party school. In January the following year, Or-dzhonikidze became a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and organizer of its Russian Bureau. Returning to Russia, he was again arrested in April 1912 and spent the next five years in prison and then Siberian exile. During 1917 Ordzhonikidze was a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. After the Bolshevik takeover, he participated in the civil war in Ukraine and southern Russia and played a leading role in extending Soviet power over Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Geor1113
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gia. A close ally of Stalin, Ordzhonikidze was promoted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1921. He remained in charge of the Tran-scaucasian regional Party organization until 1926, when he became a Politburo candidate member, chairman of the Party’s Central Control Commission and commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin). During the First Five-Year Plan, Ordzhonikidze organized the drive for mass industrialization. In 1930 he was promoted to full Politburo membership and in 1932 was appointed commissar for heavy industry. During the mid-1930s, Ordzhonikidze sought to use his proximity to Stalin to temper the Soviet leader’s increasing use of repression against party and economic officials. Although Ordzhonikidze’s sudden death in early 1937 was officially attributed to a heart attack, it is more likely that, in an act of desperate protest at the impending terror, he committed suicide. See also: BOLSHEVISM; INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Haupt, Georges, and Marie, Jean-Jacques, eds. (1974). Makers of the Russian Revolution. London: Allen and Unwin. Khlevniuk, Oleg V. (1995). In Stalin’s Shadow: The Career of “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
The term Russian mafia is widely used, but Russian-speaking organized crime is not all Russian, nor is it organized in the same ways as the Italian mafia. Russian-speaking organized crime emerged in the former Soviet Union, and during the decade after the collapse it became a major force in transnational crime.
Because Russia’s immense territorial mass spans Europe and Asia, it is easy for organized crime groups to have contacts both with European and Asian crime groups. Russia’s crime groups have a truly international reach and operate in North and South America as well as in Africa. Thus they have been among the major beneficiaries of globalization. Russia’s technologically advanced economy has given Russian organized crime a technological edge in a world dominated by high technology. Moreover, the collapse of the social control system and the state control apparatus have made it possible for major criminals to operate with impunity both at home and internationally.
During the 1990s, Russian law enforcement declared that the number of organized crime groups was escalating. Between 1990 and 1996, it rose from 785 to more than 8,000, and membership was variously estimated at from 100,000 to as high as three million. These identified crime groups were mostly small, amorphous, impermanent organizations that engaged in extortion, drug dealing, bank fraud, arms trafficking, and armed banditry. The most serious forms of organized crime were often committed by individuals who were not identified with specific crime groups but engaged in the large-scale organized theft of state resources through the privatization of valuable state assets to themselves. Hundreds of billions of Russian assets were sent abroad in the first post-Soviet decade; a significant share of this capital flight was money laundering connected with large-scale post-Soviet organized crime involving people who were not traditional underworld figures. In this respect, organized crime in Russia differs significantly from the Italian mafia or the Japanese Yakuza-it is an amalgam of former Communist Party and Komsomol officials, active and demobilized military personnel, law enforcement and security structures, participants in the Soviet second economy, and criminals of the traditional kind. Chechen and other ethnic crime groups are highly visible, but most organized crime involves a broad range of actors working together to promote their financial interests by using violence or threats of violence.
In most of the world, organized crime is primarily associated with the illicit sectors of the economy. Although post-Soviet organized crime groups have moved into the drug trade, especially since the fall of the Taliban, the vast wealth of Russian organized crime derives from its involvement in the legitimate economy, including important sectors like banking, real estate, transport, shipping, and heavy industry, especially aluminum production. Involvement in the legitimate economy does not mean that the crime groups have been legitimized, for they continue to operate with illegitimate tactics even in the legitimate economy. For example, organized criminals are known to intimidate minority shareholders of companies in which they own large blocks of shares and to use violence against business competitors.
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Russian anti-Mafia investigators perform a routine ID check at a Moscow market. © PETER BLAKELY/CORBIS SABA
Crime groups also engage in automobile, drug, and arms smuggling. The involvement of former military personnel has given particular significance to sales of military technology to foreign crime groups. Weapons obtained from Russian crime groups have been used in armed conflicts in many parts of the world, including Africa and the Balkans. Foreign crime groups, especially in Asia, see Russia as a new source of supply for weapons.
There is, in addition, a significant trade in stolen automobiles between Western Europe and the European parts of Russia. From Irkutsk west to Vladivostok, the cars on the road are predominantly Japanese, some of them stolen from their owners.
Tens of thousands of women have been trafficked abroad, often sold to foreign crime groups that in turn traffic them to more distant locales. Women are trafficked from all over Russia by small-scale criminal businesses and much larger entrepreneurs via an elaborate system of recruitment, transport facilitators, and protectors of the trafficking networks. Despite prevention campaigns, human trafficking is a significant revenue source for Russian organized crime.
Russia’s vast natural resources are much exploited by crime groups. Many of the commodities handled by criminals are not traded in the legitimate economy. These include endangered species, timber not authorized for harvest, and radioactive minerals subject to international regulation.
Despite the government’s repeated pledges to fight organized crime, the leaders of the criminal organizations and the government officials who facilitate their activities operate with almost total impunity. Pervasive corruption in the criminal justice system has impeded the prosecution of Russian organized criminals both domestically and internationally. Thus organized crime will continue to be a serious problem for the Russian state and the international community. See also: MAFIA CAPITALISM; PRIVATIZATION
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Handelman, Stephen. (1987). Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Satter, David. (2003). Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shelley, Louise. (1996). “Post-Soviet Organized Crime: A New Form of Authoritarianism.” Transnational Organized Crime 2 (2/3):122-138. Volkov, Vadim. (2002). Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Williams, Phil, ed. (1997). Russian Organized Crime: The New Threat. Portland, OR: Frank Cass.
See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; POLITBURO
Gill, Graham. (1990). The Origins of the Stalinist Political System. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Howlett, Jana; Khlevniuk, Oleg; Kosheleva, Ludmila; and Rogavia, Larisa. (1996). “The CPSU’s Top Bodies under Stalin: Their Operational Records and Structures of Command.” Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project, Working paper No.1. Toronto: Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto.
CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
