Russia Mafia Quotes

And we are not pursuing military information on this trip. At least not about the Russian mafia exchanging Russian-Ukrainian tanks and electronics for their benefit in Syria.

What exactly is the free world, anyway? I guess it would depend on what you consider the non-free world. And I can't find a clear definition of that, can you? Where is that? Russia? China? For chrissakes, Russia has a better Mafia than we do now, and China is pirating Lion King DVDs and selling dildos on the Internet. They sound pretty free to me. Here are some more jingoistic variations you need to be on the lookout for; "The greatest nation on Earth; the greatest nation in the history of the world"; and "the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth." That last one is usually thrown in just before we bomb a bunch of brown people. Which is every couple of years.

Both Bratva and thieves in law would like to call themselves nihilists and anarchists because they don’t support the established government, but they govern nonetheless, and you can’t be an anarchist unless you follow its rule. Crime and anarchy are no more synonymous than nihilism and existentialism, or fatalism and determinism; so many isms there was bound to be a schism.

According to research conducted jointly by experts from the University of California at Berkeley and Swansea University in Wales, no fewer than 150,000 Twitter accounts linked to Russia began to tweet inflammatory and divisive messages about Brexit, Muslims, and immigrants

An iceberg means it’s tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb.)

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it’s tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world’s fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman’s shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit’s cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black.

Trump’s pick for secretary of state? Rex Tillerson, a figure known and trusted in Moscow, and recipient of the Order of Friendship. National security adviser? Michael Flynn, Putin’s dinner companion and a beneficiary of undeclared Russian fees. Campaign manager? Paul Manafort, longtime confidant to ex-Soviet oligarchs. Foreign policy adviser? Carter Page, an alleged Moscow asset who gave documents to Putin’s spies. Commerce secretary? Wilbur Ross, an entrepreneur with Russia-connected investments. Personal lawyer? Michael Cohen, who sent emails to Putin’s press secretary. Business partner? Felix Sater, son of a Russian American mafia boss. And other personalities, too. It was almost as if Putin had played a role in naming Trump’s cabinet. The U.S. president, of course, had done the choosing. But the constellation of individuals, and their immaculate alignment with Russian interests, formed a discernible pattern, like stars against a clear night sky. A pattern of collusion.

Mandelman, Stephen. Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

The recent history of Russia, featuring failed socialism followed by colossal thievery and mafia rule, shows what happens upon the collapse of a sustained and determined effort to eradicate a basic social principle founded on natural human tendencies.

Russia through the waning days of the Soviet Union and into the heyday after the fall, the Red Mafia was imbedded in almost all facets of state affairs. The bratva was not an outside criminal threat, but rather part of the government itself. When Stalin betrayed his criminal ties during the Great Purge, he inadvertently created an even stronger organization that had survived and thrived to this day.

The lessons of post-Communist states can help us to think through some of the difficulty of describing the corruption—or whatever it ought to be called—of the Trump administration. Soviet Bloc countries, with their one-party systems and command economies, fostered a symbiotic relationship between power and wealth (though wealth was not measured in money). In fact, the only way to accumulate wealth was to become a part of the party hierarchy—and at the top of the party pyramid, people could achieve fantastic wealth. These systems served as the foundations for the mafia states of Hungary and Russia, where the party was replaced with a political clan centered on a patron who distributes money and power.

These systems served as the foundations for the mafia states of Hungary and Russia, where the party was replaced with a political clan centered on a patron who distributes money and power. Western analysts use the word corruption to describe these systems, but this can be misleading: here corruption does not describe bureaucrats soliciting bribes for small acts of civil service (though this happens too); it describes the people in charge using the instruments of government in order to amass wealth, but also using their wealth to perpetuate power. This corruption is integral to the system. The system cannot exist without corruption because corruption is its fuel, its social glue, and its instrument of control. Anyone who enters the system becomes complicit in the corruption, which means everyone is always in some way or another outside the law—and therefore punishable. Autocracies love to smear their opponents with accusations of corruption, jail them on corruption charges, and even execute them, as does China.

