Russia's Crime of the Century

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/20/russia_s_crime_of_the_century

by georgecmu • 15 years ago

291 93 15 years ago

foreignpolicy.com

MrVitaliy• 15 years ago

Same ol' Russia. Not much surprise here.

Video report by Hermitage CEO who can no longer visit Russia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW0AnZLSCcg

mtw• 15 years ago

hmm for those who do not speak russian http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok6ljV-WfRw&feature=chann... same video in english

sili3• 15 years ago

Since this story is starting to make an international splash, my prediction is that there will be another, very public, investigation and trial (ordered by "the very top"). Putin or Medvedev will give a speech about importance of fighting corruption. They will convict some front men as scape goats and the real puppet masters will get a slap on the wrist.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

I've never known Russian government to bother even doing THAT.

sili3• 15 years ago

They do such things occasionally when they can extract good domestic PR out of it.

guelo• 15 years ago

This story has been around for a couple years I think.

barrkel• 15 years ago

I agree; I read this same story, or something extremely similar to it, 12 months or more ago.

fingerprinter2• 15 years ago

Does anyone really trust Russia? Or China? Or N. Korea? Or most of Africa? Or any country where the government is sufficiently closed and non-democratic?

Look at how slanted, jaded, corrupt and inept the US gov't has become and we have much more visibility into those dealings. Not to mention a refresh of power every so often and bloodless changeovers of power. I can't imagine living in a place where you actively fear your government...

One thing I always say to myself when I start to really rail on the US/AU/UK/Can etc is that they are still orders of magnitude better places to live than Russia, China or other places of the sort.

rhizome3• 15 years ago

One thing I always say to myself when I start to really rail on the US/AU/UK/Can etc is that they are still orders of magnitude better places to live than Russia, China or other places of the sort.

Or so the story goes, anyway, since we only hear one side.

cageface4• 15 years ago

I've been hearing a lot of the other side since I came to Vietnam. Maybe it's just a Southern thing but most of the people I've talked to here tell me privately that they wish they had a Western-style democratic government. I think they probably see Western government through rose-colored glasses but the fact remains that saying the wrong thing about the wrong people can land you in jail here.

ahlatimer• 15 years ago

Just because the US/AU/UK/Can are better places to live than Russia, China, N. Korea, or most of Africa doesn't mean we should allow the stuff Western governments are pulling to slide. I don't know if the countries that are orders of magnitude worse than the Western governments were always that way, but my guess would be that they were, at one point, not so bad, relatively. It was likely a slow path that led them to decline to the point they have today. I don't want to see my government go down the same path.

dublinclontarf• 15 years ago

Exactly, if we continue to allow our governments to pull this stuff, soon enough we WILL be in the same boat.

rtperson• 15 years ago

> but my guess would be that they were, at one point, not so bad, relatively.

In the case of Russia, you would be very, very wrong. You'd have to go back to the Kievan empire of the 13th century to find the last time the place wasn't an ethical quagmire.

I take your point about holding Western governments to a higher standard -- we definitely should -- but don't assume all cultures had a similar starting point. Your average Canadian has never had to deal with the cultural memory of anything quite so devastating as the Mongol invasion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Rus%27).

chailatte• 15 years ago

Agreed. I mean, what a story about how companies are stolen, criminals take over banks, and murderers dictate to judges. About how politicians pay lip service to cleaning up the system, or actively assist the criminals. It's a story whose twist and turns lead down a dark trail of corruption, violence.... and theft of billions from taxpayers via bank bailouts and currency devaluation and the eventual US/UK default upon billions of social obligation debt.

Oops sorry, was going to stay on track with the Russian story. Don't know what happened there. Wait, what? The russian politicians only stole $235 Million? Man, they are small potatoes. Our politicans print hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air every month, and we say 'sir, may we have some more'.

rdtsc• 15 years ago

Not sure if you are American, but to make you feel better about your country, it is worth pointing out that unlike Russia in US the corruption is mostly happening at the top. In Russia (and whole ex-Soviet space pretty much), the corruption is spread through and through the society. It is like a metastasized cancer.

