The talk is based on the book, Gangs of Russia. From the Streets to the Corridors of Power, Cornell University Press, 2015. The book discusses the development of entrepreneurial gangs across Russia. The main ethnographic fieldwork took place in Kazan, the capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan. This involved in-depth interviews with criminal gang members aged from 17 to 35, as well as interviews with local residents, the police and businessmen. In this presentation I will give a broad overview of the history of Russian gangs, discuss their moral code, their social organisation and the forms of their interaction with, and penetration into, mainstream society. I will discuss the ways in which many gang leaders managed to join the Russian economic and political elite. Finally, I will address the place of the gang in the current political discourse and mass culture, and reflect on the similarities between the behaviour of gang members and representatives of the Russian power elite.
No registration needed.
