.  I thought a lot of the content was new to me in that I didn’t know about this or that specific situation, but none of it surprised me, having spent time in and trying to learn about the Balkans.  It seems that a lot of the areas where post-war conflagrations happened are the same areas that are still thought of as potential flashpoints today.  People should be aware of the history and the potential consequences of various actions in these places.  I thought the book was somewhat anti-victor (both Western and Communist), laying blame for some of the post-war atrocities at the feet of the Allies.  I wasn’t convinced that was accurate or appropriate, but the book was interesting and provided a good view into a part of European history that is not often discussed.

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The Vory

As a missionary in Russia, my views into the criminal underworld were rather limited.  Missionaries were, of course, sometimes mugged, and everyone ran into Gypsies and other beggars.  Some missionaries preferred to exchange money on the street instead of in a bank because they got a better rate, but that was about it.  A pretty cool story I was aware of was that one of the Russian missionaries had been in some kind of gang before joining the Church.  The story went that he was found by missionaries who were tracting one night.  They knocked on a door and this guy let them in.  People were partying loudly in the apartment, but this guy took the missionaries into the kitchen and they talked for a few minutes.  Further meetings ensued, and this guy joined the Church.  It’s now been twenty years since my missionary service began, but maybe ten years ago, I heard that this guy had married one of the Russian sisters who served in St. Petersburg, too, and he had even had a stint as a branch president.

In The Vory: Russia's Super Mafia (ISBN: 978-0-300-18682-6) by Mark Galeotti, one gets a much more in-depth look at Russia’s criminals.  The book looks at the heavy hitters, not the petty thieves, starting way back in tsarist times and finishing with events of the last couple years.  The history of Russia’s criminals is interesting in that it is rather tightly woven together with the history of Russia itself.  The Russian Empire, the Bolsheviks, Stalin, Gorbachev, and then Yeltsin and now Putin have all left a mark on Russian organized crime.  The central figures, the so-called thieves in law (“in law” because they lived according to the thieves’ code) have proven themselves resourceful and adaptable, changing their methods and worldview to fit whatever comes their way.  Originally unwilling to be part of mainstream society, Stalinist repression and policy caused a demographic shift in the underworld that resulted in the top criminals finding a partner, not an enemy, in the state, and that relationship has continued to morph up through today, where crime, business, and politics is often a blurry and hard-to-define conglomeration.  Russian organized crime was a hot topic in the 1990s, when it and the oligarchs settled their scores openly and violently on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and security services around the world warned of the Russian mafia and its potential influence in Europe and even farther abroad.  Galeotti discusses that, too, including organized crime in America that is tied to the Russians.  He notes, though, that most of the Western fears never materialized, and the Russian criminals were never able to (or never even tried to) overtake the criminals who were already in place.  Now, with their shady ties to legitimacy, they ply their trades on the margins, providing services such as hacking or providing frontline fighters in Crimea.  There are a few significant words on the costs of crime, both in terms of people and economics.  The author’s main thesis is that the Russian thieves, the vory, now a solid part of mainstream society, a complete 180° turn from their pre-Revolution days, have adapted before and will continue to adapt to whatever situation comes their way.

This was a very interesting book that I thought did an excellent job providing a sufficient amount of detail on a very broad and complicated subject without going into any one particular area too deeply, leaving that for other books, articles, etc.  The history was well worth it, especially in the context of the overarching point of the book.  I enjoyed the anecdotes as well as the analysis, finding it sound in most places.  The point is well made, focusing largely on the post-Communist time period, which is more relevant to most readers, but pulling from the rich history of the thieves when necessary.  The only danger with books of this nature is that the reader is prone to start thinking of all people in a given society, in this case the Russians, as criminals, when, in fact, it’s just a small subset of the entire population.  Organized crime is presented as such as widespread thing that it seems everyone’s involved.  One has to keep proper perspective when reading about the subject.  On the other hand, it would seem that it’s a pervasive problem, and the book, in a way, is a call for people everywhere, but especially in the West, where organized crime is (hopefully?) not as pervasive, to work hard to prevent our government and business institutions from becoming so tightly intertwined with criminals because of the tolls that has on democracy and economics.

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Pros and Cons

I’ve never been a big NFL fan (for the most part, the games are played on the wrong day).  When I was a kid, Steve Young played for the 49ers, and since he had previously played for BYU, I was nominally a 49ers fan.  Steve Young, though, seems to have been a pretty decent guy and was (and is) a guy worthy of emulation by young boys tossing footballs around backyards and parks across America (if anyone still does that since that level of freedom requires unscheduled time and so-called free-range kids, both a rarity and both not really the subject of these couple paragraphs).  On the other side of Steve Young, there was the NBA’s Charles Barkley selling products by telling the world, “I am not a role model.”  Even as a young kid, I knew that was an out-and-out lie.  Whether professional athletes want to be or not, they are role models.  That is unfortunate, considering the standard behavior of most of them.

Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL (ISBN: 0-446-60747-9) by Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger delves into the subject of the behavior of professional athletes (and, in a way, college and high school athletes since the authors not that professional athletes who get a pass on bad behavior have been getting similar passes for years).  The book relies heavily on statistics, which everyone knows are open to manipulation, but the authors go into detail about their methodology.  The bulk of the book is anecdotes regarding various players and their criminal undertakings, ranging from gambling (probably the least harmful thing discussed) to robbery, burglary, and assault, and then on up to murder.  It’s tough reading in some places as this raw, and real people are involved.  The authors’ position is that players, team management, NFL management, and fans are at fault, but the bulk of the fault lies with team and league management, since they are the ones that push for light punishments, involve their lawyers in an effort to get players off the hook, and stick up for guys who spend their days off skirting the law in myriad ways.  They do proffer some solutions, most of which center around harsh penalties for all encounters with the law, not just convictions and not just for what people normally think of as “serious crimes.”

While the book is over ten years old, it seems things haven’t changed much.  Athletes still get away with murder, sometimes literally, while average people get the book thrown at them.  As long as big money is involved, things are unlikely to change unless the ultimate source of that money, the fans, become too disgusted with the behavior of their idols, and stop going to games, turning on TVs, and buying merchandise.  I tend to agree with the authors in their assessment that the statistics for professional athletes (while this book was about football players, the authors subsequently wrote a book about basketball players) skew high for athletes, meaning the percentage of the population that is criminal is higher among athletes than among the rest of us, and I agree with them that the punishments need to be much more severe from the teams and the leagues, as well as the criminal justice system.  Personally, I don’t see that happening any time soon, and behavior that is rightfully condemned in all other areas of life will continue to be quietly and quickly dismissed when the one doing it can effectively move balls across goal lines.

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The Gift of Fear

Everyone fears one thing or another.  Some fears are what most people would consider rational.  Others, such as acridophobia (the abnormal fear of grasshoppers) and apiphobia (the abnormal fear of bees) are what most people would consider irrational.  Sometimes, we are gripped by fear of things that aren't even real, which is probably a step down from the usual phobias since at the very least, bees, grasshoppers, and the like are real things.  As a kid I had the occasional nightmare, just like most kids.  One that I remember particularly well was a dream about small, brown aliens.  The dream started out as a National Geographic-type show with a guy in a blind hunting these little aliens.  Later, the aliens made it to our house in Centerville, came through the window well (of which I was already deathly afraid because a muskrat had once fallen in and made the typical scratching and scurrying noises), and wreaked havoc in our house.  We were able to trap them in the basement bathroom, but when they learned how to flush themselves down the toilet, they were able to get out of the house and reintroduce themselves into the environment and again enter our house.  I awoke from that dream sweating profusely, sure that, in the middle of the night, all alone in my basement bedroom with two window wells, I was sure to become the aliens' next victim.  Odd shadows around my desk only assured me that hordes of the little creatures were hiding underneath or behind the desk.  I lay awake for a couple hours in an adrenaline-fueled vigil, tightly cocooned in multiple slowly-becoming-soaked-with-my-sweat blankets, waiting for the aliens to emerge from their hiding place to attack.  It never happened, and I fell back asleep.

In his book The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence (ISBN: 978-0-440-50883-0), Gavin de Becker attempts to help people push irrational fear out of their lives so they can be properly attuned to true fear, which he claims is a positive aspect of our bodies' natural reaction to things.  Fear, he says, helps us respond appropriately to situations that have a real chance of resulting in our being harmed or killed.  De Becker is an expert on security issues, criminal justice, and public safety.  His book reflects that in that most of the examples and the topics of discussion involve things like corporate safety, dating safety, and child abuse.  As one with a wide range of experience — personal, research, and professional — the examples given are not only gripping, but provide lessons learned.  De Becker explains how we can often predict violence and gives some suggestions on how to get out of those potentially violent situations with minimal damage done.  As someone who has found much of what Glenn Latham says in his book The Power of Positive Parenting: A Wonderful Way to Raise Children to be true, I was intrigued by de Becker's claim that stalking, whether from an estranged spouse to a crazed fan to a disgruntled employee or anything in between, can usually be solved by ignoring the stalker.  The overarching message of the book, of course, is that our natural intuition will help us in most dangerous situations, but only if we are informed enough to not have our head full of worries and anxieties caused by unfounded fear.

While the message of the book was a good one, I was rather underwhelmed by the book.  While child abuse, spousal abuse (mostly wife abuse), rape, and stalking are real problems, I found that robbery, burglary, and assault were under-represented in the book.  I wanted to know how to deal with walking down the street at night and being met suddenly by a few people out of nowhere.  I found de Becker's obvious political leanings to grate on the reading.  His explanations of fear were solid, but always included a final note about how we got this through evolution.  The explanation stood without evolution — evolution or creation doesn't matter in this discussion; the fact that we work the way we do is sufficient.  The same line of reasoning applies to de Becker's grossly unfounded position on gun control.  In an appendix, de Becker goes so far as to say the right to bear arms is a "so-called right."  He may be a security expert, but he's obviously no historian.  He should just leave politics out of it and tell us how to deal with violent people who happen to have guns.  Finally, I was no big fan of the author's philosophy, even though it's a wide-spread philosophy.  He claimed we only truly fear something when death is the result of that something (this is based, in part, on the current interpretations of evolutionary theory (and maybe on older interpretations, but I don't know enough about them to really comment)).  This is, of course false, and the author admits as much when later in the book he writes that we truly fear only that which can harm us or kill us.  There are many things I fear worse than being killed, and being educated about those types of crimes would vastly improve the book as would a little more effort on de Becker's part to focus on the subject at hand and not tangential opinions.

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