It is noteworthy that, in the preparations for President George Bush’s visit to Russia in May, the Kremlin quietly opened up the issue of Russian and post-Soviet organised crime as a topic for discussion.
On the surface this may seem surprising, both because of the Kremlin’s usual impatience with western concerns about the problem and also its apparent decline inside Russia. The indiscriminate turf wars and vendettas of the early and mid-1990s appear a thing of the past and the number of gangs continues to fall.
