Difference between revisions of "Essay: Donald Trump is a stooge and puppet of the corrupt authoritarian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin"

...as the Russian state began to reassert its authority under Putin, members of organized crime became less important than the oligarchs whom they had helped ascend to wealth and power. Today, Putin controls the oligarchs, and together they control and exploit the criminal world to their mutual advantage.

Galeotti’s work excels at providing an understanding of Russian criminality at its operational level. It focuses on the different types of personnel represented in the crime groups — the bosses, the lookouts, and the aspirants seeking to share in the excitement and the profit of the criminal world. In contrast to the greyness that characterized Soviet life, the world of the blatnye, as conveyed by Galeotti, was vibrant, not reined in by the constraints that dominated the Soviet era. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the criminal world was so often romanticized in the Russian and Soviet imagination. One need think no farther than the Odessa Tales of the great author Isaak Babel, who, as Galeotti recalls, brought to life the crime-dominated Moldavanka neighborhood in the colorful port city on the Black Sea.

A particular strength of the book is Galeotti’s ability to analyze the dynamics of the diverse criminal gangs that comprise the thieves’ world in different urban centers — such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ekaterinburg. Many operated on a smaller scale in numerous other cities across Russia and Ukraine. Ethnic groups, particularly from the Caucasus, were key actors in the professional criminal world of the Soviet and post-Soviet era. The most prominent of these were the Chechens and the Georgians, both overrepresented in the highest ranks of the criminal world and both meriting their own chapter in The Vory.^[2]

Indeed, Galeotti takes it even further. He suggests not just state practices but even Russian social values have become suffused with the norms of organized crime. "Maybe…it is not that the vory have disappeared so much as that everyone is now a vor, and the vorovskoi mir [thieves’ world] ultimately won (p. 222)".^[3]

Since the end of the 1990s, Russian organised crime has become “regularised, corporately minded and integrated with elements of the state.” If you follow Russian politics, chances are that you have seen the now famous clip of President Putin threatening to “‘whack terrorists, even in the outhouse.” That Putin publicly deployed these terms, Galeotti says, is only possible because of the widescale appropriation of the underworld lexicon by mainstream society. Krysha (roof, i.e., protection), skhodki (meetings), and limonki (little lemons, i.e., one million rubles) are just a few examples of underworld vocabulary – and, indeed, practices – that have become part of everyday political parlance in Russia.

Another central premise of the book is that where there is demand, organised crime supplies. In most cases the demand is for illegal and often violent services, but Galeotti also tells the lighter tale of “cheese runners” who smuggle Western cheese – forbidden by Russian counter-sanctions – into the country through Belarus. If 20 years ago organized crime was “a facilitator within Russia’s still unruly business environment,” today it plays a similar role on a transnational scale. ^[4]

Vladimir Gel’man examines regime change in Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present day, systematically presenting theoretical and comparative perspectives of the factors that affected regime changes and the authoritarian drift of the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s national political elites aimed to achieve their goals by creating and enforcing of favorable “rules of the game” for themselves and maintaining informal winning coalitions of cliques around individual rulers. In the 1990s, these moves were only partially successful given the weakness of the Russian state and troubled post-socialist economy. In the 2000s, however, Vladimir Putin rescued the system thanks to the combination of economic growth and the revival of the state capacity he was able to implement by imposing a series of non-democratic reforms. In the 2010s, changing conditions in the country have presented new risks and challenges for the Putin regime that will play themselves out in the years to come.^[5]

Early on in the invasion, there were accounts indicating that some Russian soldiers received rations that had expired in 2015. Most companies responsible for providing food to the Russian military are connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin — the patron of PMC Wagner, the mercenary organization, and sponsor of the Internet Research Agency, which has been accused of meddling in the United States elections. Several years ago, Prigozhin’s companies were accused by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny of forming a cartel and gaming the state’s bidding system for defense orders, receiving contracts for several hundred million dollars. The quality of food and housing in the Russian military is reportedly worse than in its prisons, with unreasonably small meals and some carrying harmful Escherichia coli bacteria.

There are also reports that Russian advances in Ukraine were slowed by lack of fuel — and this in a country rich with oil and gas. But ineffective control over fuel consumption in the Russian military actually long preceded the war in Ukraine and had historically created opportunities for embezzlement — that is why fuel is often called the Russian military’s “second currency.” It is plausible that the long-standing tradition of corruption in fuel supply decreased the pace of Russian advancement in Ukraine.^[8]