It starts with grade school where you have to bribe the teacher so they don't lower the grades of your child, you have to bribe your way out of a traffic ticket, you have to pay "extra" to not be ignored by nurses in a hospital, you have to pay public officials under the table to pretty much do anything. Then it goes to the top -- if you run a small business you often have to keep paying larger sums to avoid a mountains of artificially created red-tape, if you are unlucky you might have to also pay protection money to the local police/mafia. Then it gets worse as you go higher. Once you reach a certain level then you really have to start worrying about your life. Contract killings are just part of the business there.

fingerprinter2• 15 years ago

(Reply to my original comment since I couldn't edit anymore)

I should point out that my comment is simply about perspective, not complacency. Of course we should strive to fix and hold gov't officials repsonsible, fix the mess that led to the GFC etc etc...I was more or less pointing out that if we are myopic in our views we cannot take stock and realize the good we do have it. It is hard sometimes for someone who was born in the US to realize how much we simply take for granted (ask any recent immigrant from war torn countries or very oppressive regimes about their experiences and what they can and cannot do etc etc).

raquo• 15 years ago

I'm not here to defend Russia. But how is it fundamentally "worse" than any of say 100 other countries? Looking at most countries from the outside, they all look okay. Not perfect, but not barbaric either. Once you start digging deeper, however, shit will hit the fan very hard in most parts of the world. You don't have to be in North Korea for that.

Basic example: Singapore looks like a great developed country. But it's ranked just near Russia in Press Freedom Index. The ruling party (and it's a parliamentary republic) is ruling there for 10 years longer than Gaddafi has been ruling in Libya. Oops.

It's just a question of scale. Small local problems go unnoticed by the world. If this particular story did not involve foreigners, you would have never heard about it.

nl• 15 years ago

Singapore is an interesting case.

They do not have a free press, and many other freedoms are lacking.

OTOH, they have a very, very strong anti-corruption standard. They consistently rate at the top of anti-corruption indexes: http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/...

fedd5• 15 years ago

> we have much more visibility into those dealings.

in Russia people have a lot of visibility into all the corruption and how the things are being done.

> Not to mention a refresh of power every so often and bloodless changeovers of power.

you should be confusing Russia with Iraq or some other country. in modern Russia there were only bloodless power changes.

> I can't imagine living in a place where you actively fear your government...

the people in the West have this advantage - not to fear their governments, everybody should admit. there are not very many stories about how some businessman or ordinary citizen was killed or imprisoned.

awakeasleep2• 15 years ago

I really don't know how to conceptualize such audacious malfeasance. How do societies heal wounds like this?

sili3• 15 years ago

They come to accept this as a norm. Citizens become jaded and stick to the rote path that would not make them stand out from the norm. This is a large problem for Russia's economy.

Putin and Medvedev have been repeating over and over how innovation is important for Russia's future (I'm not certain how much they believe that actually); and more ironically how innovation is in Russia's blood and has defined its whole history. But I don't see many people willing to innovate. It's not even a problem of stifling bureaucracy, or corrupt officials, or some mafia extortions. Simply, majority of people are not willing to think outside the box, or to put any effort to bring their ideas to mass market.

ibagrak• 15 years ago

My wife's radio show on this topic exactly: http://english.ruvr.ru/radio_broadcast/38318922/48746461.htm... (shameful plug). Your points are all valid, but there is more to the "culture of innovation" in Russia than meets the eye.

camworld• 15 years ago

About 10 years ago I was going to start an adventure travel company in Krasnoyarsk, but I backed out at the last moment because I was informed that the local mafia would have extorted me into extinction within a few months just because I was an American trying to start a business in Siberia. Too bad; it would have been fun bringing rich Americans into Siberia to spend their money in a local, depressed economy.

waterside81• 15 years ago

This is the same reason there are next-to-no resorts in southern Italy. The mob wants a cut, so nobody develops.

guard-of-terra5• 15 years ago

However there are a lot of resorts on Sicily. I'm unsure what it tells us.

njl• 15 years ago

This is the sort of case that should be Amnesty International's bread and butter. They were an amazing organization throughout the 70s and 80s, insisting that repressive regimes treat dissidents as humans, with dignity.

I think they lost their way after the end of the cold war. I didn't find any mention of Magnitsky on their website. It's rather depressing.

alecco5• 15 years ago

Amnesty International was credited (among other big NGO) of Bradley Manning moved to a more humane facility with better conditions. They are very active on many other cases not picked up by mainstream media. They don't discriminate by color of skin or location.

ajays2• 15 years ago

I'm sorry, but you're giving AI too much credit.

