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Dec 31,2006 - Jan7,2006 |
The violent birth of the vory v zakone
Part 12 - How petty thieves have taken control of the Russian economy
By Antonio Nicaso
Originally Published: 2001-06-24
Who are the vory v zakone? A literal translation describes them as thieves obeying a code (Vorovskoi zakon): two thirds of this criminal elite are Russian (33.1 percent) and Georgian (31.6 percent), the rest are Armenians (8.2 percent), Azerbaijanis (5.2 percent), Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Abkhazians (21.9 percent). They administer their own justice (vorovskaia spravedlivost) through their own court. They’re generally young: 85.6 percent among them are aged between 30 and 40. Only three vory are between 60 and 65, and just one is 75. Many are very young (25-27). They aren’t afraid of going to jail, they’re incorrigible, ready for anything.
Even though the origins of this phenomenon are obscure, there is no trace of vory v zakone in the former Soviet Union before the Bolshevik revolution. The first hints about them come about in the Thirties, when they got in touch with some fringes of political dissidents. Russia was full of thieves since the times of Peter the Great (1695-1725): in Moscow alone there were 30,000 but they weren’t organized in gangs. Many things changed during the second half of the 18th century: thieves began using nicknames and communicating by a cant (fenia), laying the foundations for a gang structure more or less organized. These structures were refined by the early 20th century, with the specification of leaders and roles within the various micro-organizations.
Following the 1917 revolution that led to the fall of Tsarism, the enemies of the new order tried to use criminals for their own purposes. Many politicians took the head of juvenile gangs and developed a series of rules, such as not to work, not to create a family, not to serve in the military, not to contribute financially to social welfare, not to go to the police for redressing a wrong suffered, not to testify in a criminal case. These juvenile gangs are called "zhigani" and what they did was the first step towards the creation of an underworld code. Finding a compromise in this forced cohabitation between politicians and criminals wasn’t easy. There were two different attitudes: "zhigani" aspired to social recognition, while thieves, always involved in petty crimes, had no intention of changing their nature.
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