russia

Thieves By Law (Director: Alexander Gentelev): I’ve been reading Misha Glenny’s excel­lent survey of the world of organ­ized crime, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Underworld, so the sub­ject of this film inter­ested me. An exposé of the inner work­ings of the Russian “mafia” as told by three allegedly “former” gang­sters, Thieves By Law wasn’t quite as shocking as it might be to someone com­pletely unfa­miliar with this world, but the level of access gained by dir­ector Gentelev is impressive.

We’re first intro­duced to Leonid “Macintosh” Bilunov, living in a man­sion in the south of France. He’s cul­tured and rather charming, even as he recounts his own violent prison stories. Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, nick­named Taiwanchik (“the Taiwanese”) is an Uzbek who was charged in the scandal sur­rounding the 2002 Olympic figure skating com­pet­i­tion. It was Tokhtakhounov who was alleged to have bribed the French judge to score the Russian skaters higher than the Canadians. Most fear­some of all is Vitaly Dyemochka (“Bondar”), a cold-eyed gang leader who has spent nearly half his life in prison. Despite their will­ing­ness to talk, one gets the dis­tinct impres­sion that they have done many more bad things than they’ll admit to.

What they do reveal is just how quickly the under­world rose to power as the Soviet state appar­atus was col­lapsing in the late 1980s. The vacuum in polit­ical and eco­nomic power was quickly filled by the crim­inal gangs, who had never played by Soviet rules. Instead, their “Thieves’ Code” had flour­ished since Stalin’s time, allowing them to vir­tu­ally con­trol the prisons in which they were held. In the lean Soviet years, this code seemed almost ascetic. No wives or chil­dren allowed, no registered addresses, no working within society, no betraying other crim­inals. When these gangs were turned loose upon a newly “free” Russia, though, their code quickly broke down. Each group began run­ning extor­tion and pro­tec­tion rackets, tar­geting the thou­sands of new busi­nesses that sprung up overnight. Many of Russia’s richest men suc­ceeded by grabbing state assets cheaply, and the gangs latched on like para­sites. This is where the concept of the krisha (“roof”) was estab­lished. A crim­inal organ­iz­a­tion would “offer” their ser­vices as a krisha to pro­tect the busi­ness from other crim­inals (and often the police) for a price. The police at this time became just as cor­rupt, with the addi­tional power that went with the threat of legal action against the businesses.

The long rot of the Soviet state meant that in the public’s eyes, crim­inals had a better repu­ta­tion than the police anyway, so it wasn’t dif­fi­cult for the crim­inal gangs to operate and recruit. While the Thieves’ Code was in effect, gangs would often meet up to arbit­rate dis­putes in an almost gen­tle­manly fashion, but from 1994–2000, a brutal civil war took place among the gangs, who were each fighting for supremacy. This feeding frenzy essen­tially left the Code in tat­ters, as greed took over.

As the gangs them­selves grew richer and more business-savvy, they wanted to get into busi­ness them­selves, so they often demanded part­ner­ships with the busi­nessmen they were pre­vi­ously extorting. In this way, our prot­ag­on­ists ostens­ibly went legit, although there were never really any clean hands in the Russian busi­ness world. They also needed places to launder their new­found wealth, so many took advantage of Israel’s gen­erous immig­ra­tion policies and lack of fin­an­cial reg­u­la­tions. If a gang­ster wasn’t Jewish, he would simply marry a Jewish woman in order to gain an Israeli pass­port. In this period, the gangs stopped killing each other and started killing more busi­nessmen, in order to take over their enter­prises. With crim­inal organ­iz­a­tions now in con­trol of many legal busi­nesses in Russia (among them con­struc­tion, banking and real estate), it’s dif­fi­cult to tell the good guys from the bad. And glob­al­iz­a­tion has allowed these guys to extend their reach right around the world, which Glenny’s book recounts in agon­izing detail.

Although Thieves By Law is tre­mend­ously inform­ative, and the char­ac­ters are suit­ably chilling, it’s shot very much in a tele­vi­sion doc­u­mentary style. It packs a lot of inform­a­tion into its run­ning time, but it’s not par­tic­u­larly filmic. In an ironic twist, the cold-eyed Vitaly now spends his time writing and dir­ecting gang­ster films in Russia. He admon­ishes his actors by telling them, “this isn’t just a story, this really happened!” Maybe Gentelev should have brought him aboard to film some “re-enactments.”

(7/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs10, crime, israel, russia

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