In Asia, girls from villages in Nepal and Bangladesh - the majority of whom are
under 18 - are sold to brothels in India for $1000. Trafficked women from
Thailand and the Philippines are increasingly being joined by women from other
countries in Southeast Asia. Europe (European InterPol) estimates that the
industry is now worth several billion dollars a year. Trafficking in human
beings is not confined to the sex industry. Children are trafficked to work in
sweatshops as bonded labor and men work illegally in the "three D-jobs" -
dirty, difficult and dangerous. A recent CIA report estimated that between
45,000 to 50,000 women and children are brought to the United States every year
under false pretenses and are forced to work as prostitutes, abused laborers or
servants. UNICEF estimates that more than 200,000 children are enslaved by
cross-border smuggling in West and Central Africa. The children are often
"sold" by unsuspecting parents who believe their children are going to be
looked after, learn a trade or be educated.
In the decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has become the
target of a new global crime threat from criminal organizations and criminal
activities that have poured forth over the borders of Russia and other former
Soviet republics such as Ukraine. The nature and variety of the crimes being
committed seem unlimited - trafficking in women and children, drugs, arms
trafficking, stolen automobiles, and money laundering are among the most
prevalent. The spillover is particularly troubling to Europe because of its
geographical proximity to Russia, and to Israel, because of its large numbers
of Russian immigrants. But no area of the world seems immune to this menace,
especially not the United States. America is the land of opportunity for
unloading criminal goods and laundering dirty money. For that reason-and
because, unfortunately, much of the examination of Russian organized crime (the
so-called "Russian Mafia") to date has been rather hyperbolic and sketchy -
many in law enforcement believe it is important to step back and take an
objective look at this growing phenomenon.
As in the United States, there is no universally accepted definition of
organized crime in Russia, in major part because Russian law provides no legal
definition of organized crime. Analysis of criminological sources, however,
enables one to identify some of its basic characteristics. These include
organizational features that make Russian organized crime unique in the degree
to which it is embedded in the post-Soviet political system. At the same time,
however, it has certain features in common with such other well-known varieties
of organized crime as the Italian Mafia. The latter has a complicated history
that includes both cooperation and conflict with the Italian state. Much more
than was ever the case with the Italian Mafia, however, Russian organized crime
is uniquely a descendant of the Soviet state.
Russian organized crime has come to plague many areas of the globe since the
demise of the Soviet Union just more than a decade ago. The transnational
character of Russian organized crime, when coupled with its high degree of
sophistication and ruthlessness, has attracted the world's attention and
concern to what has become known as a global Russian Mafia. Along with this
concern, however, has come a fair amount of misunderstanding and stereotyping
with respect to Russian organized crime.
Trafficking is almost always a form of organized crime and should be dealt with
using criminal powers to investigate and prosecute offenders for trafficking
and any other criminal activities in which they engage. Trafficked persons
should also be seen as victims of crime. Support and protection of victims is a
humanitarian objective and an important means of ensuring that victims are
willing and able to assist in criminal cases. As with other forms of organized
crime, trafficking has globalized. Groups formerly active in specific routes or
regions have expanded the geographical scope of their activities to explore new
markets. Some have merged or formed cooperative relationships, expanding their
geographical reach and range of criminal activities. Illegal migrants and
trafficking victims have become another commodity in a larger realm of criminal
commerce involving other commodities, such as narcotic drugs and firearms or
weapons and money laundering, that generate illicit revenues or seek to reduce
risks for traffickers.
With respect to organized crime, certain geographical or infrastructure
characteristics, such as the presence of seaports, international airports,
strategic border locations, rich natural resources, and so on, provide special
criminal opportunities that can best be exploited by criminals who are
organized. More so than common crime, organized crime is fed by the presence of
ethnic minorities who furnish a ready supply of both victims and the offenders
to victimize them. Organized crime also thrives in environments characterized
by a relatively high tolerance of deviance and a romanticization of crime
figures, especially where government and law enforcement are weak or corrupt
(the history of the Sicilian Mafia illustrates this).