I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act. Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.

[Magyar] had an intense dislike for terms like 'illiberal,' which focused on traits the regimes did not possess--like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim--it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term 'hybrid regime,' which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of. Magyar developed his own concept: the 'post-communist mafia state.' Both halves of the designation were significant: 'post-communist' because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay." (quoting Balint Magyar) The ruling elites of post-communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property.

[Magyar] had an intense dislike for terms like 'illiberal,' which focused on traits the regimes did not possess--like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim--it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term 'hybrid regime,' which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of. Magyar developed his own concept: the 'post-communist mafia state.' Both halves of the designation were significant: 'post-communist' because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay." (quoting Balint Magyar) The ruling elites of post-communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property. ... A mafia state, in Magyar's definition, was different from other states ruled by one person surrounded by a small elite. In a mafia state, the small powerful group was structured just like a family. The center of the family is the patriarch, who does not govern: "he disposes--of positions, wealth, statuses, persons." The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power. The family-like structure is strictly hierarchical, and membership in it can be obtained only through birth or adoption. In Putin's case, his inner circle consisted of men with whom he grew up in the streets and judo clubs of Leningrad, the next circle included men with whom he had worked with in the KGB/FSB, and the next circle was made up of men who had worked in the St. Petersburg administration with him. Very rarely, he 'adopted' someone into the family as he did with Kholmanskikh, the head of the assembly shop, who was elevated from obscurity to a sort of third-cousin-hood. One cannot leave the family voluntarily: one can only be kicked out, disowned and disinherited. Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments. The post-communist mafia state, in Magyar's words, is an "ideology-applying regime" (while a totalitarian regime is 'ideology-driven'). A crackdown required both force and ideology. While the instruments of force---the riot police, the interior troops, and even the street-washing machines---were within arm's reach, ready to be used, ideology was less apparently available. Up until spring 2012, Putin's ideological repertoire had consisted of the word 'stability,' a lament for the loss of the Soviet empire, a steady but barely articulated restoration of the Soviet aesthetic and the myth of the Great Patriotic War, and general statements about the United States and NATO, which had cheated Russia and threatened it now. All these components had been employed during the 'preventative counter-revolution,' when the country, and especially its youth, was called upon to battle the American-inspired orange menace, which threatened stability. Putin employed the same set of images when he first responded to the protests in December. But Dugin was now arguing that this was not enough. At the end of December, Dugin published an article in which he predicted the fall of Putin if he continued to ignore the importance of ideas and history.

Oil “Soviet Russia cannot survive without Baku’s oil,” told comrade Vladimir Lenin. One of the plans was to drain the Caspian Sea: “Is it possible? Can you drain the Caspian Sea?” said the powerful Stalin. It was more an order than a question.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Azerbaijan - Oil Country). Mafia “With his wife Victoria, they reigned here for nineteen years. This period Georgians called ironically the Victorian Era, and his wife got the name Queen Victoria. Victoria created the system when all was for sale: state documents ten times the price; 5,000 roubles to enter the Communist party; 50,000 for the judge job, … “ (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Gruzia - Where Soviet Mafia Was Born). Smoking “Smoking breaks in the USSR were long and often—and became an official excuse not to work, causing huge damage to the already failing state economy. But on the other hand, with zero unemployment and prison terms, if you are not on a payroll, the state could not provide enough work for everybody. People had to show up every day in the workplace. Boredom from nothing-to-do turned into massive laziness and Soviet workers spent long hours in the smoke rooms. For some, it was a place to relax, for others, to provoke a frank conversation—because … Well, let’s talk about it later.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Litva - Friends and Rebels). God “The bus was driving slowly, just forty km an hour on the slippery winter road. Outside was a spectacular view of the Caucasus mountains. Here and there appeared churches: nearby and far away, but always on the top of the hill: “Closer to God, as high as possible,” crossed His mind. The bus stopped with a creaking sound, and He slowly got off: “For me, Khor Virap Monastery will be the resting place: from the Soviet life … from the communist lies … I shall spend here the rest of my life. And from here … I shall go to eternity …” these were His last thoughts before He entered the monastery gate. He was dead tired from all that happened, walking uphill closer to God.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Armenia - Road in the First Christian State).

