Posts Tagged ‘mafia’
Obama lets Russia get away with murder
Last Thursday, the governments of Russia and China vetoed yet another United Nations Security Council resolution that would have put sanctions on the crumbling Syrian regime of Bashar Assad. The two authoritarian powers, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “are on the wrong side of history.”
This term has become a favorite expression of the Obama administration. In the past year, both Secretary of State Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice have used the language to describe Russian and Chinese intransigence against sanctioning Assad.
Correct as the description may be, however, it is trite coming from an administration that has lobbied hard to water down legislation aimed at putting pressure on Assad’s most important friend: Russian President-for-life Vladimir Putin. Indeed, while it continually castigates the Russians for opposing sanctions on Assad, it appears that the Obama administration, too, will be “on the wrong side of history.”
Last week, the Senate Finance Committee passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, named for the brave Russian lawyer who was arrested, tortured and killed by Russian authorities after exposing a $230 million tax fraud scheme perpetrated by the Kremlin. Magnitsky was denied medical treatment and subjected to worsening conditions and ever more squalid cells. He conveniently passed away in pretrial detention on Nov. 16, 2009, eight days before the one-year mark when the Russian government would have been forced to either try or release him.
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Why Russia’s Mafia State Is So Inefficient
In “The Godfather,” author Mario Puzo describes criminal boss Don Corleone’s organization as a highly centralized money-making machine. The Godfather is the CEO of an underground business empire, a kind of shadowy Henry Ford who collects all the money and makes all the decisions.
In reality, large criminal enterprises are divided into semi-autonomous crews who have their own territory or specialty and are grouped around a middle-level boss. There are constant rivalries and struggles for influence in which thugs make alliances and seek support from higher-level mafiosi.
As business entities, criminal enterprises are hugely inefficient. The global drug trade, estimated at $300 billion annually, has produced no lasting fortunes. Everything is squandered or lost. Efficiency is achieved by establishing and following rules, but criminals are lawless by nature. The notion that mafia thugs live by a special “thieves’ law” is a legend. For example, Godfather Vyacheslav Ivankov, murdered in Moscow in 2009, was himself the worst offender against the law’s most-sacred precepts.
Over the past 12 years, Russia has become a full-fledged mafia state. One day, historians will chart its exact structure, but it seems clear that it consists of several large families headed by President Vladimir Putin’s close associates and loyal oligarchs. Alongside them, countless crews of siloviki, bureaucrats, gangsters and affiliated businessmen work on their own, their networks varying from local to nationwide.
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Fragments of a Defunct State
How to characterise the Putin regime, a now shaken and besieged ruling group sometimes said to be the richest in the history of the world? ‘Soft authoritarianism’, ‘hybrid regime’, ‘managed democracy’: the labels reveal less about Russia than about the inability of commentators to loosen the Cold War’s lingering hold on their thinking.
Luke Harding was the Guardian correspondent in Russia between 2007 and 2011 who last February was turned back at Domodedovo Airport and told that his presence in the country was no longer welcome. An editorial in the Guardian described it as ‘the first removal of a British staff journalist from the country since the end of the Cold War’. Harding himself sees his account of Putin’s Russia as a kind of codicil to Malcolm Muggeridge’s denunciation of the Soviet Union when he was the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in 1932-33. ‘Eight decades on,’ Harding writes, ‘not much has changed’: ‘Kremlinology is back’; Russia ‘has become the world’s foremost spy-state’; ‘KGB habits of secrecy’ have returned; ‘Russia’s state media are still stuck in Cold War battle mode.’ And so on. Harding is not alone in this view. But it’s wrong. Putin doesn’t represent a return to Soviet ways; it’s something very different and more anarchic.
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