Stolen Communism: Soviet Mafias. The History of Soviet Organized Crime in the Second Half of the 20th Century

The book is a deep investigation into the phenomenon of organized crime in the USSR from the «Khrushchev thaw» and «stagnation» to the «Gorbachev perestroika». The author analyzes the process of forming the Soviet mafia as a unique phenomenon that combined criminal, economic, and partly political components. At the center of the narrative is the emergence of organized crime in the 1960s to 1980s, when the first signs of criminal structures resembling the Western mafia appeared in the USSR. The author examines in detail the evolution of banditry from disparate criminal groups to organized criminal communities with a clear hierarchy, management system, and an extensive network of informants. Based on real criminal cases and operational materials, the mechanisms of interaction between various categories of criminals are revealed: thieves-in-law, workshop workers, shadow entrepreneurs, and organized gangs. Special attention is paid to the formation of corrupt ties and the establishment of a protection system for criminal business. The book contains a detailed analysis of specific crimes committed by the most dangerous criminal groups in the USSR and shows how the Soviet mafia gradually formed, becoming the precursor to the criminal structures of the 1990s. The study will be of interest to both specialists in criminology and a wide range of readers interested in the history of Soviet crime and the mechanisms of forming organized crime in a socialist state. The author and the publisher do not call for violating the legislation of the Russian Federation, do not promote or romanticize a criminal lifestyle, but only show the dramatic, and sometimes tragic, pages of the history of our Fatherland, hidden from the eyes of the uninitiated and largely leading to the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.