Demonstrating for peace to promote war was nothing new. Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy. To the ancient Greeks, a holocaust was simply a burnt sacrifice. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who exported communism to the American continent. In 1959 he was able to install the Castro brothers in Havana and soon my foreign intelligence service became involved in helping Cuba's new communist rulers to export revolution throughout South America. At that point it did not work. In the 1950s and 1960s most Latin Americans were poor, religious peasants who had accepted the status quo. A black version of liberation theology began growing in a few radical-leftist black churches in the US where Marxist thought is predicated on a system pf oppressor class ( white ) versus victim class ( black ) and it sees just one solution: the destruction of the enemy. In the 1950s UNESCO was perceived by many as a platform for communists to attack the West and the KGB used it to place agents around the world. Che Guevara's diaries, with an introduction by Fidel Castro, were produced by the Kremlin's dezinformatsiya machine. Changing minds is what Soviet communism was all about. Khrushchev's political necrophagy ( = blaming and condemning one's predecessor in office. It is a dangerous game. It hurts the country's national pride and it usually turns against its own user ) evolved from the Soviet tradition of sanctifying the supreme ruler. Although the communists publicly proclaimed the decisive role of the people in history, the Kremlin and its KGB believed that only the leader counted. Change the public image of the leader and you change history, I heard over and over from Khrushchev's lips. Khrushchev was certainly the most controversial Soviet to reign in the Kremlin. He unmasked Stalin's crimes, but he made political assassination a main instrument of his own foreign policy; he authored a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West but he pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war; he repaired Moscow's relationships with Yugoslavia's Tito, but he destroyed the unity of the communist world. His close association with Stalin's killings made him aware of what political crime could accomplish and gave him a taste for the simple criminal solution. His total ignorance about the civilized world, together with his irrational hatred of the "bourgeoisie" and his propensity to offend people, made him believe that disinformation and threats were the most efficient and dignified way for a Soviet leader to deal with "bourgeois" governments. As that very clever master of deception Yuri Andropov once told me, if a good piece of disinformation is repeated over and over, after a while it will take on a life of its own and will, all by itself, generate a horde or unwitting but passionate advocates. When I was working for Ceausescu, I always tried to find a way to help him reach a decision on his own, rather than telling him directly what I thought he should do about something. That way both of us were happy. From our KGB advisors, I had learned that the best way to ut over a deception was to let the target see something for himself, with his own eyes. By 1999, President Yeltsin's ill-conceived privatization had enabled a small clique of predatory insiders to plunder Russia's most valuable assets. The corruption generated by this widespread looting penetrated every corner of the country and it eventually created a Mafia-style economic system that threatened the stability of Russia itself. During the old Cold War, the KGB was a state within a state. In Putin's time, the KGB now rechristened FSB, is the state. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. In 2004, Putin's Russia had one FSB officer for every 297 citizens.

They are sick of their country’s being seen as nothing more than a mafia-ridden kleptocracy—even though they are the first to complain about corruption.

the Kremlin, its well-resourced spy agencies, and the Russian mafia had merged. In effect, they formed a single criminal entity, a mafia state.

Putin’s ability to maneuver between the city government, the security services, and the mafias that controlled many of the country’s leading export industries.

The Russian public wanted to see the oligarchs cut down to size and their political influence reduced. That was a tall order—but the oligarchs as a class were indeed changing. Those who had acquired assets in the 1990s wanted to see those assets defended, so they tended to support efforts to reduce the power of mafias and criminal organizations—groups that use their power to seize others’ businesses.

