The Russian Mob: Organized Crime in a Fledgling Democracy
Since the late 1980’s the Russian people have experienced one of the most drastic transitions seen in the world to date, a transition from an attempt at communism to a workable capitalist system. As one would expect, this transition has not been painless and has been the impetus of many distressing problems for the Russian people. One such problem is organized crime. This paper will explore how organized crime during Soviet rule and the Russian Federation has created obstacles in this transition to a functioning market economy. It will illustrate how organized crime has done this by analyzing its transition from the USSR to the Russian Federation, the reasons behind its existence today, and how its operation impairs Russia’s attempts at a market economy. It will also provide some possible solutions for the crises organized crime has created, which currently plague the Russian people. Organized crime has worked its way through openings provided by the transition economy to become a setback to the Russian society and economy. Its existence disables successful economic reform by influencing important issues such as competition, entrepreneurship, capital flight, the shadow economy, and violence.
Basis in Soviet Union
In order to understand organized crime in Russia today and its affect on the Russian economy, one must examine its roots in the Soviet Union. Although many acknowledge the existence of crime syndicates in the USSR, few are aware of their extent during the 70’s, 80’s, and early 90’s. As early as the 1970’s, the Russian mafia had advanced to the status of primary protectors and beneficiaries in the robust Soviet shadow economy (Anderson, 1995, 341...
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Night by Elie Wiesel is major memoir in which sold over 6 million copies after being sold. It shows the gruesome terror of the concentration camps and how Elie reacts and changes to these terrors. Elie and his family leave the safety of their homes to survive the terrible concentrations camps, enduring hardships, death, and emerging as a more stronger, improved people. Elie experiences changes both his ideas of religious and physical changes.
In the 1940s under the rule of Adolf Hitler, German soldiers caused great destruction throughout Europe. Elie Wiesel, a young boy at the time, was caught in the traumatic crossfire of the devastation occurring in that time period. The memoir, Night, tells the horrific stories that Elie Wiesel experienced. Elie was forced into concentration camps with his dad where he soon had to grow up fast to face the reality of his new life filled with violence, inhumanity and starvation, many of which he had never endured before. In Elie Wiesel’s novel Night he validates his theme of violence and inhumane treatment toward Jews through the use of excessive force such as the brutal beating to show Eliezer that he should not have been roaming the camp and
Night by Elie Wiesel is a harrowing story of his experiences as a young boy during the Holocaust at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration camp that killed over 1 million people during World War II. This book examines the effects that tragic circumstances have on the innocence of children, and the humanity in people as a whole. Over the course of a year, Elie is forced to witness events such as the brutal murders of his people, the decline and eventual loss of hope for survival, and the deterioration and death of his father. Because of these horrific events, Elie loses his faith in God, his faith in humanity, and his childhood and innocence.
Elie goes to Auschwitz at an innocent, young stage in his life. Due to his experiences at this concentration camp, he loses his faith, his bond with his father, and his innocence. Situations as horrendous as the Holocaust will drastically change people, no matter what they were like before the event, and this is evident with Elie's enormous change throughout the memoir Night.
The Russian Federation continues to pursue a program of dramatic economic, political and social transformation. Despite President Yeltsin's successful re-election campaign, continued economic reform remains subject to the influence of the communist controlled State Duma (the Russian parliament). Even the most optimistic scenarios envision a protracted process as Russia continues the task of fashioning a legal foundation for commerce, rationalizing the regulatory and taxation regimes with which businesses must comply, and completing the task of creating from scratch a highly effective and consistent customs administration. The duration and final outcome of this process are still uncertain. Consequently, Russia offers U.S. business both high risk, and potentially high rewards.
Global anomie, dysnomie, and economic crime: Hidden consequences of neoliberalism and globalization in Russia and around the world
By the mid-1980s, urbanization and higher education had transformed the Soviet society from a relatively homogenous one into one that was considerably diverse with a sizable middle-class. Educated and exposed to Western culture, the professionals and the white collars were far more likely to understand the Soviet Union's weaknesses and the system's fallacies than their counterparts decades ago. Coupled with the intelligentsia's anti-establishment tradition (as embodied by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakhorav), this new class of economic elite had ...
People may say that the people who survived the Holocaust were lucky, but in reality they weren’t. They faced horrors that are unimaginable, they changed and they have to live with the monstrosity that the faced. This essay is about how Elie Wiesel, holocaust survivor and winner of Nobel peace prize, changed during the Holocaust. The book Night is a novel about how Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust and how he changed during the Holocaust. The book shows how a Elie changed in the concentration camp In the novel, “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the main character, Elie was affected by the events in the book because he, was poignant shifted, losing/lost faith, and his life in the camps.
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The term ‘organized crime’ encompasses such diverse phenomena as the whole illegal market, quasi-governmental criminal structures, corporate crime and state crime. This ambiguity is also the result of the fact that perpetrators of crimes from the same organization may include members of any occupational group, corrupt business executives, members of the professions, public officials, politicians, in addition obviously to the conventional racketeer element (Hagan 1983:56). Therefore, it has become commonplace to observe that there is no uniform understanding of organised crime, not to speak of a generally accepted definition (Levi, 1998). Within the international literature on organized crime are there different scientific approaches that often disclose single facets (economic, cultural, political, etc.) of this phenomenon, with the result that ‘as many descriptions as there are authors’ (Albanese, 1985: 4). The multidisciplinary dimension has not necessarily ensured a high level of theoretical penetration of the objects of study. Despite recent advances, the theoretical literature on organized crime remains to be fairly thin and fragmented. In describing the object of study, one should speak about a number of different empirical phenomena, which are examined in a rather loose conceptual context. Not all approaches contain a clearly formulated conception of ‘organised crime’, being it as a formal definition or as a less restrictive outline. Often enough, a conceptualization of ‘organised crime’ is only implicitly made, at times merely taking the form of vague associations. Secondly, in some cases it seemed difficult to distinguish between claims co...
According to the United Nations Offices on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) “the organized crime threatens peace and human security, violates human rights and undermines economic, social, cultural, political and civil development of societies around the world”. Some of its different forms are financial crime, cybercrime, trafficking in firearms, drugs and persons.
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With the world changing and advancing with technology, criminal organizations are taking advantage of new opportunities. The advancement of travel, ease of communication, and an increase in demand, has all contributed to the globalization of crime. Every nation has been affected by the globalization of crime and the problem continues to grow.
Organized crime provides a wide array of illegal goods and services to million of customers on a daily basis. The scope of organized crime activities and the volume of the business engaged
Russian Crime organizations have grown to a high number since the end of the Cold War. The Nuclear Black market is no stranger to the Russian Mafia. Russia may be poised to sell nuclear weapons to the highest bidder as organized crime expands its influence in Russian society (Phinney). Some of the 200 Russian organized crime groups now operate worldwide, including in the United states and gaining the ability to manipulate its banking system and financial markets (Phinney). Roughly two-thirds of Russia’s economy is under sway of crime syndicates, and protection rackets have been the norm since the collapse of communism(Phinney). The Russian Mafia and the antifada