Organised Crime & Crime Prevention - what works? - Scandinavian ...

NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
forces us to investigate the crime situation in Russia, and the control mechanisms that shape
it, more critically.
The first explanation, blaming the inadequacies of law enforcement, has its advocates. They
tend to emphasize the qualitatively specific nature of most of the crime originating in Russia,
which makes it hidden, and thus difficult to expose by using conventional methods of law
enforcement. According to this school of thought, the Russian criminal organizations create
various contacts in Finland, but operate on a purely legitimate basis at first, switching to
criminal operations once they are well-acquainted with the environment and have established
contacts with Finnish bulvans. Those emphasizing the hidden nature of Russian crime seem to
share a common prejudice: they are certain that Russian criminality is much more
professional, intelligent and experienced that Finnish criminality.
One is reminded of the conclusions drawn by the criminologist Otto Pollak in the 1960´s.
According to Pollak, the criminality of women is of minor statistical significance, because
women are cunning and treacherous, and thus less prone to being exposed by officials than
men. Pollak believed that there are differences in the criminality of men and women, and as
women tend to commit crimes in their homes, their crimes often go unreported and uninvestigated.
Women are able to cover their crimes by using their feminine role: they may kill under
the guise of providing shelter and comfort, or manipulate passion in order to betray and
deceive. In addition, Pollak was of the opinion that women are punished less severely than
male criminals, as the justice system tends to treat women more softly.
Why is it, that many Finns imagine Russian criminality to be more hidden, and latent, than
our domestic criminality? It does seem, that the Finnish public consciousness tends to view
Russians much as Otto Pollak viewed women.
The crime originating in Russia has one very odd dimension. Several of my informants in the
Finnish and Swedish police forces - and also from other countries where Soviet emigrants
have formed prominent communities - have claimed that crime originating in Russia often has
a Jewish predomination.
One leading Swedish expert of Swedish-Russian economic crime told me that the majority of
the Russian-speaking economic criminals operating in Sweden are Jews, and that their ethnic
characteristics make them naturally adept at economic crime. Several experts of Finnish law
enforcement have told me that the country most infested with Russian crime is Israel, which
has received the largest community of Russian Jewish emigrants.
A very slight rhetorical tendency to blame the Jews runs through some of my research
material. As some of the exposed criminals really are of Jewish descent, the information
collected by the police may acquire dodgy elements of ethnic stereotyping. According to a
Finnish policeperson, the leader of the biggest Russian-speaking drug organization exposed in
Finland was indeed a Jew; a citizen of Israel, who only spoke Russian. According to my
source, the man´s ethnic character facilitated his criminal career.
At the same time, my informants in St. Petersburg law enforcement did not refer to Jews at all
when discussing the principles of ethnic organization in the context of “organized crime”.
They emphasized the role played by people of Caucasian origin, while stressing that most
criminal organisations are not ethnically homogenous. Anti-semitic sentiments may be
widespread in Russian society, but not among the police.
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