Crime in the world-system

Thu, 12 Feb 1998 11:57:19 -0600
Georgi M. Derluguian (gderlug@nwu.edu)

RE: Regarding the study of crime in the currently mutating world-system
I don't deal specifically with the unorganized crime which your colleague
seems interested in. But there are whole regions of the world-economy that
appear redundant. Obviously, narcotics are the best (or even the last)
cash-crop left to numerous peasantries and various groups that service such
periphery to core commodity chains.
Below is part of a recent grant proposal concerning the violent mutation of
criminality in the former USSR.
Yours,
Georgi Derluguian

Stephen Handelman's bestseller Comrade Criminal shows both the advantages
and the pitfalls of the straightforward pursuit of "true story". The
general picture painted in Comrade Criminal is arguably dazzling. The awed
reader is tempted to believe everything except the chapters concerning the
particular area of one's expertise (in my case this is Chechnya and the
Caucasian migrants in Moscow). Wrong dates, misspelled personal names and
toponyms could be minor fault in a research of such scope but the
interpretations of events blaming almost everything on the hidden springs
and underground entities smacks of conspiracy theories. My critique would
be simple: why in the chaotic post-communist environment where nothing
seems whole and properly functioning, we might presume the existence of
institutions exempt from this unruliness, confusion and chaos?

First step: reconstructing legendary reality of Thieves in the Law
When hard, verifiable facts are near impossible to separate from fiction,
let's go after fiction first. More precisely, the fictional accounts of the
instituions, norms and values that governed the Soviet criminal community
and the types of conflict that are considered central to the underworld of
post-communist Russia. This may eventually allow us to sort out the
presumed facts. I propose to study with the methods of historical and
cultural sociology the romantic folklore generated by the criminals and its
spin offs disseminated by the Russian mass media and the concomitant genre
of cheap detective novels, pulp thrillers, and docudrama that has
experienced veritable explosion in the Russia of the nineties. The mediocre
inventiveness, simplistic hyper-realism of plots and details designed to
provoke in the reader immediate recognition and self-association with the
protagonists, plus the fact that the authors often are the moonlighting
police investigators (Koretsky, Marinina) - in a nutshell, the same factors
that contribute to making these texts quite awful literature, make them
sociologically revealing sources. Furthermore, there are published memoirs
of Russian criminals and cops which, regard-less of their actual
authorship, reproduce a set of fixed elements in the description of
underworld.
Survey of such sources will be the first step in the proposed project. This
should enable us to reconstruct the ideal-type picture of Russian organized
crime and the vec-tors of its recent evolution. Particular attention will
be paid to the mechanisms of power, patterns of co-optation into criminal
elites, goals and norms of criminal conduct.
It appears incontestable that in the Soviet period professionalized
criminality functioned under the supremacy of Thieves in the Law (vory v
zakone). It was a formal status group similar to a caste of territorially
organized criminal authorities (avtoritety), akin to high priests, but one
may rather say the nomenklatura of Soviet underworld. Thieves in the Law
don't seem to be a very old institution. We will have to check in the
pre-1917 literature but circumstantial evidence suggests that they likely
grew from the Soviet penitentiary system and orphanages of the 1920s and
the 1930s. I shall only chart this evolution relating it to the trajectory
of Soviet state and society. More detailed his-torical reconstruction is
unfeasible and non-essential at this stage. Existing published
tes-timonials should be enough to outline a diachronic picture. I mean
primarily the first-hand accounts produced by the reflecting intellectuals
who had observed the criminals in the Gulag camps. The earliest to my
current knowledge is the article of Academician Dmitry Likhachev on the
criminal jargon (1932). More recent accounts which I hope to identify
likely belong to Soviet dissidents. Another valuable source of historical
informa-tion are the criminal ballads (blatnye pesni) which haven't been
composed for at least a generation but instead recycled in popular culture.
Just this fact suggests the ongoing la-tent shifts in the criminal culture
and the society at large. The main focus of proposed re-search is the
interrelation of the norms and practices generated in the criminal
underworld and the evolution of society at large. For this purpose
recapitulating the common stock of criminal legends would serve as only the
point of departure.