There was only 1 reason why Bradley Manning was moved: 2012 election. Obama knows that as long as Manning was being tortured, this would be a sore sticking point with his core Democrat supporters. And I speak as one of them, someone who put in a lot of time and money into getting him elected in 2008.

alecco5• 15 years ago

It freaks me out the largest mob in the world has the 2nd largest nuke stash ready to fire. They are out of control:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinen...

gloob• 15 years ago

Your first sentence has been true for the better part of a century, now. And - while the American government is undoubtedly less corrupt and more liberal than the Russian one - I don't really see the odds of America using nukes being significantly lower than the odds of Russia using them.

(Also: I'm not entirely clear on what you mean by "out of control" - plenty of countries engage in extrajudicial killings: Russia, obviously, but also Israel, Syria, America...)

alecco5• 15 years ago

That was a blatant assassination with very expensive (30M) and easily traceable radioactive material. It was a clear message to dissidents and western governments.

The assassins even took a British Airways flight to leave a radioactive trail behind. And the material was identified to come from a specific nuclear plant in Russia.

I've never heard of anything like this before.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

"Extra-judicial" in the context of warfare is one thing (killing people who kill your people or help do so), but assassination of mere critics of a government is an entirely separate kettle of fish. Litvinenko is the most prominent example of the absolute ruthlessness and lawlessness of Putin's regime but it is far from the only one (see also the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko and the many suspicious deaths of Russian journalists critical of Putin).

abcd_f3• 15 years ago

Does it not freak you that the holder of the largest nuke stash has recently invaded a whole fucking country on false premises, just to access its oil? Talk about being out of control, eh?

alecco5• 15 years ago

Indeed! It's just US has long term economic interests and they're a tiny bit more rational about it. Not good at all, but less bad and out of control.

ra• 15 years ago

Remember the first wikileaks cablegate exposes?

"Russia is a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy centred on the leadership of Vladimir Putin, in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together to create a "virtual mafia state", according to leaked secret diplomatic cables that provide a damning American assessment of its erstwhile rival superpower."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cables...

NSMeta• 15 years ago

When I opened my law firm, Firestone Duncan, in Moscow in 1993, I was aware of the dangers of doing business in Russia. The stories about "mafia" groups of tracksuited thugs extorting businesses were well known to me. What I never expected was that the Russian mafia would merge with the government; its members are now the same officials who are supposed to be protecting the public.

As far as I know, in 90s mafia had the strongest influence on government's decisions in Russia. Then again, it might have really became the government. I'm too young to remember and moved from the Soviet Union some time ago.

dimakri882• 15 years ago

Crimes like this one happen in Russian all the time. The fact, that foreign businessmen were envolved in this one, makes a big difference. Pretty much Russia is held in fetters of corruption. There are little things that can be done in here without bribing a small-time bureaucrat. Mr.Medevedev is feeding us with useless talk about war on corruption, but if you study his blog (http://eng.news.kremlin.ru/) or the committe for fighting corruption website (http://www.com-cor.ru/en), you won't find a single referance to some sort of anti-corruption hotline. Many tend to think that problems lie only in bureaucrats, but I consider that main problem is in Russian people who are raised over last few centuries to be ignorat of law and their basic rights. Citizens don't have a slightest clue about what can and should be done when ran in to any problem. Fighting the raging corruption should be Russian's greatest and the only concern over next 5-10 years. Justise is only possible when Mr.Medevedev or sometime Putin are addressed and their Manus Domini applied. Georgia should be a positive example of how thing could be delt with a country where 80% of officials are corrupt. It is really dissapointing for me to read comments like "a terrible influence on this world for the past 200 years. When was the last time anything truly positive came out of that dark, forgotten corner of the world". I can list some positive things, but I will probably be considered very subjective by people living outside of Russia. I hope thing will change, and we won't be thought of as a "threat", but for now, you are all right, we are a great threat and I am ashamed of it.

awakeasleep2• 15 years ago

Could you link to anything about how Georgia dealt with corruption, or point me towards a good book to read? I've been wondering how countries can 'come back' from corruption, and I'm getting nowhere.

dimakri882• 15 years ago

Sure, take a look at Georgia's National Anti-Corruption Strategy and Action Plan (http://www.u4.no/training/incountry-open/Georgia-materials/a...). The document is only about thirteen pages long, nevertheless, it is very informational. Unfortunatly, I can't really help you with the books. There're just too many written on the subject, but perhaps you want to dig a little bit into anti-corruption policies, that were developed in contries like Sweden and Singapore ( yeah, it was suprising to learn that Swedes had a huge problem with corruption around 19th century). These countries can be considered pioneers in fighting corruption.

callmeed• 15 years ago

"What I never expected was that the Russian mafia would merge with the government; its members are now the same officials who are supposed to be protecting the public."

