Mafia Violence and Political Power in Russia

Abstract

An analysis of the relations between holders of political power and specialists in the use of violence cannot be restricted to the purported interaction between two worlds: the “criminal” and the political. Any attempt to do so would amount to espousing the dominant view relayed by the Russian government, a view that attributes to a given social group the exclusive use of a body of violent practices—mafia-type methods—when executing predatory strategies. Indeed, political leaders have been depicting “organized crime” as a powerful internal enemy and a constant threat to economic and political stability since the late 1980s.1 Moreover, the a priori distinction between “criminal,” “economic,” and “political” actors tends to confuse analysis of the methods employed to acquire wealth and power since the end of that decade, for these have often relied on the overlap between institutional positions and the entanglement of public and private functions. After outlining the extent to which the formation of capital in the post-Soviet context has depended on the control of administrative resources and access to violent entrepreneurs, this chapter examines the propagation of mafia-style violence in Russian politics, first in parliamentary institutions and then in centers of executive power. I shall attempt to show that Vladimir Putin’s project for a “dictatorship of the law” draws its legitimacy from the desire to tame mafia violence; it facilitates the control of elites in the name of combating “corruption” and “organized crime.”KeywordsOrganize CrimeCriminal OrganizationLiberal Democratic PartyCriminal EnterpriseLegislative ElectionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.