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Russia: Has the Market Tamed the Mafia? |
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by Joseph D. Serio
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In the 1990s, media outlets around the world reported the dramatic rise of the Russian mafia with banner headlines announcing the invasion of a new criminal element. As many as 12,000 groups were said to have swept across the country like a new Golden Horde. Businesspeople were extorted. Bankers were killed. Companies were penetrated. And the country was well on its way to becoming a criminal state. Of course, in many ways, this was all true. Since 2000, however, the Russian economy has been growing, by some estimates on average of 6% a year. Foreign investment has increased dramatically, and gangland style shootouts have all but disappeared.
These days one is hard pressed to find many articles at all about the Russian mafia – a generic name applied to virtually all crime groups there. A search of thousands of articles on Russia over the past five years shows that the so-called mafia has fallen from media favor. The Russians themselves rarely speak of mafia in the major cities and, according to public opinion polls, gangsters have disappeared from the top concerns of the population. The specter du jour haunting the Russian land – as reflected in the media – is corruption, followed by the continuing wave of political and business-related murders. No mafia to be found, in print at least. |
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Organized Crime 
