Organized Crime in Russia - Historical Trends

Historical Trends

Comparison of the crime rates of the Soviet Union with those of other nations is considered difficult, because the Soviet Union did not publish comprehensive crime statistics. According to Western experts, robberies, homicide and other violent crimes were less prevalent in the Soviet Union than in the United States because the Soviet Union had a larger police force, strict gun controls, and had a low occurrence of drug abuse. However, white-collar crime was prevalent in the Soviet system. Corruption in the form of bribery was common, primarily due to the paucity of goods and services on the open market.

Theft of state property by state employees was also common. When Mikhail Gorbachev was the General Secretary of the CPSU, an effort was made to stop white-collar crime. Revelations of corruption scandals involving high-level employees of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were published regularly in the news media of the Soviet Union, and many arrests and prosecutions resulted from such discoveries. An article published in the Izvestia in 1994 described the difference between the situation of crime in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia:

Crime was never able to gain enough strength to compete with the state's law enforcement system. The criminal world had ties with the police, but it was all kept deeply hidden. Money had influence, but it was not all-powerful. Laundering the profits from crime was difficult, and spending the profits equally so. There were millionaires, but they were underground. There were gangs - but to get weapons they had to run numerous risks. We had it all. But it was all under the surface.

The crime rate in Russia sharply increased during the late 1980s. The fall of Marxist-Leninist governments in Eastern Europe had tremendous influence on the political economy of organized crime.