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ARTICLE: "Murdered Regulator In Russia Made Plenty of Enemies: Targeting Illegal Cash Flows, Andrei Kozlov Became the Bane of Shady Bankers," by Guy Chazan, Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2006, p. A1.
I spent a summer in the Soviet Union in 1985, learning Russian at LSU (Leningrade State U.) during the day, and hanging out every night with "Big Al," a very sophisticated black marketer, at his apartment on the north side.
Every night the power elite types would file through his apartment, buying the latest VHS tapes of movies from the West, the most modern electronic home entertainment gear, and the highest-quality clothes you could imagine--all of it smuggled into the USSR by Western students Big Al recruited for this purpose (he put the big pitch on me every night after we finished our first bottle of vodka).
It was an education, to say the least, for it told me that there were two great thriving strains in the Soviet Union as it lumbered to its demise across the 1980s: the na levo types (literally, on the left--aka "on the side") who ran the black markets, and the silovki or power-types who had enough access to hard currency (U.S. dollars) to afford a good life on the side.
So the USSR falls apart and who rises to the top? The black market guys and the silovki, and they've been dueling it out ever since. Easy to slip into 1920s gangster capitalism, but far harder to escape.
But understand this demographic landscape and you understand why Putin is Putin, and why so many Russians let Putin be Putin.
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