There is a long and inglorious tradition of under-reported crime rates in Russia. In part, this sometimes reflects the state’s unwillingness to admit the scale of the problem; in part, the police themselves choosing to ignore crimes or report them as being less serious than they really are; and in part, ‘latent crime’ resulting from public unwillingness to turn to the authorities, whether out of mistrust or simply because they don’t think there is any point. Together, these can lead to all kinds of anomalies in the apparent crime rate.
Bad news: official Russian crime data are under-reports; good news: Russian academics are digging out the real data
Posted by Mark Galeotti on January 17, 2011
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/bad-news-official-russian-crime-data-are-under-reports-good-news-russian-academics-are-digging-out-the-real-data/
‘Crime in Post-Soviet Societies’, in Herzog-Evans (ed), Transnational Crime Manual
My latest publication on post-Soviet crime is an overview in a comprehensive three-volume Transnational Crime Manual (Wolf Legal Publishers, 2010) edited by Prof. Martine Herzog-Evans of the University of Rheims. My chapter explores how the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellite states not only created but also revealed a wide range of social, political and economic problems, from the underground economy to corruption. While the 1990s saw the post‐Soviet states working through crises that allowed organized and disorganized crime to flourish, since then there has been a diversification of the post‐Soviet experience, with some countries beginning an effective campaign to control criminality (take a bow, Baltic states), others reaching a symbiotic equilibrium with it (bizarre Belarus, for example) and a number – frankly, most – seeing a convergence between corrupt elites and organized crime.
Posted by Mark Galeotti on January 7, 2011
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/319/
2010 in review
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
Posted by Mark Galeotti on January 2, 2011
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/2010-in-review/
Wikileaks (3): Moscow – Luzhkov and the ‘other’ mafia
From the New York Times comes a wikileaked cable on since-deposed Moscow Mayor Luzhkov and his alleged (OK, rather credibly alleged) corruption and criminal connections:
Posted by Mark Galeotti on December 3, 2010
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/wikileaks-3-moscow-luzhkov-and-the-other-mafia/
Wikileaks (2): Mogilevich and Ukrainian gas
In many ways, Semyon Mogilevich is an atypical Russian organized crime figure. He does not command an army of thugs, does not shake down storefronts or traffic drugs, does not even fit within any of the gangs or networks dominating the Eurasian underworld. Instead, he is first and foremost a service provider, a one-stop shop for laundering and moving money and criminal finance of every kind. However, he also has an interesting role within Russia’s gas industry, and especially exports to Ukraine, something noted, if not explored that deeply, in two new leaked US State Department cables published in the Guardian.
Posted by Mark Galeotti on December 2, 2010
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/wikileaks-2-mogilevich-and-ukrainian-gas/
Wikileaks (1): the Spanish take on the Russian state and OC
Others (notably Sean Guillory) are doing a sterling job of generally covering the Russia-related cables being exposed through wikileaks, and to be honest I don’t have the time to write much this week, so I just want at present to confine myself to making a few comments on some of them relating to Russian organised crime.
Posted by Mark Galeotti on December 1, 2010
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/wikileaks-1-the-spanish-take-on-the-russian-state-and-oc/
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