Russia is one of those unfortunate countries that has the receptive environment
in which organized crime thrives. Organized crime is deeply rooted in the
400-year history of Russia's peculiar administrative bureaucracy, but it was
especially shaped into its current form during the seven decades of Soviet
hegemony that ended in 1991. This ancestry helps to explain the pervasiveness
of organized crime in today's Russia and its close merger with the political
system. Organized crime in Russia is an institutionalized part of the political
and economic environment. It cannot, therefore, be fully understood without
first understanding its place in the context of the Russian political and
economic system.
Unlike Colombian, Italian, Mexican, or other well-known forms of organized
crime, Soviet organized crime was not primarily based on ethnic or family
structures. To help understand the difference, we can look to the history of
organized crime in the United States for a contrasting portrait. As a number of
scholars have pointed out, organized crime provided a "crooked ladder of upward
mobility" for some immigrants to the United States. Certain immigrants-sharing
a common ethnicity, culture, and language, and, being on the bottom rung of the
socioeconomic ladder,either having legitimate opportunities for advancement
closed to them or rejecting the opportunities that were available-have turned
to crime, and specifically organized crime, to get ahead.
Because organized crime is made up of criminals who conspire to carry out
illegal acts, a degree of trust is necessary among those criminals.
Co-conspirators must be able to trust that their collaborators will not talk to
the police or to anyone who might talk to the police, and that they will not
cheat them out of their money. A shared ethnicity, with its common language,
background, and culture, has historically been a foundation for trust among
organized crime figures.
Yet ethnicity did not play the significant role in Soviet organized crime that
it played in the United States. Instead, the Soviet prison system, in many
ways, fulfilled functions that were satisfied by shared ethnicity in the United
States. In the Soviet Union, a professional criminal class developed in Soviet
prisons during the Stalinist period that began in 1924-the era of the gulag.
These criminals adopted behaviors, rules, values, and sanctions that bound them
together in what was called the thieves' world, led by the elite criminals who
lived according to the "thieves' law." This thieves' world created and
maintained the bonds and climate of trust necessary for carrying out organized
crime.
Organized crime in the Soviet era consists of illegal enterprises with both
legal and black-market connections that were based on the misuse of state
property and funds. It is most important to recognize that the blurring of the
distinction between the licit and the illicit is also a trademark of
post-Soviet organized crime that shows its ancestry with the old Soviet state
and its command-economy system. This, in turn, has direct political
implications. The historical symbiosis with the state makes Russian organized
crime virtually an inalienable part of the state. As this has continued into
the present, some would say it has become an engine of the state that works at
all levels of the Russian government.
Contemporary Russian organized crime grew out of the Soviet "nomenklatura"
system (the government's organizational structure and high-level officials) in
which some individual "apparatchiks" (government bureaucrats) developed
mutually beneficial personal relationships with the thieves' world. The top of
the pyramid of organized crime during the Soviet period was made up of the
Communist Party and state officials who abused their positions of power and
authority. Economic activities ranged across a spectrum of markets-white, gray,
black, and criminal. These markets were roughly defined by whether the goods
and services being provided were legal, legal but regulated, or illegal, and by
whether the system for providing them was likewise legal, legal but regulated,
or illegal. The criminals operated on the illegal end of this spectrum. Tribute
gained from black markets and criminal activities was passed up a three-tiered
pyramid to the nomenklatura, and the nomenklatura itself (some 1.5 million
people) had a vast internal system of rewards and punishments. The giant state
apparatus thus not only allowed criminal activity, but encouraged, facilitated,
and protected it, because the apparatus itself benefited from crime.
These sorts of relationships provided the original nexus between organized
crime and the government. From these beginnings, organized crime in Russia
evolved to its present ambiguous position of being both in direct collaboration
with the state and, at the same time, in conflict with it.
