Douglas Century has an interesting Tablet piece on Jewish gangsters thriving precariously on the corruption of the Soviet Union.
The following excerpt is adapted from “The Last Boss of Brighton: Boris ‘Biba’ Nayfeld and the Rise of the Russian Mob in America.” The book chronicles the rise and fall of Nayfeld, the notorious Belarusian-born Jewish mobster who ran a global racketeering empire in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s from his homebase in the Little Odessa neighborhood of south Brooklyn. The following excerpt picks up in the Soviet Union, when he had, in his late-20s, become a full-fledged blatnoy—literally, a “guy with connections”— but common Russian argot for a gangster, a “professional criminal,” a young man willing to risk everything to line his pockets through the Soviet Union’s flourishing black market, known as making money na levo or “on the left side.”
The whole piece is well worth reading as it highlights how corrupt and dangerous the Soviet Union was.
Across the USSR, under the blat system, embezzling from the state was taking place on a vast scale. All it took was knowing the right factory managers, paying off officials. “You could make a fortune in the ’70s if you were smart, had some balls and the right connections,” Boris says. “We didn’t even think of it as ‘organized crime’ yet. To us, it was survival—making a living under the corrupt communist system. Some guys did it with the underground factories. I did it with my work crews. I’d go out to Siberia each season, put together a crew, and pocket my cut from dead souls. Once the season was over, I’d come back to my hometown loaded with black cash.”
The dangerous aspect was the risk of being shot for having too much money outside the protection of the Soviet state and the communist party.
At this time in the Soviet Union, if you were caught in possession of anything over ten thousand rubles, you were looking at the death penalty. The best-case scenario meant fifteen years in prison and confiscation of all property. You’d end up broke and barefoot. The worst case was execution by firing squad.
3 comments:
My friend Paul told me how much better off the citizens of the former USSR had been, than the citizens of the USA. Of course, there is the fact that he's an ignorant twit!
My old Soviet Politics lecturer told me that there was a little-known movement or trend where citizens played the game, worked hard and did their best to raise children, and prided themselves on keeping both physically and mentally clean. Not getting involved in corruption, not harming anyone, and not making a fuss. The more I hear of the old Soviet Union, the more this seems the only sensible option.
Tammly - it's astounding how many people believed that and how many still seem to think the USSR was some kind of success.
Sam - yes, it's easy to imagine how it could have been like that. Anything else would probably turn out to be self-sacrifice and wouldn't achieve anything anyway.
Post a Comment