Khodorkovsky identified and fired mafia-linked employees who siphoned off Yukos’s oil.22 He slashed Yukos’s workforce, ordering his security service to keep a list of employees who came to work drunk—a persistent problem in desolate Siberian oil towns—and ordered that 90 percent of them be fired.23 Yukos also cut “social payments” to oil towns, which in lieu of a functioning tax system funded social services from subsidized housing to child care.24 His methods were merciless, and they provoked violent pushback from mafias and oil towns, which were harmed by benefit cuts and demands that wages be tied to productivity. But Khodorkovsky was undeniably effective. In the first three years that Khodorkovsky controlled Yukos, the firm’s production costs fell by two-thirds.25

Vladimir conosceva la vita e aveva una visione chiara di come andava il mondo. Tutto quel che era buono, ordinato, bello, pulito per lui era «normal». La libertà di darsi da fare? «Normal.» Amare le donne? «Normal.» Quello che non era più «normal» era la Russia perché non c’era più ordine, perché fra mafiosi, gangster e poliziotti non c’è più differenza e con la mano faceva il gesto: «tutti uguali», gli uni come altri, tutti mischiati. Indicava le mostrine di un ufficiale e diceva: «Mafia; no normal». «Democracy?» si domandava retoricamente e si rispondeva: «No normal. Popolo russo ha bisogno di dittatore. Grande dittatore per Russia è normal. Stalin per Russia è normal». Non credo lo dicesse solo perché Stalin era, come lui, un georgiano. Lo diceva perché con il fallimento del comunismo e la caduta dell’Impero sovietico, la gente come lui non sa in che cosa sperare, non vede attorno a sé nessuno di grande cui affidare la propria sorte.

Carter Page joined Trump’s campaign in March 2016. In July 2016, Page went to Moscow and delivered a series of speeches on establishing a better relationship with Russia. His recommendations included easing of economic sanctions imposed after the invasion of Crimea in 2014. As the Trump campaign talks about ending TPP and other trade deals, the unelected candidate’s spokespeople are out inviting business with Russian partners especially in industries that are known to have crime bosses and Russian mafia ties.

Putin discovered that his sources of financing had dried up, even as St. Petersburg’s mafia bosses collected pots of money for Sobchak’s opponents.29 When the votes were counted, Sobchak lost the mayoralty, and Putin lost his job. The consequences were worse for Sobchak, who faced not only the end of his political career but

Ukraine needed new owners and a new class of managers to revive its economy. The country got both in a group of young, ambitious, and ruthless businessmen who had no roots in the old planned economy of Soviet times and had made their way up from the economic chaos of the perestroika years and mafia wars of the 1990s. Known in Ukraine, as in Russia, as oligarchs, they emerged as the main beneficiaries of the second stage of privatization, which amounted to the sale of government assets at a fraction of their actual value. The oligarchs made their fortunes by being innovative and opportunistic, but also by ingratiating, bribing, and shooting their way into the offices of the “red directors.” With the military-industrial complex in steep decline, the Ukrainian metallurgical industry became the richest prize in the 1990s and early 2000s. At that time, more than half the country’s industrial output came from four eastern oblasts—Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk—that were rich in iron ore and coal and produced Ukraine’s primary export product: steel.

If you interpret events in Russia as a crime wave, which is the way the West looks at the rise of Putin, where organized crime supposedly came to power through the KGB, you have a problem. This explanation is not workable if you look at the larger picture and consider all the facts, because this version of history cannot account for the ongoing attempt to socialize key countries, and to spread certain political doctrines, and to build up military forces. A mafia is mainly interested in money. They are not interested in global transformation. Gangsters are not political philosophers engaged in a planetary revolution. They do not build up weapons and coordinate with revolutionary parties. Such a course is destructive of those relationships that most promise a profitable return, and long-term benefits for the business. Something less sane, less rational than mere criminal enterprise is indicated. The buildup of new classes of weapons is hardly required to maintain a global criminal enterprise. Why would mere criminals work toward nuclear superiority? It is very expensive to do this, and involves serious risks.

