Russian mafia
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Russian organized crime or Russian mafia is a collective of various organized crime elements originating in the former Soviet Union. The acronym OPG is Organized Criminal (Prestupnaya in Russian) Group, used to refer to any of the Russian mafia groups, sometimes modified with a specific name, e.g. Orekhovskaya OPG. Sometimes the initialism is translated and OCG is used.
Organized crime in Russia began in the Russian Empires, but it was not until the Soviet era that vory v zakone ("thieves-in-law") emerged as leaders of prison groups in forced labor camps, and their honor code became more defined. With the end of World War II, the death of Joseph Stalin, and the fall of the Soviet Union, more gangs emerged in a flourishing black market, exploiting the unstable governments of the former Republics. Louis Freeh, former director of the FBI, said that the Russian mafia posed the greatest threat to U.S. national security in the mid-1990s.
In 2012, there were as many as 6,000 groups, with more than 200 of them having a global reach. Criminals of these various groups are either former prison members, corrupt officials and business leaders, people with ethnic ties, or people from the same region with shared criminal experiences and leaders. In December 2009, Timur Lakhonin, the head of the Russian National Central Bureau of Interpol, stated "Certainly, there is crime involving our former compatriots abroad, but there is no data suggesting that an organized structure of criminal groups comprising former Russians exists abroad", while in August 2010, Alain Bauer, a French criminologist, said that it "is one of the best structured criminal organizations in Europe, with a quasi-military operation."
The Russian mafia is similar to the Italian Mafia in many ways, the groups' organization and structure follow a similar model. The two groups also share a similar portfolio of criminal activity. The highly publicized Italian Mafia is believed to have inspired early criminal groups in Russia to form Mafia-like organizations, eventually spawning their own version. The Russian mafia, however, differed from the Italians due to their environment. The level of political corruption and arms sales in a post-Soviet Russia allowed for massive expansion and incorporation of many government officials into the crime syndicates. The Russians also dabbled in uranium trading, stolen from the Soviet nuclear program, and human trafficking.
