A vast criminal underworld has existed in Russia for centuries. Unlike the Sicilian Mafia it had no unified hierarchy and never exported itself abroad. But it existed, a great sprawling brotherhood with regional and gang chieftains and members loyal to their gangs unto death and with the appropriate tattoos to prove it.
Stalin attempted to destroy it, sending thousands of its members to the slave camps. The only result was that the zoks ended up virtually running the camps with the connivance of the guards, who preferred a quiet life to having their families traced and punished. In many cases the vori v zakone, the “thieves by statute” or equivalents of the mafia dons, actually ran their enterprises on the outside from their cabins in the camps.
One of the ironies of the Cold War is that Communism would probably have collapsed ten years earlier but for the underworld. Even the Party bosses finally had to make their covert pact with it.
The reason was simple: It was the only thing in the USSR that ran with any degree of efficiency. A factory manager, producing a vital product, might see his principal machine tool grind to a halt because of the breakdown of a single valve. If he went through the bureaucratic channels he would wait six to twelve months for his valve while his entire plant stood idle.
Or he could have a word with his brother-in-law who knew a man who had contacts. The valve would arrive within a week. Later the factory manager would turn a blind eye to the disappearance of a consignment of his steel plate, which would find its way to another factory whose steel plate had not arrived. Then both factory managers would cook the books to show they had completed their “norms.”
In any society where a combination of sclerotic bureaucracy and raw incompetence has caused all the cogs and wheels to seize up, the black market is the only lubricant. The USSR ran on that lubricant throughout its life and depended utterly upon it for the last ten years.
The mafia simply controlled the black market. All it did after 1991 was come out of the closet to prosper and expand. Expand it certainly did, moving rapidly from the usual areas of racketeering—alcohol, drugs, protection, prostitution—into every single facet of life.
What was impressive was the speed and ruthlessness with which the virtual takeover of the economy was achieved. Three factors enabled this to happen. The first was the capacity for immediate and massive violence the Russian mafia demonstrated if it was frustrated in any way, a violence that would have made the American Cosa Nostra look positively squeamish. Anybody, Russian or foreign, objecting to mafia involvement in his enterprise was given one warning—usually a beating or an outbreak of arson—and then executed. This applied right up to heads of major banks.
The second factor was the helplessness of the police, who, underfunded, understaffed, and without any experience or forewarning of the blizzard of crime and violence that was going to overwhelm them in the aftermath of Communism, simply could not cope. The third factor was the pandemic Russian tradition of corruption. The massive inflation that followed 1991 until it steadied around 1995 assisted in this.
Under Communism the exchange rate stood at two U.S. dollars to the ruble, a ridiculous and artificial rate in terms of value and purchasing power, but enforced within the USSR, where not lack of money but lack of goods to buy with it was the problem. Inflation wiped out savings and reduced fixed-salary employees to poverty.
When a street cop’s weekly wage is worth less than his socks it is hard to persuade him not to take a banknote enclosed in an evidently forged driving license.
But that was small potatoes. The Russian mafia ran the system right up to the senior civil servants, recruiting almost the entire bureaucracy as their allies. And the bureaucracy runs everything in Russia. Thus permits, licenses, civic real estate, concessions, franchises—all could quickly be bought from the issuing civil servant, enabling the mafia to create astronomical profits.
The other skill of the Russian mafia that impressed observers was the speed with which they moved from conventional racketeering (while keeping a firm hold on it) into legitimate business. It took the American Cosa Nostra a generation to realize that legitimate businesses, acquir
ed from racket profits, served both to increase profits and launder crime money. The Russians did it in five years, and by 1995 owned or controlled forty percent of the national economy. By then they had already gone international, favoring their three specialties of arms, drugs, and embezzlement, backed up by instant violence, and targeting all Western Europe and North America.
The trouble was, by 1998 they had overdone it. The sheer greed had broken the economy off which they lived. By 1996, fifty billion dollars’ worth of Russian wealth, mainly in gold, diamonds, precious metals, oil, gas, and timber, was being stolen and illegally exported. The goods were bought with almost worthless rubles, and even then at knockdown prices from the bureaucrats running the state organs, and sold for dollars abroad. Some of the dollars would be reconverted to a blizzard of rubles and brought back to fund more bribes and more crime. The rest were stashed abroad.
“The trouble is,” said Wyatt gloomily, as he drained his beer, “the hemorrhage has just become too much. Between the corrupt politicians, the even more corrupt bureaucrats, and the gangsters, they’ve killed the golden goose that made them all rich. Did you ever read The Rise of the Third Reich?”
“Yes, long ago. Why?”
“Do you remember those descriptions of the last days of the Weimar Republic? The unemployment queues, the street crime, the ruined life savings, the soup kitchens, the quarreling midgets in the Reichstag yelling their heads off while the country went bankrupt? Well, that’s what you’re watching here. All over again. Hell, I must go. Got to meet people downstairs for lunch. Good to talk with you, Mr. …”
“Jefferson.”
The name didn’t ring a bell. Clearly Mr. Wyatt didn’t read the London Daily Telegraph.
Interesting, thought the London journalist when the Canadian had left. All his briefings from morgue clippings indicated the man he was due to interview that evening might be the man able to save the nation.
The long black Chaika called for Jefferson at half-past six and he was waiting in the doorway. He was invariably punctual and expected others to be the same. He wore dark gray slacks, a blazer, a crisp white cotton shirt, and a Garrick Club tie. He looked smart, neat, fussy, and every inch an Englishman.
The Chaika wended its way through the evening traffic north to Kiselny Boulevard, turning off down the side street just before the Garden Ring Road. As he approached the green steel gates, the driver activated an alert button on a communicator he produced from his jacket pocket.
The cameras atop the wall picked up the approaching car and the gate guard checked the TV monitor, which showed him the car and its license plate. The plate corresponded with the one he was expecting and the gates rolled back.
Once inside, they closed again and the guard approached the driver’s window. He checked the ID, glanced in the back, nodded, and lowered the steel spikes.
Mr. Kuznetsov, alerted by the gate, was in the entrance of the dacha to greet his guest. He led the British journalist to a well-appointed reception area on the first floor, a room adjacent to Komarov’s own office and on the other side from that once occupied by the late N. I. Akopov.
Igor Komarov permitted neither drinking nor smoking in his presence, something Jefferson did not know and never learned, because it was not mentioned. A non-drinking Russian is a rarity in a country where drinking is almost a sign of manhood. Jefferson, who had screened a number of videos of Komarov in his man-of-the-people mode, had seen him with the obligatory glass in his hand, drinking innumerable toasts in the Russian fashion, and showing no damage for it. He did not know Komarov was always supplied with spring water. That evening, only coffee was offered, and Jefferson declined.
After five minutes Komarov entered, an imposing figure of about fifty, gray-haired, just under six feet, with staring hazel eyes that his fans described as “mesmeric.”
Kuznetsov shot to his feet and Jefferson followed a mite more slowly. The PR adviser made the introductions and the two men shook hands. Komarov seated himself first, in a button-back leather chair that was slightly higher than those occupied by the other two.
From his inner breast pocket Jefferson produced a slim tape recorder and asked if there would be no objection. Komarov inclined his head to indicate he understood the inability of most Western journalists to use shorthand. Kuznetsov nodded encouragingly at Jefferson to start.