Russia as Mafia State and Pot Calls Kettle Black
December 2nd, 2010I consider the following depiction of Russia to be middle-road, uncontroversial and obvious. What struck me, though, is how similar it sounds to the U.S.
Just change some of the proper names to American ones and instead of mafia, use corporations.
Sound familiar?
Also, this isn’t just the State Department’s assessment. This topic represents an entire genre in the literature on Russia. Here are just a handful of titles:
Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy by Anna Politkovskaya (Author assassinated)
Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State by David Satter
Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism by Vadim Volkov
Investigating The Russian Mafia by Joseph D. Serio
Via: Guardian:
Russia is a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy centred on the leadership of Vladimir Putin, in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together to create a “virtual mafia state”, according to leaked secret diplomatic cables that provide a damning American assessment of its erstwhile rival superpower.
Arms trafficking, money laundering, personal enrichment, protection for gangsters, extortion and kickbacks, suitcases full of money and secret offshore bank accounts in Cyprus: the cables paint a bleak picture of a political system in which bribery alone totals an estimated $300bn a year, and in which it is often hard to distinguish between the activities of the government and organised crime.
Among the most striking allegations contained in the cables, which were leaked to the whistleblowers’ website WikiLeaks, are:
* Russian spies use senior mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations such as arms trafficking.
* Law enforcement agencies such as the police, spy agencies and the prosecutor’s office operate a de facto protection racket for criminal networks.
* Rampant bribery acts like a parallel tax system for the personal enrichment of police, officials and the KGB’s successor, the federal security service (FSB).
* Investigators looking into Russian mafia links to Spain have compiled a list of Russian prosecutors, military officers and politicians who have dealings with organised crime networks.
* Putin is accused of amassing “illicit proceeds” from his time in office, which various sources allege are hidden overseas.
“What struck me, though, is how similar it sounds to the U.S.”
yes, exactly, I also have thought Russia has always been the rougher, cruder, more openly corrupt version of the US “corporatocracy”, ‘oligarchy’, however you want to style it…it seems it has only in the past decade or two that the US has become so blatant in it’s corruption that the two have become comparable, at least in a rational, debatable sense…in times past, people would laugh you out of the room if this kind of comparison were even spoken aloud…now, it’s like, “well, of course, they are similar! One is just a cruder version….so what’s your point?” haha…
Another guffaw arose from:
“Russian spies use senior mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations such as arms trafficking.”
and
“Law enforcement agencies such as the police, spy agencies and the prosecutor’s office operate a de facto protection racket for criminal networks.”
These paragraphs suggest that the criminals are the pawns of the government officials and not the other way around.
Government officials are more or less governed by rules and regulations. Wealthy organized crime units are only governed by the laws of nature; they can get away with as much as their ingenuity will allow.
When a criminal goes down, it’s usually because a more powerful criminal put the government officials up to the task to protect his market share.
Criminals who get caught up by police dragnets are relatively new to the game; they lack the resources to do things like burglarize and destroy records generated by government agencies that are investigating them, bribe government officials, etc.