Initial hypothesis: Thieves in the Law as peculiar avatar of Soviet state
Next stage is to frame the research in the world-systems perspective. My
previous work made me aware of the curious correlations between the ethos
of criminal organizations in various parts of the world and the local
cultures, especially in the domain of historically structuring and
legitimating the exercise of social power. For instance, Japanese yakudza
still abide by Bushi-do, the samurai code, long after the samurais were
gone, while the Chinese triads represent another cultural archaism - a
syncretist incarnation of the Chinese rural clans, Taoist secret societies,
and the Confucian concerns for filial piety and gentlemanly responsibility
for maintaining governance. The Sicilian Ma-fia (i.e. the original Mafia)
and, to another degree, the Neapolitan Camorra faithfully re-flect the
patron-client networks of the old Italian Mezzogiorno as well as the
earlier phe-nomenon of Hobsbawm's "primitive rebel" resistance against the
state agents. American ethnically-structured criminal organizations (Cosa
Nostra, if it existed in reality, and the more familiar Italian, Jewish,
Irish examples) were quite different from the original Si-cilian Mafia
because they were urban, ethnic in an multiethnic environment, and overall
were a way for the new arrivals to assimilate themselves into the legal
capitalist enter-prise and politics of the US previously monopolized by the
WASP elite. Interesting par-allels are possible with the more recent
African-American gangs that can no longer be considered a mere deviant
phenomenon in the life of their communities.
These examples suggest the following hypothesis: wherever the underworlds
of organized crime existed in the twentieth century, they imitated and
inevitably propha-nated the configuration of dominant elites, the
associated status norms and symbols, pat-terns of behavior, etc.
Furthermore, criminal cultures operated with a time lag. Figura-tively
speaking, the pirates dressed themselves in the luxurious but invariably
outfash-ioned garbs which they have appropriated from the "true" power
elite.
This hypothesis should be tested with the data from secondary literature on
the organized crime in East Asia, Southern Europe, and the US. If it proves
possible to sub-stantiate the correlation between the institutional design
and social norms of the endemic criminal underworlds and the overall
political cultures and class structures of the respec-tive societies, then
what should we expect to find in the Soviet experience? Primary evidence
suggests quite an astonishing peculiarity. Thieves in the Law apparently
inherited their symbols and beliefs from Russian intelligentsia, perhaps,
even from the professional revolutionaries. Here I would cite just two
features that appear to me exceptional. Thieves in the Law from the outset
were a non-ethnic institution. Their ranks could in-clude an Armenian like
Svo, a Georgian like Djaba Ioseliani, or Tajic like Sangak Safarov (though
formally never "crowned" and therefore formally a muzhik in criminal
hierarchy). Ethnicity was shed along other pre-ordination identities, and
it did not matter as long as the ruling communist elite remained
multiethnic. Secondly, unlike any other gangster bosses elsewhere in the
world, they abided by rigorously ascetic rules incom-patible with any civil
status including marriage and ownership of property. In this respect
Thieves in the Law resemble not only the professional revolutionaries but
Russian hermit saints (startsy) in the classical patristic analysis of
Georgi Fedotov. Evidently, the fictionary Rakhmetov, who slept on the bed
of nails and ate raw steak with onions, or the real-life revolutionaries of
imperial Russia, destined to languish in prison castles and Si-berian
exile, constructed their image along the existing lines of sanctihood and
the ultimate moral legitimation through martyrdom which was found in the
popular Russian Christianity.
Of course, this is an idealization. In private, the Bolshevik elite dumped
its modesty right after the revolution, and by the Brezhnev period
asceticism was no longer even part of official hypocrisy. With the
predictable lag the criminal sub-elite followed the suit. Thieves in the
Law perhaps persisted longer but perestroika and the end of the USSR were
really the time of their undoing. The institution mutated (got "corrupted")
from within and, at the same time, was violently challenged from without by
the upstart new-comers into the world of organized crime - generically
called in Russian bespredel-schiki, or those who respect no limits. These
seem to be the principal vectors of the recent evolution of organized crime
in the former Soviet states. Demise of tightly-knit national and regional
criminal communities accompanied by the violent rationalization of their
norms and instituions could be an important aspect of the occurring shift
from the twentieth-century project of self-contained national states to the
flexible transborder business enterprise which is usually implied by the
word globalization.

Further hypothesis: globalization causes the shift towards Weberian
capitalist rationality
If in the past organized crime imitated the configuration of the states
which con-tained them and adhered to local cultural norms, what happens
today when globalization unbundles states, dramatically increases the
density of world market networks, and pro-motes globally uniform cultural
patterns? Trajectory of Thieves in the Law offers a poignant case that
potentially bears universal relevance. The endemic criminal communities of
the past were precisely tightly-knit communities governed by traditional
authority where value-oriented behavior enjoyed undisputed priority.
According to the old Italian expression, the Mafia is not an organization,
it's an attitude. Likewise, the originally Russian term intelligentsia,
invented in the 1880s, used to describe not an objec-tively-defined social
class but rather a self-described group justified and built around its
critical attitudes towards the world and particularly towrds the state
power. The intelligentsia appears in clear decline and disintegration. What
about its unacknowledged avatar, Thieves in the Law?
As state borders become increasingly permeable to the traffic of goods,
people, information, and capitals, the noble criminalities of yesteryear
face extinction. Thieves in the Law and possibly other criminal communities
used to be parasites in the redistributive systems, as suggested by the
original meaning of the word theft.
Today they are merging with service and productive sectors, gain direct
control of business enterprises and be-come managers themselves. Violence
becomes an established mainstream way of business competition rather than
deviance. This mutation is accompanied by the dramatic and inescapably
violent shift towards the set of norms originally described by Max Weber as
capitalist rationality.
Transition from the locally-specific forms of patrimonialism to the brave
new world of global markets and the formal, culturally unspecific
capitalist rationality (the global Yuppie culture) renders previously
parochial criminal organizations obsolete. The emergent organized crime is
likely to become globally uniform and modular enabling its particular
segments to operate beyond the frontiers of their home states and link up
with their counterparts elsewhere in the world. If it is so, which seems
plausible, former Soviet criminals are on their ways to founding their
transnational corporations (TNCs). Will the global world engender an
equally global underworld? Apparently so. What place will the criminal
syndicates from the FSU manage to carve up? This is the central question
for further research agenda that my project may help to formulate.

Georgi M. Derluguian
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Northwestern University
1812 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, Illinois 60208-1330
(847) 491-2741 (rabota)