When one reads about the Italian Mafia, one can’t help themselves but come across the world’s second most famous Mafia, the Russian one. Whether indirectly, through the likes of Meyer Lansky and Louis Buchalter, whose parents left Tsarist Russia to Michael Varzar and others like him of the stock scam era in the early 2000s, all have been shaped in one way or another by the evolving conditions of Russia (and its predecessor states) and the vorovski mir it gave birth to. Naturally, the first series of books trying to describe this phenomenon came out in the 1990s when American and European law enforcement, and the public and native organized crime groups alike, first encountered these patronymic gangsters. The quintessential book exemplifying the mood of the time was probably Red Mafiya by Robert Friedman, who described Russian (or Eastern European, more broadly) organized crime as washing over the West in a crimson tide after being unleashed by the Russian security apparatus following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that it was not to be the case; ROC simply became another network plying its trade in an ever globalizing and homogenizing world. As such, I wanted to see if there was a book out there that laid out the general history of Russian organized crime, how it came to be, help explain the semi-mythical vory z zakone and contextualize it in the new millennium. Thankfully, that book exists, and it is called The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia (2018) by Mark Galeotti.

The Vory is exactly the type of book I look for. Written by an academic, it nonetheless maintained an accessible narrative, one that was easy to get into even by a layman like me. Flipping through the notes and bibliography, it was quite clear just how much background reading was necessary to establish a coherent picture of the primordial soup out of which the vorovski mir (Russia’s underworld) came about. As such, it was a bit of a slow burn as Mark dedicated the initial chapters fleshing out the economic state of the Russian Empire, the state of law enforcement and the difficulty it posed to govern such a large country, and the divisive urban environment that literally split cities into the haves and have nots. From there, the book was able to argue with quite a conviction, that unlike the Sicilian (or all Italian) Mafia, which saw its genesis in the countryside, Russian organized crime was byproduct of the squalor and lawlessness that characterized the Empire’s large urban centers such as Moscow, St. Petersburg and Odes(s)a. The vorovski mir represented a rejection of “conventional” society of the middle and upper class, and the poor inner-city enclaves that largely governed itself created the criminal stratification and specialization which led to the organization of crime itself. While Stalin’s Gulag system created the crucible for the birth of the vory themselves, the environment which birthed them pre-dated the Man of Steel, facts that are absent from the vory’s Wikipedia page.

For me, the only mild criticism I can even think of would be about the last quarter of the book, and some of it was through no fault of the author. As capitalism brutally seeped (often violently and through much misery) into every aspect of Russia during the awful years of the 1990s, the role of the vor diminished in the face of a new class of criminals, the avtoriteti, educated criminal-businessmen that blended between the under and upper worlds. Therefore, while the book was titled The Vory, they become sparingly mentioned as the chapters went by and some people might take issue with that. There were also issues around some repetition on the intersection between the modern Russian state and organized crime, to what extent one depended on the other and the role Russia’s security apparatus played into that. It didn’t help that the same people/examples were brought up over and over again. Finally, judging by Mark Galeotti’s other written works, it is clear he has a (un)healthy fascination with President Vladimir Putin and the modern functioning of the Kremlin. As such, speculation slowly started to replace facts, perhaps isolated incidents were exemplified as the general state of things, and increasingly more biased sources were used, especially about events post-2014 as Western scholarly research dropped off a cliff. The last chapter was especially painful to read in light of the many predictions he made that in hindsight did not come true. There were no mob wars, no changing of the guards, and certainly any speculation about Putin’s loosening grip on power have become moot in light of his ever-increasing dominance over the country. But as I said, these are minor complaints and don’t take away from the quality of this work.

Overall, this is an excellent book about Russian organized crime that I would recommend to anyone looking to get an introductory, but thorough, history of this phenomenon, explaining it from the very beginning all the way until 2018. Speakers of Slavic languages, I think, would especially get a kick out of it, and it was surprising to see how many “criminal” words (those borrowed from the once secret language of the thieves, Fenya) seeped their way into everyday use by myself and those around me. The bibliography was certainly inspiring, and I have already picked up a book from there to read next.

Thank you for reading.