Really? I have friends in Russian and Ukraine and from the limited stories I hear, this seems not too surprising to me.

When corruption and bribery becomes a cultural norm, it takes a long time (or never) to go away.

eurohacker• 15 years ago

dont see why political hitpieces should be on hacker news sites,

considering that U.S. itself is currently torturing the Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning in prison who exposed the fraud and war crimes of U.S. at the much greater international scale

so that Germany is protesting the inhumane prison conditions of Manning

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42571392/ns/world_news-europe/

leave politics aside would be a good idea ..

kurokikaze• 15 years ago

This "hitpiece" can be of interest to those who doing / wants to do business in Russia. This is a story about business climate in country, not only about one person's death.

guard-of-terra5• 15 years ago

My perspective as a someone who was raised and lives in Russia and doesn't realy remebmer USSR and is of a target demography of news.yc:

I am much less impressed of stories where someone who had a lot of money killed or harmed rather than of stories where someone "socially unprotected" killed or harmed.

Reason: That organized crime you all referring to was on the rage in early- and mid-90s. And they practically killed themself out. If you go to some cemeteries you would find a lot of expensive monuments to mobsters aged 30-40 yrs. There are much, much less organized crime now (you don't hear about it even if you know where to listen), partly because some of it legalized, partly because most of it killed itself. They just could not help it.

Levels of high-profile corruption vary in Russia, but everyone would agree that real estate is the apex of it. If you got there and got killed, it's like if you gambled with borrowed money and lost it all and then got your legs broken. Happens everywhere if one is stupid enough. (rem took the debt-legs breaking concept from US popular culture).

So while for someone with US/European background this story reads like the crime of the century, Russians would instead focus more on issues which can hurt ordinary people more likely (hint: list of issies which can realistically hurt you in Russia if you're an ordinary person does not include mafia, not at all).

varjag2• 15 years ago

> Russians would instead focus more on issues which can hurt ordinary people more likely

Or rather, Russian TV would focus more on ordinary folk issues, because reporting high profile crimes is a taboo.

Therefor when you skim through ORT news, it's mostly hood crimes, house fires and Chechen insurgence.

guard-of-terra5• 15 years ago

Rather, I would focus more on ordinary folk issues, despite not watching TV by not having one.

Some other people of my demographics (not TV watchers, can read international information sources, young and educated) would have the same focus.

So please, do not underestimate our own inherent bias against "high profile" and towards "ordinary people".

Confusion• 15 years ago

  (hint: list of issies which can realistically hurt you in
  Russia if you're an ordinary person does not include 
  mafia, not at all)

Hint: this kind of behavior affects ordinary Russians very directly, in two ways.

1) Foreign companies are not investing in Russia because of this behavior. Billions of dollars and euros could be flowing into Russia, but aren't. Such investments would reduce unemployment significantly and a normal share of the money could reach the ordinary Russian.

2) Every ruble extorted from a rich Russian or foreigner by the mafia cannot trickle down to poor Russians. Corruption cannibalizes an economy. Poor or unemployed? The corrupt government officials and their henchmen mafia are directly to blame.

guard-of-terra5• 15 years ago

It sure does affect ordinary Russians, but it's hardly a "crime of century". Real estate involved crime and corruption is old news here. Nothing particularly interesting or new. The event in question several years old.

I'll try to mirror it: Let's assume we would find an article about how Russian girl came to USA, was dragged into prostitution, drugged, abused and eventually killed. This is a terrible story, but you would hardly name it "Crime of the Century". While it's basically the same thing: come to foreign country, do unsafe things, get murdered.

It's sad that real estate development in Russia is corruption-ridden violent disaster, but this fact is neither very new nor very important to average Russian. Probably not even in top 10. There just are more urgent matters.

captain_mars• 15 years ago

A similar case:

Defiance, or: How to Succeed in Business While Being Targeted by the FBI, the KGB, the Department of Homeland Security, the INS and the Mafia Hit Men

http://defiancethebook.com/

kore• 15 years ago

Based on monetary losses alone, the Yukos incident of some years back overshadows this by orders of magnitude, with claims that $98 billion was lost in the liquidation of company assets according to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukos

The CEO, once the richest person in Russia, is now rotting in prison - many believing this was due to his public complaints of corruption and his funding of opposition parties.

