Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Daniel Yergin
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue
- 1 The new Russian Revolution: false start or dead end?
- 2 Creating owners: insider privatization and its consequences
- 3 Wall Street comes to Moscow
- 4 The rise and fall of the private banks
- 5 No capitalism without capitalists: entrepreneurship in the new Russia
- 6 Russia's epidemic of crime
- 7 Toward the rule of law?
- 8 Beyond coping: toward the recovery of Russian society
- 9 The shrinking Russian state and the battle for taxes
- 10 Conclusion: halfway to the market Russia on the eve of the twenty-first century
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Russia's epidemic of crime
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Daniel Yergin
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue
- 1 The new Russian Revolution: false start or dead end?
- 2 Creating owners: insider privatization and its consequences
- 3 Wall Street comes to Moscow
- 4 The rise and fall of the private banks
- 5 No capitalism without capitalists: entrepreneurship in the new Russia
- 6 Russia's epidemic of crime
- 7 Toward the rule of law?
- 8 Beyond coping: toward the recovery of Russian society
- 9 The shrinking Russian state and the battle for taxes
- 10 Conclusion: halfway to the market Russia on the eve of the twenty-first century
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Spring 1998:
Walking down the neat paths of Moscow's grimly fashionable Vagankovskoe cemetery, a visitor will find in the rows of freshly-dug graves a distinguished company of Russia's new business and criminal elite. There Ivan Kivelidi, lately chairman of the Russian Business Roundtable, and Vladislav Listev, ex-general director of ORT Television, rest in peace not far from Otari Kvantrishvili, one of the most flamboyant of Moscow's dons until he was gunned down outside his favorite steambath in 1994. Watching over them all is Vagankovskoe's most famous resident, the bard Vladimir Vysotskii, who died in 1980. Vysotskii would have mined rich material for his ballads from today's scene – not least from the fact that Vagankovskoe itself has become a market commodity. So great is demand lately that getting buried there requires some of the heftiest bribes in Moscow.
A tidal wave of crime
From one of the world's most tightly-policed and well-ordered societies only twenty years ago – at least, so it seemed to the outside world and to most Russians themselves – Russia has become one of the most criminal and corrupt. Recorded crimes have more than tripled since the mid-1970s. And those numbers are well short of the true mark, since even the police acknowledge that at least half of all crimes go unreported. In some categories the share of reported crimes may be as a low as 10%.
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- Capitalism Russian-Style , pp. 134 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999