Russia's Embedded Criminal Caste

The Reign of Urki Terror

One feature not often understood with respect to the Soviet Union's slave labour camps--the Gulags--was that they were deliberately (by design) controlled by criminal gangs.  There were two kinds of prisoner: the "politicals" that were sentenced by the state to long terms of hard, forced labour for reason of failing to support the Communist regime, on the one hand, and "ordinary" criminals (thieves, murderers, rapists, etc.), on the other.

These two groups were put into the camps together.  Deliberately.  The criminals, the Urki were permitted to prey upon the politicals, thereby keeping them in line and control.

To the inexperienced political prisoner, to the young peasant girl arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, to the unprepared Polish deportee, a first encounter with the urki, the Soviet Union's professional criminal caste, would have been bewildering, shocking and unfathomable.  Evgeniya Ginzburg met her first female criminals as she was boarding the boat to Kolyma:

They were they cream of the criminal world: murderers, sadists, adept at every kind of sexual perversion . . . without wasting any time they set about terrorizing and bullying the "ladies", delighted to find that "enemies of the people" were creatures even more despised and outcast than themselves . . . . They seized our bits of bread, snatching the last of our rags with our bundles, pushed us out of the places we had managed to find . . .  [Anne Appelbaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 261.]

In New Zealand we have a pale reflection of what the the reign of the urki would have been like.
 We are plagued with several nation-wide criminal gangs who live unto themselves, as a law unto themselves.  Naturally, significant proportions end up in the nation's prisons where they band together and terrorize other prisoners.  The urki operated like this in the Gulags--but with one key additional stipulation: they were encouraged to terrorise the politicals as a deliberate strategy both to punish the politicals and keep them in line.

 The Gulag camps have been written about extensively by many people who survived them.  Their accounts of the horrors of living under the urki are startling and beyond comprehension.

Most of the Gulag's "classic" chroniclers--witnesses to the terror, the robbery and the rape that the thieves inflicted on the other inhabitants of the camps--hated them with a passion.  "The criminals are not human," wrote Shalamov, point-blank.  "The evil acts committed by criminals in camps are innumerable."  Solzhenitsyn wrote that "It was precisely this universally human world, our world, with its morals, customs, and mutual relationships which was most hateful to the thieves, most subject to their ridicule, counterposed most sharply to their antisocial, anti-public kubla or clan. [Ibid., p. 265.]

This was not just a case of the Soviet authorities lumping urki and politicals together out of convenience; rather it was a deliberate and intended strategy to extend a ruthless control over each Gulag.  Here is an account by one political of the way control by the gangs of Urki was maintained.

Zhigulin described, graphically, how the thieves' imposition of "order" actually worked.  One day, while sitting in a virtually empty dining hall,  he heaerd two prisoners fighting over a spoon.  Suddenly Xezemiya, the senior "deputy" of the camp's senior thief-in-law, burst through the door:

"What's this noise, what's this quarrel?  You're not allowed to disturb the peace in the dining hall!"
"Look, he took my spoon and changed it  I had a whole one, he gave me back a broken one . . . "
"I will punish you both, and reconcile you," chortled Dezemiya.  And he made two rapid movements towards the quarrellers with his pick; as quick as lightning he had knocked out one eye apiece.  [Ibid., p. 265.]

By these means and policies the Gulags have ensured they stand out in human history as being the extreme essence of statist tyranny over ordinary men and women.  Secondly, the elevation of the urki into semi-official work and places of power and authority goes a long way to explain why to this day Russia remains ruled over by criminals--and why criminal gangs are often more powerful and more in control than the police or government institutions.