The Russians Are Coming

John Lloyd

• Comrade Criminal: The Theft of the Second Russian Revolution by Stephen Handelman
  Joseph, 360 pp, £16.99, September 1994, ISBN 0 7181 0015 8
• Crime Without Frontiers: The Worldwide Expansion of Organised Crime and the Pax Mafiosa by Clare Sterling
  Little, Brown, 274 pp, £17.50, June 1994, ISBN 0 316 91121 6
• Inside Yeltsin’s Russia by John Kampfner
  Cassell, 256 pp, £17.99, October 1994, ISBN 0 303 34463 6
• A Dishonoured Society by John Follain
  Little, Brown, 356 pp, £16.99, February 1995, ISBN 0 316 90982 3

What emerges most clearly from these books is that the Russian ‘mafia’ (the Italian name has been taken over into Russian) has so deeply penetrated government, business and the security forces as to have reconstituted the society which lives on one-sixth of the earth’s land surface into a wholly criminal formation. Organised crime, all four writers warm continually, has encircled the globe, has found in Russia a safe laundry for its money and is trafficking in nuclear material drawn from the ex-Soviet arsenal. The picture is one of a vastly rich, closely calibrated series of crime networks which are now able and willing to challenge the Russian Government, among others. Handelman quotes President Yeltsin in January 1993: ‘We have become a mafia state on a world scale. Everyone thinks that political issues could lead to an explosion but crime could as easily blow us asunder.’ Sterling quotes him as saying a month later: ‘Organised crime is destroying the economy, interfering in politics, undermining public morale, threatening individual citizens and the entire Russian nation ... our country is already considered a great mafia power.’