Will this be the future of the US?

David Guyatt at DeepBlackLies.co.uk on Russia immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union:

GANGSTERS PARADISE

Organized crime in Russia is out of control. Criminal “brigades” own everything of value and can “acquire” any commodity in any quantity if the price is right. Ferocious criminal gangs ship out nuclear warheads with the same aplomb that they plunder train-loads of stolen bank-notes. Fearless and ingenious they even ripped-off Russia’s entire gold reserves.

Grigor is a street-wise Muscovite who sells his ass to anyone for twenty roubles. There are plenty of takers; many don’t bother to pay. Aged a mere eight years, he roams the streets, railway stations and airport terminals of this once proud city, his small, angelic face smeared with grime and distorted by a cigarette jutting from his mouth. Suddenly the granite like exterior dissolves, his bottom lip trembles and tears track down his filthy cheeks. “I want to go home.” But there is no home for Grigor to return to – his parents are lost to a world of vodka in a new land of mayhem, murder and mobsters.

He is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of discarded children that infest the railway stations, bus shelters and wastelands of Moscow seeking a “quick fix” to suppress their daily misery. Their only crime was to have been born at a time when a super-power tottered and then fell into the yawning chasm of poverty.

Russia is a fractured society where the underworld dominates with a Capone like ferocity. The state has evaporated in all but name. Corruption, always a feature of communist life, has blossomed out of control. The new Tsars of the nineties, dressed in sleek Armani suits and Gucci loafers are today immensely wealthy, bloated with arrogance and are utterly ruthless.

Within one year of Mikhael Gorbachev’s ousting, over 2600 (some estimates put it as high as 5000) “crime clans” employing over 3 million criminals had miraculously appeared and spread like wild-fire throughout the former Soviet empire. Forty of them match or out-number in size the Sicilian and American Mafias’. Collectively they form the most powerful criminal grouping in the world.

This lead Boris Yeltsin to warn in 1993 that “Nearly two-thirds of Russia’s commercial structure has ties to the growing criminal world.” Such was their alarming growth that Interior Ministry officials warned that organised crime would control between 30-40% of the Gross National Product “In the next few years.” This figure has probably been out-stripped already. How these syndicates came to the fore and achieved such concentrated power in so short a time remains mystifying.

Meanwhile the economic devastation of Russia continues unabated, a gruesome testimony of corruption and criminality that is largely ignored by an introspective and unmindful west. Growing numbers of despairing Muscovites die from hypothermia on the snow-swept streets where they have collapsed and huddled, foetal-like, following a mighty vodka binge. On average twenty or so real-life “stiffs” daily arrive at the morgue during the long winter months. Privatisation has bequeathed Russia 100,000 millionaires and an estimated 200,000 joint venture companies that are owned lock, stock and pork-barrel by various “entrepreneurs” – a word that nowadays has sinister overtones and is generally used as a code-word for “criminal.”