GFischer• 15 years ago

Have you read Roman Abramovich's biography? He stole close to that amount, too.

He started out selling stolen gasoline, then, after a stint in the black market, he eventually stole a train containing 55 cisterns of diesel fuel !! , ended up as friends of the mafia-government, which sold him Gazprom for only 100 million dollars (it is worth billions).

According to Wikipedia, Abramovich later admitted in court that he paid huge bribes (in billions) to government officials and obtained protection from gangsters to acquire these and other assets

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Abramovich

sovande2• 15 years ago

During the Stalin area, the intelligentsia and people with university education were basically killed off. What happens to a country when you remove most of the educated and intelligent people from the gene pool?

varjag2• 15 years ago

Education is not an inheritable trait.

If anything, the cultural effect of the purges was the most devastating.

sovande2• 15 years ago

> Education is not an inheritable trait.

I used the conjunction "educated and intelligent". Intelligent people tend to gravitate towards education, formal or informal. IQ tests show that university students score on average 120-130 compared to 100 in the general population. Removing educated people from the common gen-pool in a closed society may have an interesting collective effect.

known• 15 years ago

You call it corruption. They call it lobbying.

hugh3• 15 years ago

Well if this is Russia's crime of the century, then that's at least significant improvement. Russia's crime of last century wound up killing more like twenty million people, instead of only one.

The 19th century wasn't so great either.

dalenkruse• 15 years ago

If you want to read more about this kind of thing happening in Russia, I recommend the book "Putin's Labyrinth" by Steve Levine.

AlbertoE• 15 years ago

230 million and a couple of murders is chump change. US wastes that much money and lives for no reason every day in piece of shit countries.

elvirs• 15 years ago

for those of you who speaks russian here is a short documentary about the issue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8SmQ6dxlyM

strlen• 15 years ago

As somebody born in former USSR, this is why Russia will _never_ have a Silicon Valley. I refuse to ever consider living in (even temporarily), visiting or doing business either in Russia or with a Russian company in the United States (how do I know they won't come after my relatives?). When I got to the United States, I realized that I'd rather sweep the streets in the United States than be wealthy in Russia.

Rule of law (vs. rule by decree), freedom are deeply engrained in American and ersatz-British (UK, but also Canada, Australia, Ireland, etc...) ethos. A pupil on a school yard, when confronted by a teacher screams "it's a free country, you can't make me". People feel entitled (I am using it in a dictionary definition, in the positive sense of the word) to freedom, to human rights.

This isn't the same way in Russia: elders would frequently tell me "the place for people who want freedom is in jail". Philosophy was taught in an entirely different way in university: my parents were surprised when I told them that Plato and Hegel (who taught that real freedom is the right to submit to an absolutist state) were considered fascist by my (American) professors. Their anti-democratic (in the greater sense of the word, which encompasses not just elections but also concepts of minority rights, free speech and the like), anti-freedom theories were taught as being more "advanced" than philosophies of Locke and Kant.

To be fair, there are many abhorrent and brutal ideas in the American ethos as well, but they're token compared to the Russian/Soviet ethos: compare for example, Russian behaviour in Chechnya with US behaviour in Iraq or Israeli behaviour in Palestine. As another example, it's shameful that United States is even publicly debating torture, but in Russia torture isn't an abstract debate about "ticking time-bombs": it's something that you _expect_ to happen to you if you're arrested. I remember a neighbour recounting how, when he was found publicly drunk, the police patrol put him on the trunk of the car and struck his liver and kidneys with a truncheon to teach him a "lesson".

United States, Canada and England are blessed, historically. Russia had been occupied by Mongols, ruled by tyrannical czars (who styled themselves after Mongol Khans and Byzantine Emperors), ruled by the worst tyrant known to man (with an intercession of Nazi Germany rule, during which heavy racist propaganda was further imprinted into the popular ethos). You can't expect this backdrop to produce an environment in which the next Google will be built (there's a reason Sergey Brin didn't stay in Russia to build it!).

SergeyHack• 15 years ago

> (there's a reason Sergey Brin didn't stay in Russia to build it!). "Brin immigrated to the United States from Russia at the age of six." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin

Russia's Crime of the Century

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