As to the impact of all the “active measures” undertaken by Russia leading up to the 2016 election, it is difficult to quantify exactly how much they changed the outcome of the presidential race. However, according to the study by the University of California at Berkeley and Swansea University in Wales, automated tweeting alone by thousands of bots added 3.23 percentage points to Trump’s vote in the US presidential race.77

Here the state described by Magyar met the society described by Gudkov. When the state used force and ideology as mere tools, society responded as it had over the course of previous generation to both force and ideology: by mobilizing. Russia had a mafia state ruling over a totalitarian society.

Given the strength of the civil-liberties community in the West and the KGB’s comprehensive surveillance of the Internet, one might assume that Russia would represent an implacably hostile environment for cyber criminals. Yet the Russian Federation has become one of the great centres of global cybercrime. The strike rate of the police is lamentable, while the number of those convicted barely reaches double figures. The reason, while unspoken, is widely understood. Russian cyber criminals are free to clone as many credit cards, hack as many bank accounts and distribute as much spam as they wish, provided the targets of these attacks are located in Western Europe and the United States. A Russian hacker who started ripping off Russians would be bundled into the back of an unmarked vehicle before you could say KGB.

Similarly, in 2014, former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-MS) and former senator John Breaux (D-LA) became the main lobbyists for Gazprombank, a subsidiary of Russia’s largest supplier of natural gas. More recently, in 2016, millions of dollars in Russian money was funneled to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell3 and other high-profile Republicans to finance GOP senatorial candidates.

The threat of a terrorist attack in Moscow is real enough - a constant beneath the surface. But another, more palpable form of intimidation stalks the city's streets. It targets those from the Caucasus - no longer perpetrators but victims - as well as anyone of non-Slavic descent. This spectre is Russian nationalism, furiously asserting itself.

Russia is the biggest mafia state in the world, the super power of crime that is devouring the state from top to bottom.

What options did this frightening country offer its intolerably anxious citizens? They could curl up into total passivity, or they could join a whole that was greater than they were. If any possession could be summarily taken away, no one felt any longer like anything was truly their own. But they could rejoice alongside other citizens that Crimea was 'theirs.' They could fully subscribe to the paranoid worldview in which everyone, led by the United States, was out to weaken and destroy Russia. Paranoia offered a measure of comfort: at least it placed the source of overwhelming anxiety securely outside the person and even the country. It was a great relief to belong, and to entrust authority to someone stronger. The only thing was, belonging itself required vigilance. One had to pay attention: one day Ukraine was where the important war was being fought, the next day it was Syria. In the paranoid worldview, the source of danger was a constantly moving target. One could belong, but one could never feel in control.

Instead of seeking to strengthen institutions in order to erase the abuses of the past, Putin’s allies simply took them over, giving themselves the monopoly on abusing power. They were assisted by the fact that many Russian laws were full of loopholes, making it easy for anyone to be accused of transgressing them. In such an environment, laws were open to interpretation, and meant far less than a system of mafia-type ‘understandings’, or agreements between friends, under which you had to stay on the right side of the Kremlin if you wanted to survive.

The vory and regular criminals who had served in the army and were now considered to have broken their code were joined by maybe half a million former soldiers and partisans whose ‘crime’ had been to be captured by the enemy when Stalin expected – demanded – that they fight to the death. For them, ‘liberation’ meant an inglorious transfer from a foreign prison camp to a Soviet one. Over a third of a million Red Army soldiers ended up in the NKVD’s ‘verification and filtration camps’, and while most were eventually freed to civilian life or returned into the military, at least a third of them ended up in the Gulag.15